F-14 Tomcat | Behind the Wings

I'm Matthew bruschetta and this is a special US fort you finally got it episode of behind the wings with the f-14 tomcat baby [Music] so during the Cold War the US Navy knew that they needed a fighter aircraft that could do a couple of things one was protected the fleet from Soviet air launched missiles and those would be coming from Bajor in bare bombers but they also needed something that could dogfight with those bombers close air support at the time we didn't have anything that could do both of those roles so what do you do you open a project in this case the VFX project called the naval fighter experimental project what we got out of VFX was not this it was actually the f-111b it was huge it was slow and it couldn't land on a carrier in Vice Admiral Thomas Connolly said hold on this is not at all what we need for the Navy guess what Grumman steps in and says if we got a deal for you we've got a plane that we think will fit all those roles it became known as Tom's cat and a little bit later it became the f-14 tomcat it's one of the best-looking fourth-generation fighters ever in my own humble opinion but the day had to come and in 2006 the f-14 was retired to be replaced by the f-18 an f-18 Super Hornet well guess what we don't have to say goodbye because we've got a real Tomcat pilot we're gonna talk to right now so obviously this is an amazing aircraft you know what else is amazing the men and women that flew the f-14 and to that end I have lieutenant rich spud we'll get to that later web who's with VF 211 the checkmates so how did you get into flying so for me it was it literally a childhood dream I still remember the first time a July 4th parade when I was probably maybe eight and I saw an f15 Eagle scream down Main Street with full afterburner as remember screaming time I longs to my mom did you see the afterburners and that was like my first that's the first memory I have where identified something that just shook me to my core and then subsequent air shows and experiences after that led me to taking flight lessons in college and then when I got out of college I decided you know what let's go for broke and applied to the Navy and turns out they accepted me and we flew at 14th or I flew f-14s for about three years and then our squadron actually decommissioned our f-14s and then we transition to the brand-new f-18 Super Hornet so I kind of got in my 9 years and then in the Navy I got to fly a lot of different platforms [Music] so rich it's probably been a while since you've been in an f-14 cockpit September 2004 so yeah coming up on 15 years and I bet that's what it looks a little bit different I'm just sad to see that this one is aged pretty poorly oh no kidding yeah you know in 2006 the the Navy came out and they took everything out of here and I can understand why the platform was sunsetting in the only other country that flies this thing or the Iranians still a lethal yeah this is pretty much a skeleton in here yeah it really is it's kind of bittersweet and of course I haven't flown this you know Tomcat in close to 15 years but I was just kind of going through as I'm sitting in there like procedures are starting to come back and like for out-of-control flight what we call UCF recovery let's see it was upright 30 unit stick board neutral a turtle hunter schlock rudder opposite turning off no recovery indicated stick internally finish cells throw a fake smile or soft light off noticing there's message fire to test on and on and on it just keeps going and and my brain is like pulling back those boldface eps from 15 years ago the real kind of heart beat started to pick up as soon as the canopy came down and clicked Ford about two inches to lock in and everything's sealed up and then you just got this sense that you are strapped onto the most powerful rocket ride ever which it was and then as you got more experienced and as you got more qualifications then you started to transition to where you strapped into it you felt like you were putting it on like a jacket I read a great little blurb in a book and the Rio always noticed that once they got back on the deck and the canopy popped he would get out and he would stand on the back of the plane and he would wait for his pilot hmm and he would wait and you would wait and finally the guy would get out after about four or five times of this he asked him why all waiting for his wait for his niece's stuff you go yeah that was it yeah so you know honestly you know a lot of people think that combat is the is the high stress point of carrier aviation and it's absolutely not the high stress point is the last 30 seconds of final approach to landing on the carrier so you know if you back it up let's just start with the ship for instance it's rolling in as heating so it's pitch roll heave it's just go all over the place so the deck is not sedating through the water it's a 30 knots so now your runaway is moving away from you well it's pitching and rolling and heating then on top you're also landing four o'clock in the morning so your circadian rhythm is the point keep in mind you've probably just done a six-hour mission so you're fatigued and then there's no autopilot because the f-14 was designed in the 60s moved on the seven you can fly it with perfect pass and have your tail hook skip over the wires which happened oh by the way you're holding up everybody else as well you know that's no pressure you know I've heard it described one time as like the culmination of like a high-level executive making corporate level you know high move decisions with Olympic athlete you know athletic skills with ninja samurai warrior acumen you know kind of all good and that sounds kind of bombastic maybe but it's incredibly accurate so this guy probably looks pretty familiar to some of our viewers it's an m61a1 Vulcan 20 millimeter rotary cannon and it's the cannon that came out of this bad boy and you shot this thing yeah this was a beast hunter around the second that's pretty good we carried 600 rounds so for firing a hundred rounds per second that means we're out of bullets in six seconds so what we do is we we load up the drum every 50 rounds we put a space and then oh the 50 rounds put a space and then when we went down for a full trigger squeeze instead of having to kind of guess at what 50 rounds would be like a half second burst we just go trigger down hold it fire out 50 rounds and stop when it hit that that built in space at 50 rounds and then that way we knew we had 12 trigger squeezes at rounds that's a really cruel drama of rounds you know the rounds are coming out right here yeah they're coming out of the muzzle right here however the body of the gun actually comes all the way the back here like this is actually one of the panel's where you would access the bullet drum well if you look at where the seat is it's directly over that and you're literally sitting vertically on top of this gigantic big ol hydraulically powered gun so it's a pretty visceral experience when you're when you're doing trigger squeezes on this so the f-14 can carry an immense amount of payload from the mark 80 series 2gb use the m9 the aim-7 but what it was really known for is the aim-54 phoenix yeah that was the hallmark weapon for the f-14 platform and the aim-54 was designed at the same time with the augment radar to be paired together as a weapons unit and then the tomcat was actually designed around the aim-54 in the Augmon to actually fly and employ it the Tomcat was capable because the Augmented radar was so powerful and had amazing radar motor agility is capable of locking up six targets fire six Phoenix simultaneously at all six targets defend shoot them all down turn around go back home for more so at the time that was unprecedented and remember this was designed in the Cold War era we were looking to beat back the Russian bombers coming over the horizon and that was what the Tomcat system was designed for well we continued employing that all the way into the mid 2000s we kept upgrading and adding on more and more features so we started adding on a lot more air-to-ground we'd started turning into you know Tomcat turned into a bobcat where we could drop dumb bombs the mark 80 series the 82 is in the 84 s and then we retrofitted it with the airforce lantern pod on the WEP on the wing pylon rail there and we could then drop laser-guided weapons the GB 12s and the 16s and all the way up to some other stuff we even could carry a reconnaissance pod for doing self-contained reconnaissance with the tarp spot we just kept adding more and more and more but the Phoenix was the weapon system that the Tomcat was originally designed around and that's the one that the Tomcats known for yeah what we're looking at here is the business end of the practi f30 engine so we had two of these 9 feet apart on centerline and can you just imagine a cylinder of lane this big about 3 feet diameter only 30 feet up that would be two of them what does that translate into top speed because it can't be slow yeah so we we translate that into factors of speed of sound called Mach so Tomcat is rated for Mach two point four which is two point four times the speed of sound which I think it altitude works out to over 1,500 miles an hour so when you're sitting on the deck and you're you're on the cat and you're ready to hit it and you're in what do you call stage sighs yep zone five after zone five afterburner what does that do to you I mean it's because you're holding back that amount of thrust yeah so you're holding back 50,000 pounds of afterburner thrust and the carrier stopping you from going and all sudden the carrier the catapult shuttle fires off and so you go from zero to 100 knots which is about a hundred and fifteen miles an hour and about 200 feet which is pretty impressive and you're taking that all via a back slap just one continuous 200 foot long back slap now here's the thing when the deck is pitching and your timing catapult shots is pretty cool because you've got the the pitching period of 1,000 foot long carrier it's pretty slow so it's kind of maybe a two-second cadence so they actually fire you they release the shuttle on the on the catapult when you're pointed down so that two seconds later you're going up so it's absolutely physiologically the most messed up thing about it's just your your gyros are tumbled inside your head you're absolutely just discombobulated you're hanging on to the front end of a rocket and you're getting shot downhill downhill into a life hopefully that at the end of that two-second ride you're pointing up and you fly away so you're and that's the start of it rich thank you so much this has been so much fun that's a pleasure to see here thank you very much it's been not it thank you so much and thank you guys and gals for watching because you are what makes behind the wings if you've got questions or comments facebook youtube we'll get to when we can and if you haven't gotten enough of the f-14 which how could you rich tell us where we can learn more well one of my favorite pieces that that is currently out there that can be streamed from all the the major suppliers is a film called speed and angels and it's a documentary with unprecedented quality that follows two of my friends who actually flew it with all my instructors highly recommended I know what I'm doing later get off my plane you kid that's that's the curator metaphor [Music] you know when I like to eat danger zone calzones anytime baby get it anytime baby [Music] you

Channel: Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum

Views: 725,988

Rating: 4.9081683 out of 5

Keywords: F-14, F-14 Tomcat, F-14 Tomcats, F-14 documentary, Tomcat documentary, Behind the Wings, Wings Over the Rockies, Matthew Burchette, Ben Theune, Scott Hennelly, aviation, Top Gun, F-14 Top Gun, Air and Space Museum, Aerospace, Richard Webb, Danger Zone, Danger Zone Calzones

Id: _iH6pQAxdUA

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

there’s no autopilot? but that’s wrong, because there’s ACLS... right?

[u/Maelshevek]

I was just there yesterday. Awesome place, and they have two DCS simulators with full Warthog HOTAS setup.

[u/StandingCow]

I think the F111B COULD land on the carrier (they did it)... but it took up way too much room and was difficult to land on the carrier?