"DDAY" wrote:

:---------
:In article , "TV"
:wrote:
:
: The F14 had great legs (fuel/range),
:
:Is this true? I've heard it was a gas guzzler and had to top off soon after
:launch.

Nope. The F-14 in normal operations probably WOULD do that, just so
that it had full tanks at the beginning of the mission, but that's
pretty normal for everyone. Hit the rally point and tank.

: test cost $154,000 per second!!). The Tomcat couldn't carry 6 missiles and
: still normally land back on a carrier. With even 4 Pheonixes reducing fuel
: levels at landing to critical when doing carrier ops. So typically they
: only carried two. And even then, pilots lamented the drag/weight
:
:An interesting question is if they would have ignored these restrictions
:during a real war. If they were really concerned about mass cruise missile
:attacks on the carriers, would they have launched F-14s with a full load of
:AIM-54's?

More likely would be to launch with 4 Phoenix in the tunnel and
Sparrows for when you got closer. However, if you expect to shoot
them off it really doesn't matter how many you launch with, since they
won't be there anymore when you trap.

:I imagine that this question could be answered by whether or not they ever
:trained for it in the 1970s and 1980s. My suspicion is that they never
:trained for carrying more than six AIM-54s.

Well, I'd hope so, since the airplane couldn't carry more than 6
AIM-54s, which WAS a full load.

I doubt they'd train for 6 going off a boat, since they'd have to
jettison two of them to get back onto the boat (and NAVAIR probably
would get a bit hacked at folks throwing million dollar missiles in
the drink for TRAINING).

--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney