Why did the F-14 Tomcat retire decades before its peers? (2021)
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sandboxx.us
This might be just F-14 bravado, of course, but I do also remember that like the second week of "shock and awe" (the initial Iraq campaign bombing) they stopped all F-14 flights for the same reasons. F-14s were trouncing the sorties of the F-18s, even though we were one squadron vs four or five of their squadrons, because we were the only jets capable of actually reaching Bagdad from the carrier and we were able to convert our bombs to "smart bombs" much faster (F-14s break a lot more so our techs were more skilled).
The biggest threat I remember was we were very sure Saddam had chemical weapons (mostly because we sold them to him previously, but I digress). So we had to carry gas masks and did chemical attack drills alot. We also were forced to take many shots including small pox and an experimental anthrax shot. Many of my friends have medical conditions they believe are related to those shots.
I heard the banner was pre-planned by the ship as a celebration for the completion of the cruise, but then it was prominent in the photo ops and Bush got attacked as though he were celebrating victory in Iraq.
Curious on thoughts from someone who was there, or if you all even had opinions about it afterwards.
It could be that the ship's leadership wanted something like that (they are politicians too). But at least in my squadron we were all furious the president was coming because we had been out at sea for the longest nuclear and F-14 cruise of all time (10 months) and we just wanted to go home to our families but now we are delayed another week for a political stunt and have to spend the next two weeks cleaning the ship in preparation.
Pretty sure this is the answer lol...
Also, didn't we have airbases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Why were we relying on carrier aircraft for bombing Bagdad when we could have been using F-15s and F-16s?
He/she isn't concluding that, they are repeating what they were told at the time.
Yes, I believe Al Jaber Kuwait had already constructed one of the largest post-Vietnam expeditionary airfields* with multiple US squadrons (including F/A-18s) present before the war officially began.
* "Expeditionary Airfields (EAFs) are portable airfields that can be constructed, used, broken down after the completion of a mission and moved to another site for re-use."[1]
The F-14 is a very large aircraft. It had electroluminescent exterior lighting that looked straight out of a sci-fi novel and with its differential rear stabilizers it looked like a living machine, especially when landing.
I was an electronics tech in a bomber (A6) squadron so I didn't know much about the workings of the aircraft, as mentioned in the article. I will say that I am always in awe when I see that aircraft and will always be.
The article's picture of a Soviet Bear bomber above a carrier, being escorted by armed F-14s flying close aboard, brought back memories of how we were always greeted with a "welcome to WestPac" flyover by a Bear, and we likewise sent up armed F-14s to make sure everyone stayed peaceable. On my first WestPac deployment, one of my roommates in "Boys Town" (an eight-man bunkroom for junior officers, just below the flight deck) was a warrant officer who ran the ship's photo lab; he brought us all 8x10 glossies of a similar photo, taken by the back-seater in one of the F-14s. I still have mine somewhere.
We also had the Bear's and the trawlers. I think that had a lot to do the spy John Walker Jr.. He gave the Russians the cryptographic codes for the Navy, and they could read all of our communications. That's why the Bear's knew exactly when the carriers were changing station.
I was an AT and programmed the "code of the day" into each aircraft, every day. Mode-4, IFF.
Edited to add: CVW-2 for airwing. West Coast.
Before the F-14s were retired (2004-ish?), I attended an air show at the Quonset Air National Guard Base [0] .
As part of the show, an F-14 took off from the runway and then went vertical (I assume on afterburners). It stayed vertical until it disappeared into the clouds.
It felt like I was living in some sci-fi future, watching a spaceship launch. I was in awe. It was like some Stewart Cowley [1] book [2] come to life.
IMHO it's still one of the coolest-looking fighter planes ever, up there with the YF-23 [3] and Su-35 [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_Point_Air_National_Gua...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Cowley
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-D-Authority-Hand...
Seeing something going vertical and accelerating is fascinating.
I miss watching F-14s at the airshows. It was always a good show. Though I have to say, having recently watched a solo F-35 demo and having modest expectations, I was impressed. It may be a boondoggle and massively overpriced, but it seems to have the performance now.
It might have with a tiny amount of fuel and no load out (at an air show). In a realistic operational configuration, definitely not.
I am now 99% sure it was Spacecraft 2000 - 2100 AD. Thank you so much for posting the name and helping me solve this mystery.
I couldn't remember much about the book either. I did some digging a few years ago when I wanted to get a copy for one of my kids.
Tangent: the spaceship designs in the Homeworld games [0] remind me a lot of that book.
From MIG-23 to Tomcat to F-111 to less-known Su series to Tornado to whichever example you can imagine, were designed in this period.
Then engines got much stronger. They overcame the drag from low sweep angle wings and readily pushed aircraft to the barrier of 2000 km/h speeds. It was also discovered that at 2000 km/h you fly like a brick and there is not much room for manuevering or doing anything. It was also discovered that the practical max was 2500 km/h, and beyond that you either use titanium like in SR-71 and keep the aircraft light so that it couldn't do anything but recon, or, just accept that your aircraft would burn and crash if it exceeded that speed. Even the successful and widely used MIG-25 had 2500 km/h as its max.
Therefore aircraft speeds hit a wall, engines got powerful enough to make up for the loss from non-swing wings. Add to that how the industry learned to use the entire aircraft body as a lifting surface instead of loading everything on the wings, any reason for swing wings has gone away.
Hence their early retirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12
(The YF-12A program got as far as a 96 plane order for the USAF before it was cancelled in favour of the cheaper F-106X project, which also failed.)
Anyway, before condemning the F-14 for being expensive to operate, I invite you to consider the likely costs of fielding a fleet of hundreds of nearly-hypersonic interceptors based on the same hardware as the SR-71 ...
It's impossible to say how much money was spent on aircraft capable of firing the missile, since they were also designed to do other things, and raw production/maintenance costs are hard to track down anyway. The Tomcat alone seems to have cost tens of billions to build and operate.
Ultimately, "the AIM-54 has been used in 62 air-to-air strikes, all by Iran during the eight-year Iran–Iraq War" (Wikipedia).
Whether or not this outcome was "expensive" is up to the American taxpayer, I guess.
“In January of 1999, two F-14s each fired one Phoenix missile at two Iraqi MiG-25s, only to have both miss. Later that same year, another F-14 fired a Phoenix at a MiG-23, only to miss once again. No F-14 ever shot down an enemy aircraft with the missile it was designed to carry.”
The Wikipedia quote above is from the initial introductory section. Later, Wikipedia[0] says:
> U.S. combat experience
> On January 5, 1999, a pair of US F-14s fired two Phoenixes at Iraqi MiG-25s southeast of Baghdad. Both AIM-54s' rocket motors failed and neither missile hit its target.
> On September 9, 1999, another US F-14 launched an AIM-54 at an Iraqi MiG-23 that was heading south into the no-fly zone from Al Taqaddum air base west of Baghdad. The missile missed, eventually going into the ground after the Iraqi fighter reversed course and fled north.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-54_Phoenix#U.S._combat_e...
Theres’s an entire system for how the designations work.
I guess procurement politics?
But maybe also because the terminal active radar guidance was no longer capable of burning through expected Russian ECM? And in a balancing of "substantially update and redesign" vs "invest elsewhere", long-range fleet missiles weren't a priority in the wake of the USSR's collapse and Russia's economic struggles.
It was a huge fucking missile. Only the F-14 was able to physically carry it and it's unique pylon. If adapted to other airframes they might have only been able to carry a single missile. Even the F-14 could only practically carry four of them. If it launched with the max of six and didn't fire any it would have to jettison two before attempting a landing.
The AIM-120 in contrast could be carried by a number of US and allied fighters, had active radar homing (fire and forget), and BVR capability. The latest versions can even match the range of the AIM-54.
The AIM-54 was designed to hit incoming high altitude bombers coming for a carrier battle group outside of the range they could launch nuclear ALCMs. With that job largely obviated by the collapse of the USSR and end of the Cold War there was never much need to keep the system in service.
The danger to carrier battle groups today are lower altitude cruise missiles, opposing fighter/attack aircraft, and UAVs. A missile that really only works well against high altitude targets isn't all that useful.
Though: this is actually beside the point because the Navy wasn't ever going to operate the F-12. The predecessors of the F-14 were the F-111B (rejected because it wasn't actually going to be carrier qualifiable) and the F6D (rejected because it was useless once the missiles were launched)
I assume it's to ensure that a previous program can't be revived and thus threaten the follow-on program.
In my view, if the follow on program is truly compelling, it should live or die based on its own performance, but I guess that's not how the game is played.
I think this was done with the Saturn V, as well.
Thoughts?
Do you preserve the production line or destroy it?
The customer paid for it so it is their property usually. They make the call.
I would bet that the tooling was not destroyed but transferred to other lines.
The jigs and fixtures used would be destroyed because it was top secret job.
Safer to destroy than preserve.
1. Storing tooling, especially huge aircraft-sized tooling, has real costs associated with it. There's the physical space it occupies as well as the costs associated with keeping it from degrading. Guess who industry charges for all of this?
2. Concerns about security. If an adversary manages to surreptitiously capture images or other data on the tooling, perhaps they can get closer to developing an equivalent capability.
It's certainly possible the idea is also at play that by destroying the tooling, you prevent advocates of the current system from jamming up the process of acquiring new and improved systems. It would be great if the development and acquisition of new systems was always merit-based and rigorous, but it's often not. I'm not saying this is the case, but it could have been a fear of guerrilla advocacy from Lockheed or its advocates in the Government stymieing progress. For all its awesomeness, the A-12 family was heinously expensive to operate. If you had pressure from congresspersons or ill-informed generals to acquire more of these because of their incredible capability, but that meant you couldn't afford to improve your capabilities in other areas, you might not appreciate that pressure.
Also worth mentioning there are effectively two generations of F-14, the second one having an improved engine design. These did not debut until 1987.
While the F16 beat the YF17 for LWF, it’s carrier version was defeated by the carrier version of the YF17 (which would become the F/A-18).
I would agree that the F16 is not a peer to the F15 or F14, the entire point of the 16 was to be a small and cheap workhorse. Not just because of the LWF program, but because that was its designers’ ethos inside General Dynamics.
The 15 is 50% heavier when empty, And the 14 more than double (though part of that is changes and reinforcements for carrier-based operations, the Vought 1600 was also quite a bit heavier than an F-16).
To be clear, the Vought 1600 (a partnership with GD where Vought took on the prime role and GD became a sub, similar to the what happened with Northrop and McDonnell-Douglas with the YF-17 and F-18) never left the conceptual design phase. You won't find a Vought 1600 airframe in any museum.
> Not just because of the LWF program, but because that was its designers’ ethos inside General Dynamics.
And also on the part of the USAF instigators of the LWF program (the so-called "fighter mafia"). The interesting thing is that if you look at the combat & military exercise record of the F-15C, it contradicts a lot of what the fighter mafia took and preached as gospel, at least as far as the air-to-air theater goes. The F-16 did/does enjoy a great deal of success as a multirole fighter with a non-trivial emphasis on the ground attack role.
I dunno. Another way of looking at it is that the F-15 has never had to compete in a war the fighter mafia was designing around: specifically total war.
Israel/US vs Lebanon/Syria/Iraq was never a peer state conflict, and so allowed staged strikes or long-range AWACs-supported intercepts, both of which played to the F-15's strength, without exposing the weaknesses the fighter mafia claimed to address (feasibility of procuring large numbers and visual range dogfighting).
The F-16 was designed for a scenario where the number of F-15s became a limiting factor and where any-fighter >> no-more-fighters. I.e. NATO-vs-WP
The fighter mafia tended to overextrapolate from Vietnam that systems/technology were never going to be the force multiplier originally thought, and you needed to equip lots of smart men with incredible knife-fighting ability.
The maybe underappreciated lesson from the F-15 (air-to-air variants anyway) is that the systems did indeed catch up to airframe capabilities and proved their mettle. Not just in combat with lesser-trained adversaries but also in western military exercises. Moreover the F-15 doesn't give up very much in the WVR dogfight situation either, despite a lack of fly-by-wire (until F-15SA) or lack of relaxed static longitudinal stability. I'm sure you can setup a WVR fighter maneuvers set where the F-16's characteristics give it an advantage but that is likely to be a small window in the envelope of potential engagements. The F-15's size actually ends up being a pretty sweet spot and is (ironically?) a better airframe for getting within the adversary's OODA loop.
That all being said, John Boyd is credited with keeping the F-X program from foolishly pursuing a more complex and less maneuverable design - design direction which deserves immense praise.
The later upgrades which are worth mentioning, were mentioned, several times.
That's a huge design flaw.
If you want to understand more about the genesis of the configuration, look on YouTube for "Peninsula Valley Seniors" or "Western Museum of Flight" for a talk by Mike Ciminera of Grumman.
As a swing-wing plane, putting weapon stations on the wings meant they'd have to pivot in the opposite direction of the wing motion to keep the bombs/missiles pointing forward (so they didn't become an aerodynamic drag.) Pivoting ordnance stations on the wings would also mean the wing swing servos would need to be larger and more powerful (aka heavier). So no ordnance on the wings.
http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-detail-wsm.htm
The other heavy consumable part of a fighter is the fuel. Most of the fuel on the F-14 was carried inside the fuselage between the engines. There were small tanks in the wings (which mean there was a flexible hose connecting it - that likely leaked) but most of it was stored along the centerline of the aircraft, helping with the center of gravity and allowing it to turn faster.
I LOVED seeing the F14 fly in the 80s at an air show. Total star of the show - I can't believe how close to the ground they fly that thing!
The AIM-54's never lived up to their name as an air to air missle, since it was meant to shoot down bombers, which never flew (and you know: thankfully never flew). Though they tried against fighters - that wasn't very successfully (except for Iran?).
One wonders if a computer system like what's in the F35 could have worked in the F14 to mitigate the problem with engine failure - of course: if one could go back in time 30+ years to install it.
Good point on the variable swept wings not allowing hard points, didn't think about that. The F111 did allow for ordinances on the wings and they did it in the method you've described (tho much larger plane)
Perhaps the greatest achievement for the F14 was selling it to Iran, which had a real hard time keeping them in the air due to flight costs. Kinda sold them a lemon then cut off diplomatic ties. No one else wanted the plane!
And another one next to an A-10. Notice how substantial the landing gear is on the F-14 compared to the A-10, and the A-10 was designed for landings on improvised runways...
In short, carrier landings are closer to controlled crashes over the thing that everyone is calling landings.
It could be possible that with full-authority fly-by-wire flight controls, a flight computer could prevent departures in case of single engine failure. I doubt anyone with enough F-14 flight dynamics knowledge is going to be on HN (you never know though!) to say if there was enough authority in the controls in these parts of the envelope to recover from such scenarios.
While not the same failure mode, the SR-71 in the '80s acquired a system called "DAFICS": Digital Automatic Flight and Inlet Control System. During supersonic flight, you could get inlet unstart (ejection of the internal normal shock and a resultant sudden decrease in thrust due to poor inlet performance) - which typically occurred asymmetrically and was not uncommon. DAFICS sensed an impending unstart and actually forced both inlets to simultaneously unstart. A less expensive patch than redesigning a finicky inlet already 20+ years old.
https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/85...
That aside aside, the real fix the F-14 needed was the GE engines (A+/D model). So you likely ought to blame the losses of these airframes from engine-induced issues on acquisition system decisions, rather than the airframe design itself.
They did a number on the Iraqi air force, you could argue that they got their money’s worth. They got more actual combat use out of them than the US ever did.
Maybe by "peers" the author meant it was one of the "teen" fighters serie, F-14, F-15, F-16 and F/A-18. Like there was the "century" fighters, F-102, F-104, F-105, F-106.
* F-14 1974
* F-15 1976
* F-16 1978
* F-18 1983/84
* F-22 2005
* F-35 2016ish
The interesting thing here is that F-18 was introduced only a decade after F-14, while F-15 -> F-22 took nearly three decades and F-16 -> F-35 four.
But, the cone of condensation coming off the body of a plane is the supersonic shock wave.
And shock surfaces can be present over the body due to local flow speed being supersonic even when the aircraft's velocity vector is strictly subsonic. Though to be fair, still in the transonic realm if you're seeing shocks.
A sonic boom, on a small scale, isn't something impressive...bullets cause sonic booms, even the tip of a bullwhip will. I had been around high explosives before too, an oddity of my father's profession. This wasn't just a loud jet, it literally sounded like a bomb, and it resonated for what felt like 5-10 seconds.
The F-14 was an excellent aircraft when using the F-110 engines. The TF-30s were terrible. Cheney just didn't trust NAVAIR to develop any aircraft (see the A-12 fiasco), and he wasn't going to approve updating all the F-14s to the D standard.
Depot service hours only matter in a budgetary sense, although I heard they were immense for the F-14. All those moving wing parts need to be removed, inspected, x-rayed or magnafluxed or whatever they did, reassembled, and exhaustively tested. In comparison, on the flight line day to day, I don't recall hearing the jet required unusually more time than similar aircraft.
The time the F-14s spend sitting inside hangars (and requirements of trained techs to work on them) being useless was the primary driver of their retirement. Carrier hangar space and tech numbers are very limited after all.
Using made up numbers, its fine if each F-14 requires twice the maint of a F-18 if a mission pack for a F-14 takes two birds but doing the same mission with F-18 would require at least four.
On the other hand depot level longer term service certainly was a budget buster for the F-14 and if you can pay for depot level service for 100 F18 for the price of 10 F14, well, the fleet's getting F18s.
Kind of like calculating hours of maintenance per hour of cruise missile flight time, admittedly that metric would apply very well to an observation platform like a E-3, but not so much to a wartime interceptor platform.
Keeping a carrier from being sunk was almost invaluable (at least, to the Navy) in many envisioned conflicts.
Consequently, in a modern, first-strike-is-primary-strike (limited numbers of exquisite, high-lethality weapons and platforms) scenario, ongoing maintainability is less of an issue than maximizing aerial and combat performance.
But if those aircraft were intending to drop nuclear weapons on British soil, even a single successful kill would have saved far more lives than the crew complement of a 440.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Burner
Hard to overstate how large the F-14 loomed in the consciousness of kids growing up in the 80s/90s — not just from Top Gun but from this game as well. So many quarters spent having this machine babysit me while my mom shopped.
For anyone who doesn't know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVMmFD9mzCI
This says a lot about our world. Just look outside.
The Soviet Union had vast excess capacity to scale its army, build more armaments, etc. All of that went away as unaffordable when the Union collapsed.
Carrier life is rough on planes.
/not an expert, I knew more about this stuff when I was 12 than I do now heh
(Unless the above doesn't make it abundantly clear, I have little knowledge of aircraft repair procedures)
Before the revolution, Iran had bought F-14s and made them the core of their air force.
The US went out of its way not only to retire the F-14 but also to ensure that there would be no spare parts for it that could help Iran maintain its F14 fleet.
Here's an episode covering Iran's usage of the F-14 against Iraq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HYrasBB4k
--
"`There were several factors which influenced the selection of the F-14. Iran’s northern border with the USSR, and those to the west and southwest with Iraq, are guarded by high mountains. Our Air Defence Command was building radar outposts on many peaks for better radar coverage, but we could never improve the situation with ground-based radar alone. There were too many “blind spots” in this coverage, and the big white domes of our radar stations were also excellent targets, visible from up to 50 miles away. Intelligence information obtained at the time verified that the Soviets would indeed strike them first.
`In the south, along the Persian Gulf coast, we had only US-supplied radars, which did not work properly in hot and humid conditions — that is, for ten months of the year — and otherwise also had poor performance, despite several upgrades. All the radars supplied to the IIAF as part of Military Assistance Program projects were far from being top-of-the-line. The Americans gave us what they wanted to give, not what we needed.
For two years — 1973-74 — a group of Iranian radar instructor including Col Iradj Ghaffari (the first Iranian tactical radar instructor) studied coverage problems associated with “Radar Sites Reinforcement,” but could not find a solution. Eventually, it was decided that a “flying radar” would eliminate the terrain masking problems. That flying radar would also have to be able to defend itself. It is beyond doubt that during the war with Iraq, the F-14 proved that it was exactly what we needed.
`Before these studies were conducted within IIAF circles — at the time we were still flying F-5A/B Freedom Fighters and F-4D Phantom IIs we started looking for a top-of-the-line fighter interceptor. The result of these studies, directed by Gen Mehdi Rouhani, was a requirement for F-14s and AEW aircraft. US briefings on F-14s and F-15s undoubtedly helped us to formulate our requirement. We created the plan to purchase eight AEW aircraft — initially four, followed by four more — and the F-14s. Eventually, four orders were issued — the first for 30 Tomcats and the second for 50. There was one for Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS, followed by one for two communication satellites, which would enable all these aircraft to communicate securely with each other.’
"Unaware that the Iranians had already identified the F-14 as the right aircraft for their unique operational requirements, the US Navy and Grumman started an intensive campaign to ‘sell the Shah’, which included sending the F-14 Program Coordinator of the Chief of Naval Operations, Capt Mitchell, to Tehran twice to brief the Shah and IIAF commanders on the Tomcat’s capabilities. This culminated in a spectacular fly-off in July 1973 at Andrews AFB, Maryland, for the Shah and a group of high-ranking Iranian officers."
source: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/former-iiaf-tomcat-pilots-te...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29653/this-is-what-gru...
I think the Navy is now regretting their decision, but it's too late to go back.
Even worse, the money that could have been spent building ships that would be useful in a conflict with CN was spent on effing GUN Cruisers (!!!) and littoral ships that didn’t even work.
Imagine instead if the USN had 8 additional Burkes, upgraded/refurbed 47s, Aegis/VLS across the fleet, and a hi/lo of updated, maintainable 14s and 16s.
The US taxpayer spent billions and billions and got nothing. It’s been huge scandal for 30+ years
Perhaps there might be time to face the fact that the F-14 may not have been the most useful (and upgradable) planes for actually practical roles the carrier aircraft are expected to do?
The F-14 maybe has been sexy in the air, but for effective and operational warfare the things like logistics, maintainability, reuse of parts and carrier space matter much more, especially if F-14s shortcomings made it less able to actually be in the air when needed.
It's like taking your daddys 1970s charger (with new infotainmed and bolted on cruise control) into a desert expedition. Sure it has that gas guzzling V8 for the POWER when you need to hunt sand people, but in reality a modern Hilux is going to make the combined force a much more potent force and won't need truckloads of spare parts and mechanics to trail it. Even if it doesn't go 0-60 in 3s.
By the end of its service life the F-14D had decent availability rates. And while the F/A-18 was certainly superior in terms of logistics and maintainability, that doesn't help if it lacks the range to reach the target.
https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...
Another story of an undersung military airpower leader is that of Red Flag & Moody Suter: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1100flag/
There's a better longform writeup I saw once from one of the military service academies, but I can't seem to find it now.
Is the F-35 considered "great" when compared to the F-22 Raptor? I was under the impression the Raptor was better in most ways, but also way expensive.
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on military aircraft, though I have visited the San Diego Air and Space Museum countless times.
F-35 is a jack of all trades, has a better sensor suite for ground attack, can be dispatched somewhere from a deck of even small carriers and is much cheaper to manufacture. It is also worse at fighting other planes (although not bad really).
In any kind of real fight you'll probably see both because they're complementing each other, but the 22 is much less flexible and more specialized at its role.
So the 22 is more of a successor to F-15 and F-35 is a successor to the F-18 or F-16.
The F-35 trades a slightly higher radar visibility (vis a vis F22) with a very modular software & hardware architecture & networked combat assistance. Its avionics is much more easily upgradeable & mostly written in a C++ dialect to best of my knowledge. F-22 on the other hand is absolutely the best in class on stealth & maneuverability - but the tech it is built on, will be of 90s always (sadly). Its avionics & controls were coded in Ada on i960MX architecture (CPU clock ~90MHz) which is no longer maintained.
Between the two, F-22 is a marvelous bird still, and still outclasses F-35 in air dominance roles. Its capabilities can strike fear to even well-equipped combat adversaries. In an anecdote that I was told by an US airman friend, Pakistan AF had scrambled F-16s during the OBL's Abbotabad raid, but the sortie was pushed to flying the perimeters of the city when a F-22 pair switched on their radar beacons temporarily to ping their presence (& as a obvious warning). Apparently they were overflying at reasonably high altitude having taken off from Qatar or KSA on special close air support mission. Their stealthy presence & perceived capabilities from this incident speaks volumes.
Edit: The hardware is Intel i960MX. I mistakenly remembered it as IBM Power architecture.
Edit2: Aviation Intel also surmised that F-22s were possibly in the theater
http://aviationintel.com/was-the-f-22-used-for-contingency-c...
(I would not describe myself as competent at either Ada -or- C++ though, so take my wondering with a suitable amount of salt)
Unfortunately, it was too expensive to maintain and didnt perform a role that couldn't be performed by more advanced multi-role fighters (e.g. the F-16 and F-18) at the point it was retired. Similar to the A-10, really, in that the F-35 will likely take it's place.
https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-of-the-first-micr...
I feel this is in line with other computers of that time, and uses rather clever parallel design to improve the performance of the specific functions required - but it is not general purpose by any means.
The U.S. will always fetish gadgets at the expense of simple functionality.
You'll always get a DDG-51 rather than an FFG-7; an M-16 rather than an AK-47.
This despite the reality that the FFG-7 does most of what you need a navy to do, more cheaply, and an AK-47 is far less fuss and bother than an M-16.
The F-14 falls right in line.
A lot of good arguments can be made about how the U.S. has failed to control the costs of developing and fielding advanced capabilities. Sometimes they just plain make bad design decisions, like with the M1A1 or F-35. But I don't think there's a valid case that advanced capabilities confer insignificant benefits vs. large quantities of less-sophisticated systems. You ideally want a good balance of both and you need the understanding and empowerment on the acquisition side to control costs.
Re the M-16, Jim Fallows wrote a great article decades ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-...
And then, of course, there's the military bureaucracy. Here are some entertaining stories from David A. Lutz, who was the project manager for M16A2 at USMC:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200708173852/https://www.ar15....
"Ever wonder why Safe, Semi, and Burst are marked on the starboard side of the receiver? Well as the list of improvements increased to a point some 2 1/2 years into the program spilled over onto a second viewgraph, the last thing on the first page was the starboard side marking, the first thing on the second slide was a "mirror image" selector that pulged-in from the right side for us left-handed Marines. One Colonel who shall remain un-named insisted that I "lose everything on the second slide.""
Or here's the story of the M16A2 barrel profile change:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200708174036/https://www.ar15....
The difference in ruggedness and reliability between the two is also very overstated - much of it dates back to the original introduction of M16, and the various associated early problems (none of which were due to the design as such). But today? Watch:
When did the F-22 die that it had to be brought back?