The Truth About the F-14 and Goose’s Death

all right i'm pulling mr rogers so you remember when mr rogers would walk into the house he'd take off his sports coat and put on a sweater and when he put on the sweater that meant it was time to sing songs and tell stories and play with puppets and so when i put on my flight jacket that means it's time to talk about aviation so when people ask hey what did you do in the navy i'll say oh i was an f-14 rio and generally that'll generate a quizzical look and so i'll use an analogy a pop culture analogy and i'll say remember the movie top gun maverick and goose i was goose and usually that clears it up actually increasingly with the young kids these days they haven't seen the movie top gun which is surprising to me but okay so if somebody has seen the movie they'll generally ask questions about the movie's accuracy and i'm happy to talk about that and the two main subjects that come up are would that flat spin have happened the way that it's sequenced in the movie and would goose have hit his head on the canopy like that is that realistic so let's talk about those two things so i have a model here because as we know we expect the highest production values here at my channel so this is a model that replicates my first deployment in the first squadron i was in vf-32 the swordsman and you can see the the swordsman which is the tomcat with a sword and the gypsy is because our tactical call sign on the radio was gypsy this would be gypsy 214 and this is the first airplane that ever had my name on the back seat on the canopy rail right me and wilco west wilco was best man in my wedding so the f-14 big airplane swept wing fighter 20 degrees all the way forward slow speed 68 degrees all the way back high speed so when you're dog fighting generally you'd be with the wings all the way forward so in the movie you'll remember iceman and maverick and the bandits in front of them and they're trying to prosecute a solution and it's very close range much closer than it would be in real life but that's movies right so maverick flies through iceman's jet wash and flames out one of his engines and gets into a flat spin and somebody transmit transmits on the radio mavericks in a flat spin he's headed out to c so part a that's not a flat spin a flat spin is not like throwing a frisbee where the jet would be traveling across the ground laterally a flat spin the airplane's coming straight down so let's talk about how a real flat spin would happen so it could happen in a dogfight the f-14 had good slow speed characteristics because it's a big airplane with a lot of lift in fact 25 of the lift was generated by the fuselage it also had gigantic horizontal stabilizers these are about the size of an a4s wing smaller airplane in fact in the movie top gun there are a4s so the airplane didn't roll very quickly it didn't have ailerons it used spoilers to roll but it could have good pitch authority because the size of these horizontal stabilizers so if we got into a slow speed fight which could be desirable depending on who you're fighting and if you're fighting what was called a mig-28 which is really an f5f in the movie you'd probably want to get into a slow speed fight with that guy because that's a fast airplane little airplane you don't want to get far away you might lose sight so you want to keep him close in the phone booth as we call it so you could get into a slow speed high angle of attack fight so the f-14a which had the tf-30 pratt whitney engine later the b and the d had the general electric f-110 the way you can tell the difference if you google f-14 and you look at the back tf-30 has black exhaust nozzle the f-110 has silver exhaust nozzle now most of the squadrons i were in were tf or were f110 ge motors the b model which was a lot better engine more thrust more reliable it had an issue with the afterburner liner that they had to fix and then once they did it was good to go um but my first squadron was an a squadron in the movie top gun those f-14s are a's right so compressor stalls were a big problem in the a that tf-30 was not originally built for the f-14 it was built for the f-111 so they kind of morphed it into something it would fit in the airplane and as a result in certain flight regimes it had a tendency to compress or stall so high angle of attack slow speed fight we'd maybe interrupt the airflow into one of the engines and it would compressor stall so now you have asymmetric thrust which is a problem these engines are not perpendicular they're counted out canted outward a little bit so if i'm at low airspeed high angle of attack and i lose this engine immediately i'm going to have this yaw rate if i don't recognize that yaw rate and counter it and the way you would counter it is by using rudder not stick and so f14 student pilots early on were told by instructors that rudders are very important in the f-14 especially in high angle attack because if i was to say oh i need to roll right and i put the stick right the airplane would actually roll off to the left and maybe get into a flat spin so what i meant when i said i need to roll right is i actually need to put in right rudder and then the airplane would roll but let's say again i have a compressor stall boom now i have this asymmetric thrust if i don't recognize it and counter it by both throttles idle put the stick forward lock your harness was the other bold face procedure right away because you'd immediately get this incredible eyeball out g which would throw the pilot against the stick so if i if that happened the airplane would go into a flat spin and if you get into a fully developed flat spin the airplane cannot recover which gets us into the second question which is would that happen where goose would hit his head on the canopy well let me show you an injection sequence here so this is on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier you can see the f-14 behind this one on the cat is getting blown over the side and boom okay so what you saw there was the ejection sequence so either the pilot of the rio pulls the ejection handle first thing that happens is the canopy comes off right there's no through the canopy ejections like there are in some airplanes like the harrier so canopy comes off half a second later the back seat fires 0.4 seconds after that the front seat fires okay so in a flat spin what they discovered by this actually happening to a rio the canopy when it's jettisoned if there's not a additional couple of milliseconds has a tendency to not separate from the air airplane very far and so what happened is they pulled the handle and this rio actually did hit his head on the canopy in a flat spin so they modified the emergency procedures that the second to last step was canopy jettison so in the movie goose does this wrong he should have jettisoned the canopy before pulling the ejection handle okay so that's not unrealistic that plot line was based on something that happened in real life but again the way that the flat spin is related in terms of heading out to see is is not accurate right okay so i wrote an article as i've mentioned in a previous show called 79 cringe-worthy errors in the movie top gun so if you google errors in top gun this article will come up and it's kind of fun i i warn you if you read it you'll never watch the movie in the same light but you know it's a fun movie um in real life the navy was very good to me and that i was able to fly the f-14 for about three quarters of my 20 years in the navy um and i'm very proud of that fact about you know 2 000 plus hours in the f-14 five extended deployments uh the f-14 went away in 2007 in fact we had a huge party uh in honor of that cheap trick played i got to sit in with cheap trick and play the song surrender with them which is definitely a bucket list item for me um the airplane is actually more capable as it approached retirement than it was in the early years because in addition to improving the engines to the f-110 they also fixed the flight controls into they added what was called digital flight control system so i mentioned the high angle of attack thing so also mentioned that it was a bad idea at high angle of attack to roll the stick or put the stick right if you wanted to roll right because it would go the other way and could create a flat spin so what digital flight controls do is if i roll the stick right at high angles attack how the computer's like okay i know what you mean but i'm gonna fix this for you so right stick actually would be right rudder and the airplane would not depart controlled flight now this is what the super horn has f-16 any modern airplane has got a a digital flight control system that keeps the pilot from doing things that would cause the airplane to depart controlled flight so unfortunately when the airplane when the f-14 got to the end of its life it became very costly and time-consuming to maintain so here comes the super hornet so a lot of the f-14 squadrons that i was in are now super hornet squadrons either e which is one c or f which are two c so vf is now vfa and uh there you go now the f-14 may not be out of the public eye completely because if you see the trailer for top gun maverick at the very beginning an f-14 flies through the frame so that's a teaser don't know as i've said in the previous episode where i was beseeching paramount and tom cruise to release that movie now for the morale of the nation in this cove in 19 environment but there's an f-14 in the movie so we'll have to see what that means in terms of the plot but as i said i'm grateful that i was able to spend a lot of time in that airplane and get paid to do it it's one of those kind of jobs that is very rare and i'm very proud of all right that'll do it for this episode look forward to talking to you again soon thanks for your support subscribing and liking and sharing i very much appreciate it

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 637,708

Rating: 4.9250159 out of 5

Keywords: Top Gun, F-14, fighter pilots, RIO, Goose, Navy, aircraft carriers, flat spin, ejection, Top Gun Maverick, Tomcat, jets, Maverick, Tom Cruise, Paramount Pictures, fighters, DCS

Id: LwS1k8LKxJg

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020