Tomcat in Air and Space Museum

Harry Andreas wrote:
In article . com,
wrote:

I was flying them with the crappy flight controls, crappy engines,
crappy CADC...etc...
I flew the F-14A+ in VX-4..nice engines, crappy avionics. I saw the
F-14D...was in the planning for the cockpit...and it sucked compared to
the analog F-16N I flew...

unless you need to fire a missile...

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

???Don't know what you mean? F-16N had all the plumbing for
Aim-9...even tho they were training aides only...just like the first
gen F-16....

I worked on the radars for the various versions of the F-14.
I've also observed the F-16's radar (N was a Block 30 IIRC)
with the APG-66 was pretty woeful compared to the AWG-9 or
APG-71.
There's just no comparison.
The radar is part of the Avionics suite BTW...

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

Except when the fookin radar didn't work, it didn't matter how good it
was on paper. In the 12 months I flew the F-16, I launched w/o a radar
exactly ZERO times, in about 450 hrs...I had a radar fail once in that
time. It was standard to launch off the boat(VF-31, USS Forrestal) w/o
a stinkin radar about 30 days into the cruise. I saw better radar
availability with the F-4S(Awg-10) than I EVER did with the
AWG-9...APG-71 had MUCH better availability than the HAWG-9....The
inspired by the A-6, designed in the late 60s, F-14, never to be
modified in the 2 decades it existed, was an embarrassment when
compared to aircraft like the F-16C and F-15C/E....even the 'D'
model...too little too late. If the F-14A became the 'C' model like it
was supposed to, along the lines of USAF and now F-18 A/C, the F-18F
wouldn't exist.