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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.


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?

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.

Does anybody know?



D