The advanced engineering behind the excellent Grumman F-14 Tomcat naval fighter

It feels a little strange to write this entry using the verb in the past tense, but at the end of the day it is about a plane that is already history.

The real combat between two F-14 Tomcat and two Su-22 that inspired the movie 'Top Gun'
A recreation of the combats in which Mirage F1 managed to shoot down F-14 Tomcats

The F-14 Tomcat was the last member of a legendary family of naval fighters built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, which produced such famous naval fighters as the F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat during World War II and the F9F Panther and F11F Tiger during the post-war period. Other famous Grumman naval aircraft included the TBF Avenger and A-6 Intruder bombers, the HU-16 seaplanes, the E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft and the C-2 Greyhound transport aircraft (the latter two are still in service).

The F-14 Tomcat was created in the early 1970s, thanks to lessons learned by the United States in aerial combat during the Vietnam War and in order to confront the Soviet Tu-22M supersonic bombers, a model that made its first flight in 1969 and was a major threat to American aircraft carriers.

The Tomcat made its first flight on December 21, 1970 and entered service in 1974, replacing the F-4 Phantom II in the US Navy. Although it was capable of carrying out attack missions, its primary role was the interception of other aircraft. The aircraft had variable geometry wings that gave it more wing surface and more lift in low-altitude combat, and at the same time it was equipped with long-range AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles, capable of shooting down targets at 190 kilometers and a maximum speed of Mach 5.0.

The F-14 was the only aircraft equipped with such a missile, which paired perfectly with the Tomcat's powerful Doppler radar, the AN/AWG-9, capable of simultaneously tracking 24 targets at 370 km and firing at six of them. It was the most powerful aviation radar installed on a fighter until the arrival of the F-22 in 1997.

The F-14 has only had two operators: the US and Iran. The US Navy retired it from service in 2006, replacing it with the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Most US Tomcats were scrapped to prevent their parts from falling into Iranian hands via the black market. Iran still uses it, although it is in the process of replacing it with Russian Su-35 fighters. As a curiosity, the F-14 was one of the candidates for the Spanish Air Force's FACA program, but it was discarded in favor of the F/A-18 Hornet because this aircraft was more reasonably priced and is capable of carrying out attack missions more effectively than the Tomcat. Hollywood immortalized the F-14 with two excellent films, "The Final Countdown" (1980) and "Top Gun" (1986).

A few days ago, Real Engineering published an excellent video analyzing the amazing engineering behind the F-14 Tomcat. This 29-minute report shows the technological advances that went into this amazing fighter, which already occupies some admirable pages in the history of aviation:

You can see some screenshots from this video here. Here we see the AIM-54 Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles. The F-14 carried four of them on ventral mounts and two others on mounts on the inner part of the wings.

In the video you can see the operation of the amazing air intakes of the F-14, which had computer-controlled mobile ramps that regulated the amount of air entering at any given time into the two Pratt & Whitney TF30-P-412A turbofan engines.

The AN/AWG-9 Doppler radar antenna, located inside the nose of the F-14. An excellent radar that made the F-14 a difficult aircraft to beat.

In the video you can also see the operation of the Tomcat's variable geometry wings, which could vary from an angle of 20° to 68° in flight depending on the speed of the aircraft.