Posted on 07/03/2007 4:24:12 PM PDT by IonImplantGuru
A mechanical monster grabs the F-14 fighter jet and chews through one wing and then another, ripping off the Tomcat's appendages before moving on to its guts.
Finally, all that's left is a pile of shredded rubble — like the scraps from a Thanksgiving turkey. Within a workday, a $38 million fighter jet that once soared as a showpiece of U.S. air power can be destroyed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, home to the military's "boneyard" for retired aircraft.
The Pentagon is paying a contractor at least $900,000 to destroy old F-14s, a jet affectionately nicknamed "the turkey," rather than sell the parts at the risk of their falling into the wrong hands, including Iran's.
"There were things getting to the bad guys, so to speak," said Tim Shocklee, founder and executive vice president of TRI-Rinse Inc. in St. Louis. "And one of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits."
The Defense Department had intended to destroy spare parts unique to the F-14 but sell thousands of others that could be used on other aircraft. It suspended sales of all Tomcat parts after The Associated Press reported in January that buyers for Iran, China and other countries had exploited gaps in surplus-sale security to acquire sensitive U.S. military gear, including F-14 parts.
Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department's surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren't supposed to allow its export. Investigators also found some sensitive items accidentally slipping into surplus auctions rather than being destroyed as they were supposed to be.
Iran is the only country trying to keep Tomcats airworthy. The United States let Iran buy the F-14s in the 1970s when it was an ally, long before President Bush named it part of an "axis of evil."
Shocklee's company won a three-year, $3.7 million contract to render surplus equipment useless for military purposes. The work includes the recent demolition of 23 Tomcats in Arizona, accounting for about $900,000 of TRI-Rinse's contract. The military is considering using the same process on its other F-14s.
The company has developed portable shredding machinery so the Pentagon can have sensitive items destroyed on a base instead of shipping them long distances to be shredded. The Tomcat was a strike fighter with a striking price tag: roughly $38 million. By the 1980s it was a movie star with a leading role in the Tom Cruise classic "Top Gun." But as the planes are mangled into unrecognizable metal chunks, the jets with a 38-foot wingspan appear small and vulnerable.
The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.
Among the shredded victims in Arizona: a plane flown by the "Tophatters" squadron, which led the first airstrike in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded in October 2001.
The Pentagon retired its F-14s last fall. At last count, the military's boneyard in Arizona held 165 Tomcats, believed to be the only ones left out of 633 produced for the Navy. The others were scavenged for parts to keep others flying, went to museums or crashed, said Teresa Vanden-Heuvel, spokeswoman for the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group.
As powerful as the grinding machinery is, it can't shred all of the F-14. The landing gear — built to withstand the force of slamming onto an aircraft carrier's deck — must be cut by hand with a demolition torch.
One of the last five F-14A Tomcats taxis into Tucson's Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. The Navy plane made famous in the moving "Top Gun" was retired from military service in September 2004 and flown to its final desert resting place.
Iran had a large fleet of Tomcats and I'm sure they would love to get the parts to make those planes flyable again.
Did you have to show the picture of the F-14 being destroyed? It was an incredible platform. Wish some had been saved and hope the Iranians don`t have any that still fly.
Am I the only one who feels a bit sick when I see those beautiful birds being destroyed?
It is not like they have run out of room to store them.
A decade ago the Navy’s A-6’s were all made into octopuses’ gardens.
I.e. “artificial reefs.”
Yes, it's sad, but it is rational. The planes are old, and the technology is way behind the times. They were great for their time, but the technology has advanced, and so must naval aviation.
One nice thing if one works around TUS (Tucson Int'l) is that the guys in the tower regularly invite incoming 'last flight' birds to come on over for a low-level pass in review, after which the planes head over to D-M (about 5 miles NE) to their last landing.
If a plane is going into storage, the pilot and whoever is along for the ride will usually sign the fuselage under a 'goodbye' note ... but if AMARG is just going to grind up the bird right away, even that little grace note seems a bit futile.
If the cost to destroy them is more than the salvage income from the scrap metal, why don’t then simply remove engines, weapons and avionics (and any other spooky stuff) and give them to VFW and Legion posts, etc.
We have a B-52 (a Dog model, I believe) on display at Orlando International. She looks great.
Nice pic!
I agree that it's sad to see it, and it is certainly possible to mothball planes in the desert almost indefinitely. They seal all the openings with latex, replace the guel with oil to coat and protect engine parts, and then just park it. In the past, planes from AMARC have been restored to service in a matter of weeks.
But in order to make the Tomcat a feasible reserve plane, the Navy would have to keep a roster of aviators qualified to fly it. If the reserves were still using the -14, that wouldn't be too difficult. But maintaining enough planes to train new aviators and give existing aviators enough hours-in-type to stay sharp would be a waste of money.
Not to mention the waste of time and personnel to keep pilots current on a machine that is not in the active inventory. My understanding -- and others will correct me if I'm wrong -- is that pilots and aviators are assigned to a particular airframe, and that they spend all their training time on that one plane to stay as sharp as possible. Keeping pilots on the-14 means keeping them out of action, and we don't have a lot of folks to spare jut now.
I guess my dream of someday owning an old decommissioned fighter jet is growing dimmer.
A friend of mine had a MiG21, but he sold it.
What a waste. A sad, unnecessary waste. There must be a pylon to sit on or a gate to guard or a museum that has some space for everyone of the remaining F-14s. The PTB are supposedly worried that Iran is going to get some spare parts? C’mon, Iran could get new Sukhois and MiGs easier than replacement parts for their remaining F-14s. Cutting them up is a historical waste.
Clearly, for front line purposes this is so. Yet, the F-14 is still the equal of most other nations we might face and keeping a healthy number in reserve, maintained for reserve, would be prudent.
We should have a reserve and training program to enable us to quickly train personnel. Having a resever component could easily prove needed and prudent in years to come. Once they are shredded, you have no option.
RIP Tomcats, you didn’t get the respect you deserved. It's America's loss.
.... but can’t they keep them in a “boneyard” like they do with a lot of the older B1-As and B-52s, as I understand it...... in case we ever wanted to refurbish them for emergency or allied use in a really big war?? It doesn’t cost much to keep them stored in the Arizona desert does it?
Alternatively, (ok, this is really not serious!) we should have turned them into RPVs loaded with a few tons of bombs and targeted them on Iranian strategic and Rev. Guards sites..... “here, Iran, you are most welcome to our old F-14s...... BOOM!”
Scrap titanium prices must be up. This story saddens me.
I still wish the President would allow the Navy to eliminate the Iranian F-14 fleet. Not because they pose a great threat, but it is the principle of the thing.
Actually, I can’t believe that Pukin is gone.
He was okay, and I miss him.
“Iran had a large fleet of Tomcats and I’m sure they would love to get the parts to make those planes flyable again.”
I don’t think that Iran had any tomcats. I know that they and Saudi Arabia have F-15s. Why should Iran want F-14s when they have no carriers?
It was an awesome airplane when it was behaving itself. It could be a scary airplane when it decided to not behave. I always felt it was an honest airplane to fly, not the departure prone airplane some people made it out to be. The problem was that Grumman wanted so much out of the airframe that it was very complex, with a tendency for pinballing emergencies. The aircrew needed to really be up to speed if they wanted to be safe and mitigate those issues.
Here is my answer to the most common question I got on the F-14. Mach 1.9 straight and level in a slick A model at 35K.
And in my opinion, that is exactly why they're being destroyed. (yes, it's cynical, but cynics are right more often than wrong when our fed gov is the subject)
"..The decline and fall of the region's most prominent business was a landmark in the economic as well as social history of postwar Long Island. It came amid massive consolidation in the nation's aerospace and defense industry, which was responding to vastly reduced Pentagon spending after the Cold War ended. Only six months after that morning in Washington when Cheney said he was ending the F-14 program, the Berlin Wall fell. What was good for the advance of democracy was not necessarily good for jobs on Long Island..."
"..Indeed, it was circa 1990 that the New York Congessional Delegation went up against SECDEF Cheney and boasted that they would simply "fix" the F-14D program the way they wanted on the hill. SECDEF retaliated by cancelling it altogether and ordering the production tooling broken up (ie termination with prejudice). .."
wonderful, now i can go throw up my supper...
No. That is the same reaction here.
A simpler solution would have been “Anyone caught selling F-14 parts to Iran will be waterboarded hourly for a week, then horsewhipped, then lynched.”
Sad and stupid. They should still be flying and raining nukes on the axis of evil.
Unfortunately when Jimmy Carter was president the Iranian Revolution occurred and the Islamic Terrorist regime came into power. At that time all repair parts and Phoenix missile parts were embargoed.The Phoenix missiles that Iran had were Sabotaged to make them nonfunctional. It seems that U.S. agents were able to screw up the guidance systems to the missles.
What are you talking about?
I’m just a punk Maryland boy who used to visit the Academy on Boy Scout trips and wished I could fly for the Navy.
I literally used to go to sleep at night staring at F14s posters on my wall hoping it would work out one day. To me it was more than just another jet model for some reason. It encompassed the aggressiveness of America.
We did the same thing after WW2.We were so good at scrapping planes and anything else from the war that today a B-17 flying will cost you up to 6 million bucks and that is if you can get one of the few (12) owners to sell the plane.The iranian f-14s are A models and the engines are used up. They are museum pieces and thats it.No motors, no flying period.
I'd settle for a military jet trainer. They're more forgiving and have a passenger seat. What's the point of a plane that can have you in the Caribbean in a couple hours if you can't bring a date?
A friend of mine had a MiG21, but he sold it.
For a while right after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, there were MiGs for as little as $50,000. Of course, you'd need to budget at least that much, if not double it, a year for maintenance. I remember this one guy with a company, based out of Italy I think, that specialized in refurbing MiGs for sale in the West. He had a review of each model his company sold.
The -17 was the most "practical" -- good balance of speed and range, and if you got the trainer variant, you could even bring a passenger along. The -21 was the one he found the most fun. The -23 was designed to take off on afterburner and refuel in flight, so he usually declared a fuel emergency as soon as he cleared the runway. Not sure if he was joking about that or not.
What would be way cool would be to make external luggage pods out of drop tanks. Then you've got a serious vacation machine. Those old fighters have plenty of weight capacity, but not a lot of stowage space.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that he is dead.
Now THAT sounds interesting indeed! do you have any more details or links?
“Lord knows we would need them until we could get our own manufacturing and steel production back up to speed in that event.”
Yep.
We better be stripping all the transistors and integrated circuits out of them and mothballing those since we no longer have the capacity to produce many of them here.
I’m NOT joking.
hehe yes, but you probably wouldn’t be interested in the kind of money I have to spend right now.
Thats assuming there are qualified pilot candidates ready for training. It would make more sense train reservists on the -15, -16 and -18 than to maintain the planes, and maintain obsolete skill sets on the part of both the pilots and ground crews .At some point you've just gotta move on.
In the next few years, we should have a growing number of those airframes in the ready reserve as the F-22 and F-35 replace them in front-line service. Those planes, with trained and experienced pilots getting regular time on them, ate a better candidate for a backup plan than the -14.
For that matter, it might make more sense to cross-train our pilots on MiGs. A lot of our newer NATO allies are flying those these days.
Goods. Speed, Fuel/Loiter time, Long Range Radar Detection and Long Range A/A Weapons, and in its later years LANTIRN/PGM capability.
Others. Engines in the A model. Maneuvering A/A Target Tracking A/B model. Spare Parts Supply D model. Avionics Reliability A/B model. Airframe Systems Reliability (Hyds, Wings, SAS systems) all models. Some people would put flight controls/carrier suitability/departure resistance in the Others column, but the F-14 wasn't nearly the bear to fly that the Crusader or Vigilante were.
Did Pukin leave an opus?
Seriously, I respected him and his experience. It will be a loss that is not easy to replace.
All hail Admiral Dick Cheney's F-18 navy.
Not all of them. Not enough places that can properly care for them. and can afford to ship and mount them. It would be embarrassing to just have them parked in a field or a barn somewhere.
AMARC does prepare a lot of planes for what's called "static display," and I'm sure they're entertaining requests from museums, VFW halls and bases. This site lists 80-some Tomcats currently on display.
CRIMINAL!
It will come with one full tank of gas!!!
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