Rarely. It was always on if it was working.How often did you fly DLC off approaches to the boat?
I was watching some interview of a former F-14 pilot who claimed that the GE F110 engine was prone to blowing up. Not sure if it was just his opinion, but others seemed a bit surprised at that claim. Of course the PW TF30 was notorious for compressor stalls.
It was this. Captain Tom "Trots" Trotter. I've got it set up to right where he talks about the GE engine "falling apart".
The hold back was once a breakable shear pin. It's now a spring loaded holder and completely reusable. Available in different holding strength levels. It provides holding power on the order of several tons. I don't know the precise amount. When the cat fires, it overcomes the holdback before moving the airplane.@Astro14
In the intro to, "Top Gun Maverick" they show several shots of the hold back bar. These appear to use a type of disposable shear pin designed to break away at a certain force when the catapult is fired. Allowing the aircraft to accelerate down the flight deck.
Are these designed to help keep pressure off the nose gear as the catapult increases its forward force? And they must have a ton of these replaceable shear pins on a carrier for a variety of different weight aircraft?
How are these things set up and handled, to assure the proper bar is attached to the right aircraft? Who is responsible for them? It would seem a mix up could cause a disaster.
And there are very few things more hectic than carrier launch and landing operations. A lot of different things are happening at once.... And at a very rapid rate. Providing an almost perfect environment for mistakes.
This was a misunderstanding of what was happening. In several ways - "pushed it too far, it would get into a spin". No. If you were stupid with pushing the airplane, you could get a spin.
Back to the engine - When the GE F110 was adapted for the F-14, (the GE F110-400 version), they lengthened the AB liner by about 26 inches. The AB liner was cooled by bypass air that was forced in from outside the liner to create a cooling boundary layer - but the amount of bypass air wasn't increased, while the liner had the same number of perforations per inch, so the engine was not maintaining the cooling air in the augmenter (AB) section.
The faster you were going (High Q), the greater the pressure in the AB, and the more likely the AB flame would melt the steel liner.
This caused liner burn throughs - and we kept seeing AB liner burn throughs with no consequence. Then we lost a couple of jets in quick succession. The one with Scooter Lamareaux, that he mentions in the video. The Discovery channel jet.
And the one that killed Bill Daisley and my friend and former Jolly Roger, Fred Dillingham. I was the one who noticed the jet had not returned on time and I was part of the search, and later, mishap.
When the AB liner burned through on their airplane, they were doing about 1.4 Mach at 10,000 feet. The AB flame melted the engine casing, and then propagated outward, melting the control rod for the starboard horizontal stab. Which was then free to move.
The airplane pitched nose down and rolled at full control deflection at over 800 KIAS. It shredded itself from the negative G, which was over -10 G. The crew never knew what hit them.
The debris field was 10 miles long. We never found the bodies. But we got most of the airplane, including engines, and airframe, from the shallow water.
The final realization on the severity of the problem wasn't from the Discovery channel video, it was from the pieces of our jet on the hangar floor - where you could see the scorch marks and the burned parts. You could trace the flame front from liner, through the engine, and the control rod.
The F-14 B/D was prohibited from using afterburner until GE redesigned the liner with more robust cooling.
And I don't blame the airplane, as the video does. I blame GE, for not properly engineering the AB liner when it was lengthened for this airframe. We had 50+ AB liner burn throughs, and they didn't redesign it until it started killing people.
For the Super Tomcat, and Tomcat 21, GE offered the F-110-429. A lengthened -129 with about 29,000# of thrust in AB. That would be just over double, yes double, the thrust of the TF-30 in the F-14A.During the time I worked on F110 -100 and -129 (not -400) we didn’t see burned augmentor liners and we were working on flight test engines so they would have shown up.
Astro,I've supercruised a slick F-14B for hundreds of miles.
It does. Lots of the airframe parts get warm at that speed, even though the air is about -60 degrees, the total air temperature is much higher. It’s a combination of skin friction and the kinetic energy of the air being converted to heat.Astro,
When you run the airplane up that fast and keep it there for any length of time, does the front windshield, (the flat sloping part), become hot?
I started training in 1988, left the Navy in 1997. I don't think that I am in a position to judge training before and after my time.@Astro14. How do you think the f-14 pilot training was in the 70's-80s vs the last years the tomcat was in service. How would an earlier tomcat pilot compare to the 90s to 2000's ? All similar or was the combat maneuvering training better in the later years.
Another question. Did you always have a RIO? Were tomcats flown on delivery or from place to place without a RIO ? Or was there always one there when in the air ?
This thread started over 10 years ago . I just have a serious amount of respect for Astro14 and what he has accomplished. Thank you for your service.Originally Posted By: spasm3
Where did the phrase "Anytime Baby" originate?
I believe these guys:
http://www.f-14association.com/stories-02.htm
It was around when I first flew the jet in 1989...and the phrase was legendary then....
Whose idea was this?
Not sure when they started the orange but your first post is an F-14 nose by the gun gas purge door. Always thought it looked a bit silly, but squadron traditions and esprit de corps are powerful things and it wasn’t my squadron.I'll just add that the aircraft in that photo appears to be an F-4, but it's my understanding that VF-114 continued to use those ugly orange flight suits when they transitioned to the F-14. Those are some real high visibility flight suits.