Quote:
Originally Posted by JA Boomer
Last one, I promise! I know that the F-15E Strike Eagle gives its pilots a fairly bumpy ride down low to the ground due to its low wing loading. Given that the F-14 shares some design similarities with the Tornado and the F-111 (two of the best low-level attackers around) does the F-14 have good high speed low-level handling characteristics? I’m not sure I you and your squadron mates ever practiced low-level bombing techniques.
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As promised, a little more about bombing from the F-14. Late in my career, I commanded the AIMD at Oceana. As such, I had a bunch of F-14s in my hangar and on my ramp. One fine day, an old friend of mine who by then was at the Pentagon doing something highly classified, showed up at my office asking interesting questions about some old Grumman software. He had some interesting documentation that I had long thought existed somewhere. What he had was the instructions for activating the bombing modes on the AWG-9. We had one of my hagar queens powered up so we could run some tests. Amazing thing, the software on the old bird did just what the highly classifed document said it would, it did appear to give a bombing solution. At least one aimed at the wall. The next step was to try and fly a bombing profile.
That was more difficult. It's one thing for the boss to hook up a GPU to a plane that is being scavenged for parts and aim the IRST at various spots on the wall. That just affirmed most of my crew's impression that I was crazy. It's quite another to order an ordy chief to roll over some inert Mk 76s for release testing. By then, most of the crew thought something was seriously wrong. I had my planning staff going over bomb profiles. I had my engineers checking and re-checking load stresses. I had my ordies loading and unloading bombs from the ejector racks. In a week, I had satisfied myself that the original data on bomb carriage was incomplete but suggested that we could safely depart with Mk 76s. By then, my XO had called the base chaplin, the base commander, the base psychologist and my wife. He was deeply concerned that I might be unhinged. A diagnosis the psychologists were reluctant to endorse since they didn't think of it first. Finally, the base commander called me into his office for a friendly chat.
I showed him the orders I had from my old buddy. He immediately ordered the entire air station to give me what I wanted and stop asking questions. He also orded the base fire department to stand by ready for a catastrophic explosion in or around the AIMD hangars. We picked a day when the USAF didn't have anything planned for the Dare County range so they wouldn't get upset about us dropping bombs. My ABE loaded two Mk. 76s for the test. Taxi and takeoff went just fine as did climb out. The trip to Dare County is minutes at most. I made three passes at the navy target. The first was just to confirm the AWG-9 worked in the air to ground modes. It did. The second was to make a drop. My planners and engineers agreed that a straight and level drop from 12000 feet was safest. So, I dropped from 12000 just as on the test card. The bomb hit the target dead on! The third pass was the same drill. The point was to verify the second had not been a fluke. It wasn't. Another drop and another hit on target!
The trip home was far too short but, I did have to flat hat the tower. It had been ten years since someone at Grumman locked away all their bombing data and now the cat had fangs again!
From there on, I had to pass the program on to VF-101 which was co-located at Oceana NAS. I would bring in a F-14, modify the programming and do a test flight to verify that the AWG-9 and the SER's worked. Then they got the plane and flew to Roosevelt Roads for more advanced testing and to work out the various bombing profiles. It was all done on the cheap, using time available at the AIMD and at VF-101. Fuel was "borrowed" from different accounts. Lots of engineering time was charged to squadrons that had no clue what we were really doing to their planes.
Because the program had no budget and no authorization from the congress, it moved slowly. My only flights were very early test flights. The later tactical flights were done by VF-101. But, I can say the F-14 would have been a good low lever penetrator. However, we did get much better accuracy and safety from the middle altitudes. By 1986, five years after that first fateful afternoon, the F-14 was cleared for limited bomb drops. I was already retired by then. But, it felt good to know somehting I had been in on at the beginning was paying off.
When the A-12 program folded all the work we had done so cheaply in the '80s really kept naval aviation alive. If we had had even a million dollars, I think the F-14 would have stayed in production and been the medium attack aircraft for the navy from about 1989 to the end of the century.