Iranian F 14 - In the early morning hours of January 26, 2012, an Iranian F-14A (serial 3-6062 seen here) scrambled to intercept a 'UFO' near the port city of Bushehr in southern Iran. About 5 minutes into the flight, the mighty 'Tomcat' disappeared from the ground control radar. The pilot and the RIO lost their lives in the crash.
So far the Iranian regime has attributed the cause of this terrible incident to some unknown technical failures.
Iranian F 14
The '3-6062' F-14 was one of the best maintained aircraft in the Iranian Air Force inventory assigned to the critical task of 'QRA' in the important port city of Bushehr where it' Iran's only nuclear reactor is also located. .
Iranian F 14 Skin
The Iranian regime has not revealed much beyond its official line that the crash was due to a technical problem. But now it can be believed that the air defenses of the 'Revolutionary Guard' near the 6th Bushehr tactical air base have shot down this precious 'Tomcat'.
Regular air force officers I spoke to over the past week admitted that IRGC air defense personnel are "unusual" with the type of aircraft they fly over their own country. One of them told me that AAA 'IRGC' personnel fire at anything that can scare them. Although my guess is that they fire at fast flying objects at all for fear of being reprimanded for not actually fighting.
This story reveals the gulf that exists between the regular armed forces and their more radical friends the revolutionary guards. A loophole that could be exploited during coalition airstrikes to eliminate the Iranian regime and its nuclear weapons facilities.
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Email us at sales@ if you want to support this website by purchasing the original piece, which is only available through this website! Five decades later, Iran's F-14s keep getting better and better. And more and more important for the defense of the Persian state.
Iran Thinks Cia Drones Took Out Its F 14 Tomcat
On April 9, 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a historic agreement. The Soviet Union is committed to arming the Arab republics with the latest weapons. In return for sending Baghdad guns, tanks and fighter jets, Moscow gets only one thing - influence ... in an area with a lot of accessible crude oil.
In neighboring Iran, news of Iraq's alliance with the Soviets exploded like a bomb. Ethnically Persian with a Shia majority, Iran was — and still is — a fierce opponent of the Sunni Arab establishment in Iraq, which during the 1970s dominated the country's politics.
In Tehran, King Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — the “shah” — moved quickly to counter the Baghdad movement. First he unleashed an army of secret police in a desperate and bloody attempt to stamp out internal strife. Then he reached out to the United States.
Shah wanted weapons. And not just weapons. A former military pilot himself, the king wanted the latest and greatest US-made fighter jets, with which Iran's air force could dominate the Persian Gulf and even patrol the Indian Ocean.
Grumman F 14a Tomcat, 3 863, Imperial Iranian Air Force 1977.
The Iranian leader's appetite for the plane is notorious. "He would buy anything that would fly," one American official said of the shah. But Pahlavi especially wanted a fighter that could fly fast enough and shoot far enough to face the Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat recon aircraft that had been flying over Iran at 60,000 feet and Mach 3.
US president Richard Nixon's administration was eager to grant the Shah's wishes in exchange for Iranian help to balance a rising Soviet Union. Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger visited Tehran in May 1972 — and promptly offered the Shah a “blank check”. Any weapon the king wants and can pay for, he will get - regardless of the Pentagon's own preferences and the State Department's strict export policy.
That's how, starting in the mid-1970s, Iran became the only country besides the United States to operate arguably the most powerful interceptor jet ever built — the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a wing fighter carrying a radar package advanced and long-range AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missile.
It is fair to say that American policy makers quickly regretted giving Iran the F-14. In February 1979, Islamic hardliners rose up against the Shah's police state, kidnapped 52 Americans at the US Embassy in Tehran and demanded the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Islamic Revolution transformed Iran from an American ally to one of the United States' most vocal enemies.
Vintage Grumman Aerospace Sticker F 14 Tomcat Imperial Iranian Air Force 3 * 5
For the next five decades, the United States will do everything it can — short of war — to ground the ayatollah's Tomcats. But America failed. Through a combination of engineering ingenuity and daring espionage, Iran has kept its F-14s in working order — and even upgraded them. The swing fighters took to the skies in several conflicts and even occasionally engaged American aircraft.
Today, about 40 of Iran's surviving F-14s remain among the best fighters in the Middle East. And since the US Navy retired its last Tomcats in 2006, our Tomcats are the only operational Tomcats left in the world.
The F-14 was a failed product. In the 1960s, the Pentagon hoped to replace thousands of fighters in the US Air Force and Navy with a single design capable of ground attack and air-to-air combat. The result was the General Dynamics F-111 — a two-person, two-engine high-tech marvel that, in time, became the outstanding long-range bomber in Air Force service.
But as a naval fighter, the F-111 was a disaster. Complex, underpowered and difficult to maintain, the Navy's version of the F-111B — built by General Dynamics in partnership with carrier-fighter specialist Grumman — is also a widow. Of the seven F-111B prototypes built by the consortium starting in 1964, three crashed.
Finemolds 1/72 Iranian Air Force F 14a Tomcat (limited Edition) 72936
In 1968, the Department of Defense stopped working on the F-111B. In seizing the replacement, Grumman took the swing-wing concept, TF-30 engine, AWG-9 radar and long-range AIM-54 missile from the F-111B design and packed it into a smaller, lighter and simpler aircraft.
Voila — F-14. The first prototype took off on its first flight in December 1970. The US fleet got its first Tomcats two years later. Grumman eventually built 712 F-14s.
In 1974, the shah ordered 80 fighters along with spare parts and 284 Phoenix missiles at a cost of $2 billion. Seventy-nine Tomcats arrived before the Islamic Revolution forced the shah into exile in Egypt and forced the United States to impose an arms embargo. The US Navy eventually acquired the 80th aircraft for one of its test squadrons.
The US State Department oversees the transfer of the F-14 and, at its eternal discretion, delegates much of the work to the Air Force. But the F-14 is a Navy plane and only the Navy has pilots qualified to fly the machine. The sail branch made the Tomcat crew over to the flight branch, but only after an extensive safety review over six months — and not without some culture clash.
Grumman F 14 Tomcat
Navy pilots built new Tomcats at the Grumman factory in Long Island, New York and flew them three at a time over Iran. "Few pilots in their careers have ever had the opportunity to fly an airplane that 'smells' exactly like a new car, and still has cellophane covering the ejection seat cushion," wrote one F-14 flyer years ago. according to. "Well, I had an amazing experience."
"Although my F-14 was 'factory fresh', it had an Iran-specific camouflage paint scheme. And although it had US military markings, as I explained later, those markings would be cleverly changed and quickly after reaching Iran.paint The United States easily disappears when certain solutions are applied, exposing the markings of the Iranian air force underneath.
The trip to Iran consisted of two legs — from Long Island to Torrejon, Spain, then on to Isfahan air base in Iran, with Air Force KC-135 air tankers regularly visiting F-14s.
It is complex and, for pilots, unpleasant work. "We have to be 'topped up' with fuel for most of the seven hour journey if we have to divert to the emergency landing field," said the ferry pilot.
The F 14 Tomcat Might Have Been Retired Too Early
"This means at least six in-flight refueling events for each leg, regardless of weather - and the KC-135 is a tricky, Rube Goldberg type of aircraft refueling" r Navy.”
Air Force planes refuel in between via a probe that extends from the tanker to the fuse of the receiving plane — the tanker crew does most of the work. Navy aircraft are equipped with probes and refuel themselves by moving the probe to baskets suspended from tanker fuel pods. Accepted pilots do the work — an arrangement consistent with the incredibly high demands the Navy traditionally places on its fighter pilots.
To make the KC-135 compatible with the F-14, the Air Force clumsily attached a basket to the tanker probe. Improvised equipment tends to whip around
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