Amir - Iranian F-4 pilot wrote:

Hi,
It seems your information is very old and out of date, even your
information about Iran comes back to more than 20 years , your writtens
shows that you are not aware of Iran Airforce,
Iran used effectively of its Tomcats during Iran-Iraq war resulting in
80 kill, and even the best F-14 pilot worldwide is an Iranian, named
"Zandi" with 12 confirmed kills.

This is like arguing with a child. You tell me my information is 20
years old, then tell me about Iran's use of Tomcats 20 years ago.
After the Iran-Iraq war, the Tomcats fell into a horrible state of
disrepair due to a lack of parts and engineering knowledge. Since then
they have been able to get some more of them back online by reverse
engineering some of the needed parts. We've seen about 10 flyable
examples, 16 wouldn't surprise me, but getting one to fly and having it
ready to fight are two different things.

As you know F-14 is the strongest interceptor, even now, that every
country dreams of having it...

An F-14A with an AWG-9 radar, and TF30 engines, all 40 year old designs
is most definately NOT the strongest interceptor. For interception
duties, I'd say the best aircraft in the world is the Mig-31. For
general air superiority missions, such as OCA and BarCAP, Tomcats
aren't particularly good at all (which is why they weren't used in that
role over Iraq, F-15s were).

Not every country deams of having F-14s, they are a maintenance
nightmare, and are now easily outclassed by the F-18E, Rafale,
Eurofighter, Su-27, and, of course, the F-22. Israel was given the
choice of F-15s or F-14s, and they chose F-15s.

There is a reason the US chose to stop using them. The model Iran has,
the A's were retired or upgraded to B model standard a long time ago,
the last of the F-14D's, far superior to the A's were just retired last
month, and by the way, they are still available if they are needed.
Most of them are still sitting on the tarmac at Oceana Naval Air
station waiting to fly to Arizona for storage.

Now, Iran is somewhat of a formidable opponent, but not because of
their air force, but because of their integrated air defense network.
There are a number of Russian S-300 SAM systems, networked together,
that pose quite a challenge.