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I can well understand the strong emotional attachment many have to the F-14 Tomcat, but I find it difficult to believe that the A/F-18 Superhornet is as inferior to it as is being made out here.

Reliability and ease of maintenance are touted as strong pluses in the Superhornet's favor, and it is by no means a dog in the air.

Then there is the compatibility issue vis a via the disparate Navy and Marine roles (fleet defense versus CAS). It is far more costly to have to field and maintain two different airframes and weapon systems. As I understand it, the A/F-18 does both roles well rather than one role outrageously well, and the other mediocre.

These are the kinds of considerations that go into making a decision to choose a weapons system (unless we're talking about the Air Force when Darlene Druyan ran things).

I too think the F-14 is one incredibly impressive-to-look-at aircraft. The first time saw one up close and personal at an airshow, the experience raised the hair on the back of my neck. Looking at it on tarmac, its wings swept back, I had the weird and unsettling impression that the thing was alive, crouching in majestic silence, waiting to uncoil world-destroying destructive force at the mere whisper of a command.

I can well understand the strong emotional attachment many have to the F-14 Tomcat, but I find it difficult to believe that the A/F-18 Superhornet is as inferior to it as is being made out here.

Well, believe it.

Were the Tomcat not too expensive to maintain, or had it been upgraded with modern avionics and a few changes to the airframe, there would have been no SuperHornet.

The SuperHornet represents compromise, even to a larger degree than the original Hornet did. The SuperHornet has a monster RADAR, but in all other areas, it has inferior performance to the Tomcat, and in some ways is inferior to the Hornet C/D. It can carry a lot of ordinance, but it cant carry it very far. It is slow for a fighter, and fragile for an attack aircraft. But it does both jobs for less money than the F-14/A-6 combination, so it exists, while those too great aircraft are gone.

I can well understand the strong emotional attachment many have to the F-14 Tomcat, but I find it difficult to believe that the A/F-18 Superhornet is as inferior to it as is being made out here.

Don't go by us, go check the link someone put up in the first 40 posts or so, to the comments made by the F/A-18 Hornet drivers about the new E/F Superhornet. It really is an inferior aircraft -- a design stretch that didn't work, even after they turned it into 90% new aircraft.

The E/F Superhornet resembles the A/D models in the same way Ryan Newman's superstocker resembles a family sedan -- cosmetically only. And it isn't about to fill the hole made by withdrawal of the F-14's.

It is far more costly to have to field and maintain two different airframes and weapon systems.

The mission comes first, everything else later. If you can't protect the carriers from Moskit-carrying Su-30's and -33's, you can't project force -- and that's the Mission. Then there's nothing for the Hornet-driving flying Leathernecks to do. Your F/A-18's can't support a Marine expedition if the expedition can't happen because you can't risk the carriers.