Posted on 07/24/2014 11:38:33 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Bump
Bump
I read somewhere that private individuals wanted to acquire old F14’s but were thwarted because the gov wanted them all scrapped to keep Iran from getting spare parts for their old 14’s.
Wonder if that is true?
That was Snort (Dale) as well ...
To continue, my recollection is that Snort wanted to obtain 12 Tomcats with the intent to form a not for profit group that would keep 2 or 4 flyable for demos. Like what the Collings Foundation does with its aircraft (including an F-4C). Also that he had all the funding line up.
But the military is really squirrely about putting retired aircraft into civilian hands. There’s a LOT of bad blood over the Collings F-4, since they got it courtesy of a Congressional authorization that was snuck into a bill. Collings tried the same thing to get an F-105, and the USAF apparantly responded by cutting the wing spars of every Thud they could have potentially gotten their hands on.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole Iranian spare parts thing wasn’t a cooked up pretext to keep Tomcats out of civilian hands ...
Wonder if the opportunity to be stationed at NAS Whidbey Island had anything to do with that.
Nice. Thanks for the post.
Our the fact that RIOs generally got no respect...
Fair our not the RIO was often considered an appendage to the fighter jock. A second class citizen in the aviator world.
And everyone remembers...
Goose died.
.
I remember Miramar in the good old days... Even the not so local girls learned to spot two anchors. Surface dinks (like me) could often get more attention. More than once heard a girl give a RIO a localized brush off.. “sorry, I don’t play in the back seat.”
Not saying it was fair or right... just saying it happened.
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