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 ...