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.
You forgot, IMHO!
As far as I can determine, both MiaT and Peach are still active. Their accounts are not banned.
I miss Pukin too. I don’t understand why he took off. I mean left.
I mean split.
Hey, I got this from Wikipedia (yeah, I know: consider the source), but for what it's worth -
'The Hornet is also notable for having been designed with maintenance in mind, and as a result has required far less downtime than its counterparts, the F-14 Tomcat and the A-6 Intruder. Its mean time between failure is three times greater than any other Navy strike aircraft, and requires half the maintenance time.[1] For example, whereas replacing the engine on the A-4 Skyhawk required removing the aircraft's tail, the engine on the Hornet is attached at only three points and can be directly removed without excessive disassembly.
The General Electric F404-GE-400 or F404-GE-402 engines powering the Hornet were also innovative in that they were designed with operability, reliability, and maintainability first. The result is an engine that, while unexceptional on paper in terms of rated performance, demonstrates exceptional robustness under a variety of conditions and is resistant to stall and flameout. By contrast, the Pratt & Whitney TF30 engines that power the F-14A are notoriously prone to flame-out under certain flight conditions.'
It's still the 'CAF', but they gave ground to the PC crowd a few years back.
See my 76.
Now you see why I have a sloped forehead - it's from hitting it with the butt of my palm when I have one of those "Doh! When will I ever learn to read all the way through a post before replying to it?" moments.
Mea culpa, mea culpa!
It would have made better sense even more to have never scrapped the airframe to start with. Instead the money should have been used on R&D for Avionics upgrades. Ending the F-14 production is the second dumbest thing Cheney ever did. The dumbest thing he did was ordering it's tooling and production destroyed. Yes the F-14 was high maintenance but with it came higher speed, payload, and distance.
Some of those had come straight from the rewinging program.
Which is mainly a function of the 1970 engines and electronics on the F-14A and A-6E.
But when Cheney cancelled them, Grumman Aerospace was turning out 90s versions (F-14D and A-6F) with new lower maintainance electronics and engined (F110 on the Tomcat and F404 on the Intruder.)
I'm thinking scrapping the A-6F must rate.
It would make a lot of sense to be flying KA-6F tankers and EA-6C Super Prowlers now than trying to make the Superbug do everything (Is there a COD F-18 planned yet?)
Well, at least there’s a tribute to two of the Navy’s most well-known Tomcat pilots from the movies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA
Something went on with the A-6's in the late 1970's maybe someone remembers what it was. They were dropping like rocks less than 5 miles out after launch. I remember there was a Navy wide stand down over it but I can't remember why. We lost 3 F-14's I remember. One due to pilot error on a very bad landing one night pilot popped the round down and broke the landing gear off. VIP's were on the bridge at the time. Next two were parked in the hanger bay. They were spotted improperly with one too close to an elevator door. The door was Red Tagged by the snipes but someone operated the control anyway sending one F-14 straight into another F-14 nose to nose.
Tom Kazanski was the greatest of the Top Gun F-14 pilots:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1562826
bttt
The AB who spotted them should have received a dressing down by his/her LPO or even the CAG. But I personally feel the most disregard for the idiot that blew off the red tag - that miscreant got mast and a demotion and maybe even brig time, I hope? Sometimes you have to make an example of someone. - IIG (and CVA-63 vet)
The worse punishment I reckon anyone got was the idiot who faked a man overboard. We were down in St. Thomas, VI and had pulled out that morning headed home. Late that night the whistle blew for man overboard and we spent that night and most of next day searching as did our group ships.
We had to give up and headed home. A few days later the Old Man announced that airman whoever he was was located. Seems when the Navy went to his parents home for notification his mom said he's sitting right here unaware of what had happened. The idiot caught a commercial flight out of St. Thomas and flew home that morning. He had a buddy toss his Flight Deck gear over and do the call to the Bridge. He did some hard time I think, likely his buddy caught some brig time, and his LPO got a chewing for mustering a man as being on-board at morning muster who wasn't.
The second biggie was the guy who purposely drove a fork lift off the flight deck at NORVA and another one the whack who burned a cross on the aft mess decks. Personally I'd liked to have found the person who lit off a HI-CAP one night in the yards on the hanger bay. You may not have ever seen one. After the Forrestal fire they came up with a semiautomatic Hi Capacity Foam system to lay down AFFF without having to use the hoses. One button and that station would empty out in a matter of a few short minutes. The tanks had to be hand filled and the foam was deep. But AFFF was a life saver the automatic-system more so as it could be activated remotely.
Mia T, too? WTF, didn’t she run Radio FR back in the day?
I will then dare, just dare Iran to try to get parts out of the Israeli's.....
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