F-14 Tomcat vs F-15 Eagle | US Navy Training Film | 1970s |

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] after two years of joint military and DOD planning an evaluation of new short-range air intercept missile Concepts including the all-asspect IR missile and air combat maneuvering tactics was conducted at Nellis Air Force Base Nevada Navy F-14 Tomcats And Air Force F-15 Eagles took part in the exercise against a common adversary the f5e protests known for the acronym Ace vowel aim vow are complete now and while there are varied conclusions to be drawn with regard to their primary goals a funny thing happened to the F-14 on its way through the trials designed at another time for another mission the swing Wing long-range Interceptor more than held its own in the close end 30 mile air combat Arena at Nellis excelled in several key performance areas and in terms of operational Readiness proved to be a very maintainable aircraft tactically the word is out the best way for fighter aircraft to deal with the lethal all-asspect missile is its standoff distances long-range identification and long-range kill with launch and leave missiles that's what it's going to take to be prepared for the future because the new infrared missiles can be fired head on or even at an angle to the Target maneuvering is less important and getting behind the other guy is no longer an essential ingredient for successful air combat it's a situation that for the first time radically changed the course of aerial tactics we have always approached the killing of another aircraft in the same way we've had to identify it visually and then we had to maneuver with it and finally at about 95 percent of the cases you end up in a 15 or 20 degree cone behind the guy firing whatever kind of weapons you have at him from the rear now the new all-asspect missile gives you the capability to fire somebody head-on and that's very very important because it extends the the weapon system Effectiveness area it sets up a requirement for you to identify early and to fire what you've got to do now is quit thinking about 1100 feet and a gun kill or an aim nine kill and start thinking in terms of getting a kill at 50 miles something that's certainly outside of his weapon system capability took advantage of recently developed highly sophisticated computer technology which enables fighter pilots of supersonic aircraft to fly realistic missions in a simulated combat environment even missile launches and gunfire can be simulated and their flight paths tracked from release to impact all the action at the range is monitored by a network of unmanned solar powered tracking stations which are fed by Airborne instrumentation pods attached to the aircraft with the same captive Carriage characteristics of a Sidewinder this missile carries no Warhead it's a self-contained electronic system that continuously measures and transmits position velocity and weapons data to the ACMI control center where it's displayed in real time from just about any angle or point of view hundreds of thousands of data bits can be handled within the system every second and it's all available for instant recall evaluation briefing and debriefing an intensive training experience that greatly accelerated the learning curve in combat tactics we explored all little cores of tactics that we hadn't really looked at before and we could do it on an almost hour by hour basis you could sit down right as you're debriefing the particular hop you've just been blown away on and figure out a way to go out and carry this fighter Crews at the Nellis evaluations were all expert sticks and tacticians some with combat experience in Vietnam some out of Top Gun the Blue Force was comprised of Air Force and navy Crews who flew the f-15s and f-14s respectively the aggressor red Force flew the f5e an agile fighter similar in size and performance to the mig-21 [Music] at Bravo of the basic Rules of Engagement radar cannot be turned on before entering the range short-range missiles aim 7f sparrow and guns only no Phoenix positive visual identification required before clear to fire all scenarios limited to 30 mile arena with entry from specified start points in this engagement two f-14s will take on two F5s we'll charge towards uh the northern bogey okay and G cell give us altitude and so on I'm going to remain about twenty two thousand I'll try to lock this guy up you press go ahead and turn it on this guy trying to blow him away and I'll chase the guy that's that's dragging back toward the Rope as this guy tries to hook me you ought to be able to get him before he gets me okay Race For The Kill book right here twice [Music] nope [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] one five zero it's about five nights looking back to the South oh yeah I got him on TV I'm still looking on radar time okay to be well Miss Dalton you gotta kill Falcon get killed Falcon keep going get out of there within an hour after each trial the entire engagement is Thoroughly debriefed despite their success in this engagement there was no way F-14 crew members were going to take the f5e lightly not as long as she was carrying the all aspect head-on missile a far less sophisticated airplane the f5e suddenly became a very dangerous competitor at the Nellis range when armed with a launch and leave aim9l so I think what people have to recognize is that we are in a very limited in-game scenario here where we're talking about visually identifying the other aircraft that we're fighting before we're allowed to chew by the time you got a positive identification you were inside the lethal head-on envelope of that IR weapon so a normal uh tendency for uh fighter pilots would be to design their tactics so that they didn't get into that lethal environment however we had to get into that lethal environment to do the test we tried to act like we thought we would act in combat uh with the with the big exception that we wouldn't have gone into most of these fights to get killed too often your survivability is about three missions it's nice to go out man to man and say I beat him flying and get your hands going and work your way and it is six but you might not have a chance to do that if he's carrying an all aspect threat you need a standoff capability standoff capability is one thing to be able to launch a missile successfully outside the range of the enemy's weapons but there's still the requirement in many scenarios for positive visual identification since there's little advantage in having a long-range missile if you don't know who you're shooting at in the F-14 itself we've had for a number of years the capability to kill another aircraft at 50 60 75 miles the problem has been we don't know who's out there and that's the first thing that any other airplane driver will tell you when you start bragging about the fact that the F-14 will do things that his airplane won't do he shrugs his shoulders and says yeah that's fine but who the hell knows what's out there with the installation of a television siding unit the F-14 has taken the first giant step toward long-range Target identification an electro Optical system the tvsu helped F-14 crew members positively identify the much smaller F5 long before being visually detected themselves and at distances significantly greater than the naked eye often maintaining a lock on the F5 even through ground clutter and evasive maneuvering we're always positive what we're shooting at way out and in fact they're in a program in order to keep us honest people running a test at various times ran Intruder aircraft through flying the same type of tactics if the F5s would kind of confuse us just making sure we're playing the game straight and pbsu worked for us every time you can also tell a lot about what the opponent's doing and that's important to know exactly when he turns into you for example if he's running away and you can't always pick that up just by watching a v Sub C on the HUD you can visually track one target and radar track another Target simultaneously and with a long range vid sometimes you'll have one radar flip on your scope and you won't know if how many there are you slave the TV if there's enough contrast there sometimes you'll pick out two sometime as much as four if they're in tight formation trying to master iffs or the number of force mix against the F5s over land that was very easily an ID was very easily achieved in the heart of the aim 7f envelope and that did enable us to achieve Sparrow kills and exit the arena prior to being exposed to the F5 and his aim9l and consequently there in the sparrow envelope uh before they even have a tally ho the tbsu has also proven very effective for surface surveillance positively identifying potential Targets on land and sea to take full advantage of the tvsu however F-14 Pilots at Nellis could have used a launch and leave missile if the rules had permitted fire and turn away while the weapon continues to the Target on its own hanging around to see the weapon home got to be very risky the F-14 with the tvsu would would pick up the F5 fire a missile at him and uh and it would look as though he had to kill in the bag but because you had to track the aim 7 and it was not launch and leave the two aircraft continued to close until the F5 could see the F-14 at that stage of the game he fired an a9l that is launch and leave and even though he's destroyed himself the uh the missile goes on and takes the F-14 with him and you end up with a one-to-one kill we just can't do that we know from uh from the way uh Russia is producing aircraft that wherever we go and under whatever circumstances we fight him we know we're going to be outnumbered and for that reason we've got to have better quality if the aim 7 had been a launch and leave missile or if he could have had could have been able to fire his name 54 Phoenix missile which is launch and leave the situation would have been entirely different technology will soon catch up with the advanced F-14 weapon control system contracts have been awarded to achieve long-range aircraft identification using several different approaches taking advantage of The Versatile laser beam and coherent Optical processing microelectronics memory chips that can store compare and arrange data almost instantaneously and the Next Generation radar systems finally a computer will provide multiple correlation of all identification systems telling us exactly what kind of airplane is out there and opening the way to full use of the only long-range aircraft weapon system in the defense inventory there's really only one airplane on the market today that and in fact there's only one airplane even in the airplanes that we're contemplating building that can take advantage of the uh of the ability to identify at longer ranges and that's the F-14 it puts it literally in a class by itself for all the sophisticated electronics and high performance features inherit in a modern weapon system one of the most important considerations is still operational Readiness the or rate maintainability keeping flight schedules because no matter how capable if an airplane is not up when you need it it's not doing anyone any good at Nellis the flight schedules were tough and demands on the aircraft heavy Logistics control came out of Miramar but a small network of shops and Supply Centers set up very close to F-14 flight operations at Nellis and manned by Sailors with minimal contractor assistance carried out the day-to-day minute-by-minute support role it was a people-to-people thing that kept several steps ahead of all the paperwork with Direct Communications whenever possible I'm ready 43 this is many maintenance to understand inbound up enough because of the extensive built-in test an on-board checkout features air Crews were able to continuously monitor F-14 systems in flight often radio in problems ahead so that maintenance people were prepared to respond as soon as the aircraft returned all right Roger that poor too that guy the first one I could see every flight was immediately debriefed every gripe discussed face to face the result the F-14 demonstrated exceptional maintainability day in and day out with an operational ready raid as high as 95 percent some months better even than the veteran F5 yeah yeah we're sold approximately 1400 sorties without a maintenance abort that's a better record than any airline in the world can maintain our people are not unique this situation is not unique you can go back to Miramar or you can go to Oceana and you can get another 118 119 enlisted men or about the same Talent level that we came here with and give them the same tools and they could do the same job we've been doing I never went out to get an airplane that I didn't fly and that that's something I've I've been flying both at fours and f-14s for about 10 years now that's kind of unheard of we'd come back from The Hop and it'd still be hard up and ready to go again anytime you can maintain a better than 90 or rate I don't care how good your support is uh that speaks pretty well for the aircraft in terms of aerial combat both the F-14 and the F-15 performed impressively in the short-range visual environments however the F-14 was operating in an area that represented only about 25 percent of its total capability even so the Tomcat proved quite a depth close in outmaneuvering and out running the F5 and hanging tough against the all aspect missile there's very little area that you can use in tactics to improve them to handle and all aspect our equip threat as we faced up here I think you got to have Hardware improvements now to handle that kind of threat we need an airplane that can uh that can fire such as the F-14 can fire a half a dozen Phoenix missiles on one pass and hit aircraft or cruise missiles or whatever the threat may be at different altitudes going different directions different speeds eventually but uh that we've had since for the last four or five years but one that is only now coming into its real importance because of the identification problem the lessons learned from Ace vowel aim vow will be the basis of much discussion and procurement decisions for years to come although the scenarios were limited and the realism compromised somewhat by the fact that no one after all was firing real missiles few can discount the tremendous technology which made it all possible for the dedication and expertise of a group of people who went all out to do a first-rate job in a very demanding environment or the excellent performance of missile and aircraft systems that will be the first line of this nation's defense for years to come [Music]

Channel: Mike Guardia

Views: 159,057

Keywords: Air Force, Fighter Pilot, F-15, Eagle, Squadron, F-14 Tomcat, Wings, Dogfight, F-16, Top Gun, Maverick

Id: n08PDlYio08

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023