The F-14 Tomcat is arguably the most popular fighter jet. Thanks to the movie Top Gun released in 1986 and its sequel maverick released in 2022. Though the fighter jet is headed for extinction with only a dozen or two units remaining in service the fighter jet will certainly live forever.

The Tomcat is a great looking plane, sleek and huge. It took part in major operations and wars and did well but it had major problems. So major were the problems that some wonder if the US Navy should have continued flying F-4s until the arrival of the F-18 Hornets in 1983, ten years after the introduction of the F-14.

Expensive to buy and maintain

The F-14 was expensive to buy. The so called Super Tomcat was priced at over twice the price of a single F/A18. It was also expensive to operate due to the cost per flight hour of at least $35 000 which was as nearly as three times higher than the F/A18. It also required 40 - 60 maintenance hours per hour flown.

While the F-14 was designed to carry the revolutionary AIM-54 Phoenix missile capable of hitting targets 160 km away, it could carry six of them but could not land with that load on a carrier. So an F-14 launched in a full fleet air defense role, and it didn’t fire any of their six Phoenix missiles, it had to jettison some of them to land 

Sub standard Air to Air Missile

Since the F-14 was designed to shoot Soviet bombers from 100 miles away, the AIM-54 Phoenix missile was designed to be only carried by the F-14. With the Tomcat’s AN/AWG-9 guidance radar it was the first aerial weapons system that could engage multiple targets. Initially notoriously unreliable and fault ridden the AIM 54 Phoenix became reliable when the C version came 12 years and millions of dollars later.

Faulty Engine

The original General Electric engines specified for the F-14 were never finished and development was canceled. Therefore the F-14 inherited the TF-30 engine which was from the F-111 program. They were derivatives of airliner engines and not capable of rapid changes of throttle. In addition, they were not originally designed for supersonic speeds resulting in intolerance to out-of-range inlet speeds and possible compressor stalls. This was “fixed” somewhat by a system of inlet ramps to control engine inlet airflow, they were not 100% effective, especially at low speeds and high angles of attack. The compressor stalls were common as were the accidents. This led the pilots to fly the engine not the plane.

Design Flaw

The requirement to carry Phoenix missiles caused the engine to be far apart. Nine feet to be exact. This meant in the event of an engine failure there was a large disparity in asymmetric thrust. The result was an aircraft that was difficult to fly with a single engine operating. (Failure to pay attention could result in a compressor stall and flameout; and if this was not dangerous enough, the F-14’s wide engine separation and flat lifting body, made single engine flight especially dangerous and prone to flat spins.)There were some spectacular crashes where an F-14 lost an engine on the catshot or while landing, and in an attempt to recover, the good engine was advanced to full power, which only resulted in yawing and rolling the aircraft due to the asymmetric thrust.

The F-14 had a high accident rate. 20% of all F-14s ever produced were lost to accidents that is 144 out of 712. The TF 30 engine was the cause in most cases.