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F-14 Air Combat Released Never Seen Footage
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00:00This is Fightertown, USA, the Naval Air Training Station for Pacific Fleet Fighters at Miramar,
00:26California, and for the past 15 to 20 years, the home of Phantoms, Skyhawks, and Crusaders.
00:35In this mixed population, some of which are still in the front line in the fleet defense,
00:41you can't find one aircraft that was not designed in the 50s, rolled off the production line in the
00:47late 50s and 60s, yet serves a practical purpose here in the 70s. There's something to be said for
00:55this kind of longevity, about American know-how, and about men trained to fly in combat.
01:07Exposed to the realities of air warfare in Vietnam, many of these men are professional sticks with
01:14experience that comes only in a shooting war. Now, they're back where it all began, to get
01:21rung out in a fighter that's unlike anything they've ever flown before, the F-14 Tomcat, and to test what
01:29they learn in simulated air combat maneuvers against other high-performance fighters.
01:35Responding directly to combat lessons learned in Southeast Asia, the F-14 was designed to counter the growing
01:53threat of improved enemy aircraft and missiles launched from sea and air.
01:57It combines long-range fleet defense with the close-in maneuverability of dog fighting, without
02:06compromising basic mission performance.
02:12The average pilot weaned on F-4s and F-5s is not easily convinced, however, that the F-14 can really
02:19do all that the tactic syllabus says. It takes a building of confidence in the overall performance
02:25of the F-14 and the pilot's ability to handle it. To begin with, there's getting used to a cockpit with
02:33lots of elbow room for a change, getting the feel of a flight control system and surfaces that move in
02:40unconventional ways, and learning all about the effectiveness of a variable wing for tight turns
02:46over a wide speed range.
02:55Added to this is the AUG-9 weapon control system, with long-range radar for early target detection,
03:02acquisition, and tracking beyond 100 miles, allowing the F-14 pilot to get the jump on the other guy,
03:10or to avoid engagement. The choice is his. A multiple weapon system includes six Phoenix missiles,
03:19which can be launched simultaneously at targets more than 50 miles away.
03:24Then there's working as a two-man crew, dividing responsibilities that range from visual tracking
03:30and navigation to kill assessment in a tough ECM environment, with a computer to help the NFO
03:37process over 20 targets at the same time. Learning about the F-14 and how to take advantage of its
03:48performance capabilities is a full-time job. Every working day, a routine of briefings and flying,
03:55flying, and debriefings. Beginnings before dawn and endings just short of midnight blur one day into the
04:03next. Soon enough, it's time to fight. Pilots new to the F-14 against tough gunfighters flying F-4s,
04:13A-4s, and T-38s. With the exception of the F-4, these are short-legged defensive fighters,
04:20yet all have a key place in the training environment because of their maneuvering capabilities. Many,
04:27like the Mongoose and F-5, have been souped up to closely simulate the performance of defensive enemy
04:33type fighters. That the F-14 can outmaneuver and destroy any of these fighters is certain enough.
04:41But the pilot has to find out for himself, and dog fighting is one way to do it. Although only
04:48part of the F-14's overall capability, it's a good measure of the aircraft's performance
04:54under one of the most demanding fighting conditions a pilot is likely to face.
05:02The F-14 versus the T-38 is a lesson in defensive maneuvering,
05:08the T-38 being one of the tightest turning aircraft in the inventory.
05:12The test is a critical one. The F-14 in the most vulnerable position of all. His adversary
05:25directly behind him in shooting position. Once the T-38 starts to make the attack on you,
05:30the first thing you have to do is negate it. And the best way to do that is to break into him. You've got
05:36G available, so start your break. Okay, now we want to go from this defensive position into a neutral
05:42and an offensive position. The way we can do this with the F-14 is we can pick its nose up. So we're
05:48sitting there. As we start to have the overshoot and going in here, we'll flop the wings level,
05:52and we'll take the airplane up into the vertical. The NFO instructor, who is riding in the back seat
05:58of the F-14 during this simulated air battle, is a busy guy. He conducts some of the briefings,
06:05sets up the rules of engagement, and later he'll help in the debriefing. Knowing the F-14 and the T-38
06:13like the back of his hand, he'll recognize immediately when the trainee should make his move,
06:19when he should get out of the way. And if he hesitates for even a second, he'll know that too.
06:24At that point, I'll be calling for you to level your wings to get them leveled prior to pulling
06:29the aircraft up into vertical. You want to make sure you get pure vertical if necessary to look
06:33inside. At that point, I won't be cutting my eyes on the T-38 during the whole maneuver,
06:37so you don't need to worry too much about keeping silent. Is there any chance the T-38 can out-zoom
06:42me up there and get me back? No, no way. As long as you get your burners let in here,
06:46and get your nose into the vertical, the T-38 just can't climb up. The more he tries to come up with you,
06:52the more he's going to load that wing up. And as you can see, that wing is much less than yours,
06:56so he's going to lose a lot more energy. Therefore, he isn't going to be able to sustain up into the
07:00zoom. Is there any way he can really counter that, or is he just going to end up in the same place
07:06every time? No. The less that he counters, or the more dynamic that he counters, not coming up with you,
07:12the faster you're going to go after his wing line, the faster you're going to be able to place your nose
07:17behind him, and the faster you're going to be able to employ your weapon system. You have gone from
07:22the complete defensive to an offensive position, and that's what we're trying to look for.
07:34From the classroom to the real world of air combat maneuvering, and back to the classroom,
07:40where the instructor who flew the T-38 conducts the debriefing. I was sitting there at 15,000 feet,
07:46and you were coming around about a thousand feet lower than that on my port side. As you came around,
07:51as most times when you pass a bogey like this, with an airplane that's superior turning capability
07:55that you've got compared to the T-38, will always cut across your tail, trying to keep you in sight,
08:00making you turn a long way this way. And then you started your nose pitch up and went a long way around.
08:05Yeah, what happened there is when you went across my tail, I lost sight of you. Denny had sight of you,
08:10and I spent quite a bit of time, and I think I arced probably up there when I was trying to see you.
08:15That's just about what it looked like, because as you came by down low, with your nose back down,
08:19re-accelerating, you had a typically good early turn opportunity that the F-14 has. If you had the
08:25opportunity to pick me up immediately out of that turn, you could gain a lot of angles. I was spending maybe
08:29too much time looking for you, not enough time driving the airplane. That's a possibility. You can definitely see
08:34the responsibility changes here as you pass, communicate in the cockpit, and let Denny pick
08:38up the padlock for you as you come back over the top until you can get your head spun around and get
08:42back inside of that bogey as it comes down low. I really found out F-14's turnkey ability. We stayed
08:48pretty close, and that's not that much problem. I thought it would be a big problem, but it wasn't.
08:55Encouraged by their success against the Nimble T-38, F-14 flight crews are no less attentive in
09:01preparing for their next battle against the A-4, another good turning low wing loaded fighter.
09:07In this engagement, the tactics instructor will also double as pilot for the A-4. Again, the F-14 is on
09:15the defensive, the A-4 rolling from a high perch into a good gun position. Once I start to make my attack,
09:21you're going to have to counter that, and the way you do that is you start your nose up, get yourself going
09:25right up into the vertical, making sure you get your afterburners lit, and start going up. Lyle's
09:30going to coach you into where I am. Once you're up in here, start to do your displacement roll towards
09:34my six o'clock. You're going to be sitting in there in a position like this, so then what I'll have to do
09:48is I'll have to counter that, making sure you get your burners out right up in here, and once you have
09:53those out, start your attack. Try to make a kill on me. Once that I'm sitting there, I'll have to
09:58counter that. I'll have to bring the nose up, get up in there. Once you see that you can't make the
10:03attack, bring yourself right up into the vertical again, and then this is where you're going to
10:07really make your money. You're going to be back up over top of me. I will be out of energy. I'll have
10:12to bring my nose down. So if you're coming over the top, you'll have a good position to start making the kill.
10:23After the engagement, both crews return to the base for debriefing. At this stage, debriefing is
10:31often a matter of reminding F-14 pilots of the extended capabilities of their aircraft, to instill
10:38more confidence that you can push it beyond the limits of other fighters, and that it will respond.
10:45First thing I saw is that we started the maneuver. I came up over the top of you like this. I really
10:51was impressed with the way that you brought your nose up. That really surprised me. I didn't think
10:55you could get that kind of pitch right out of the airplane. Oh boy, you bet. You can get yourself
11:00right up over the top of that guy. Once you're up in here, now you're in a position where I'm starting
11:04downhill. You can start to attack. And then I started to come back on up in there. You saw that. You came off
11:10in a nice little leg position like that. I kind of felt you may have had a little coaching from the
11:15back seat or something there. Yeah. I could feel it coming off. I saw you're in a position where I
11:20said, well, I could almost maybe try to reverse. But no, I could see you started back on up. And then
11:25it's just straight standby to look in my mirrors. I had you picked up. You came right back down into the
11:30gun kill. And that's the name of the game. I felt like the trouble, if I had troubles, was early in the
11:36early in the hop where I was getting a little bit greedy putting the nose on you when I was still
11:40defensive. You end up getting here where you get to burners lift. And I think everybody gets so darn
11:44awed with the way this thing will start soaring that they don't get them up by the time they're
11:48starting to come back down. And it causes you to start to do your overshoot. Talk about the way you
11:53saw it, Hope? Our only real problem, I thought, Keith, was after we came out to the outside,
11:58Mueller started his nose up and we got on our back up here on top, still in zone five. I thought,
12:03had you gotten the power off a little bit sooner, we wouldn't have picked up so many knots coming
12:07back downhill. Well, this goes back to what Mueller said in the brief. I didn't come out of zone five
12:12coming over the top. Consequently, I got fast because I'm not realizing how fast this airplane
12:16accelerates. That's exactly what we're talking about. You handle everything right up through here.
12:20You're getting up on top, just like we're looking for, back over the top of there. But right here,
12:25you've just got to believe it. Two down and one to go.
12:33Opposition for the F-14 today is the F-4 Phantom. Both are high thrust to weight fighters. Both have
12:40a two-man crew. Unlike the F-14, however, the Phantom has to fight at high speed to be effective,
12:47and thus is vulnerable to the tight-turning Tomcat. Both will use radar to find one another,
12:56then engage, starting from neutral, head on. The F-14 is the aggressor.
13:01Now we sit there and start up into the vertical. Now he's going to make damn sure he's going to come
13:07up here with you. If he just sits there, rolls his wings down and starts running on you or anything like
13:11that. Straight, lateral, little turn. Go on down and chase him. You'll have the energy to go after him.
13:16You'll be ready to go. If he picks his nose up, start smiling. You've got a good day ahead of you.
13:20How much of its maneuvering potential the pilot extracts from his F-14 will determine his success
13:29in this engagement. The trick is to keep his head out of the cockpit, to reduce his reaction time,
13:36to fly the airplane instead of watching over it, to spend less time with the machine, more time with
13:43the fight outside. You can be sure the instructor pilot in the F-4 knows what his adversary can do
13:50and how he's likely to do it. His job is to stay alive.
13:57Having heard it in the classroom, of course, is a lot different from being there. And after you've been
14:02there, there's a lot to talk about. Okay, well, this is where we picked him up, climbed up to his
14:08altitude, closed in, passed him down our left side, just like we briefed, and like we briefed, he zoomed.
14:18He peaked out about, uh, about 30,000 feet, and we went up to about 28. But he was out of airspeed,
14:25and just like you said, when, or just like we said, when we got his nose coming down predictable,
14:31we just put a right on him. I could not believe how little maneuverability he had left. You know,
14:37you could see the airplane load back up, and you could see him start to get a little bit desperate.
14:41He just had nothing left. We just put the nose on him and closed. You know, I thought that, uh,
14:46the whole engagement was just pretty much cut and dry. It's like Mike drew it out in the blackboard
14:50Yeah, it sure is.
14:56Pilots and Navy flight officers continue to cycle through Fighter Town to get their hands on the F-14,
15:04and to put it to the test against the more familiar Mongoose, F-5E and F-4. And they're impressed.
15:11We can take more of the classical maneuvers and use them to our advantage. But that, to me, is the biggest thing.
15:17In the F-4, there are only one or two ways to win a fight. And if you don't do those one or two ways right and perfect, then you're going to lose.
15:26That's not a magic airplane. If you give any plumber and say go out there and pull the thing around,
15:30it'll do what it needs to do. It just does things better.
15:33You may come for a lot of mistakes and still survive or still get the shot.
15:39I've done several fights, one-on-two, where the pilot has called sparrow shots and I've never looked in the cockpit, never looked in the cockpit.
15:45I'm just going to BSL and he's got a lock and he's called a shot because he's got all the information he needs on the heads-up display.
15:53This building is unbelievably important. And I think in this airplane, you can see people stay alive.
15:58The F-14 just makes it easier, makes it possible to have more good fighter pilots just because the airplane performs so well.
16:10It's really amazing that we can just go out there and just take that airplane and say,
16:14we're going to do this to you and go out and do it to you.
16:23With a confidence in his airplane now born of experience,
16:26the pilot can translate F-14 capabilities into real performance.
16:40High thrust to weight and effective wing loading means the ability to stand the F-14 on its tail
16:46and in one move get into a six o'clock position.
16:56As other potential adversaries come along, F-14 tactics will be modified to handle them.
17:06The aircraft's performance flexibility and wide variety of weapons can be adapted to meet any
17:12foreseeable threat, to take the fight to the enemy, and to win.
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