Of Eagles And Tomcats

If you want a discussion with less venom, just talk about politics or religion...

Well, this actually is a religious discussion.

This is a continuation of what I started here.

Which plane is better?

This all started because The Aviationist published gun camera footage from an F-14A with the guns pipper squarely on the helmet of the pilot of an F-15C...

Notice that the elevons are full deflection on the Eagle.  He's pulling for all he has to get away.  On the right is the range scale.  The 1 is a mile, the little > at near the bottom of the scale means they are CLOSE.  On the left is the closure rate scale in 100's of knots.  Notice how the < is just barely above the zero?  That means this is no boom and zoom kill.  He's in the phone booth with the knife and he's maneuvering with the F-15C.  Jose "Hoser" Satrapa knows his job and knows his plane.

Let's be cold and calculating about it.

The Eagle has much better engines.  In pretty much every respect the F100 is better than the TF-30.

The Eagle has better thrust to weight and has less bleed for a given g at a given speed.

The Tomcat has much better radar and a dedicated operator for it and is a lot better at low speed, low altitude.

Those little factoids add up to the time honored, "do not fight as your enemy fights."  It's something that every armchair aviator seems to forget.

Fighter pilots, being fighter pilots, never wish to acknowledge any personal failing that led to being shot down...  But you can get them talking honestly.  The Tomcat drivers I've talked to have admitted that getting an Eagle in 1v1 guns is WORK and it was mostly the skill set the Navy promotes with it's culture that gave them enough edge to pull it off.

This is somewhat confirmed through pilot exchange programs.  The differing cultures between the USAF and USN tend to make different rates of aggressiveness.  I've read that this is because the Navy's approach is, "as long as there's nothing prohibiting it, it's OK to do" and the Air Force is, "unless it's specifically allowed, it's forbidden."

Back to plane v plane.

If you're willing to use an AIM-54 on a fighter, the Tomcat wins about 4:1 before the F-15C can even see the Tomcat.  Some people say that it should be a higher ratio than that.  Into Sparrow range the Tomcat has a slight edge because the AWG-9 and RIO combination really helps get the first shot in, but not by more than a split second.

Once all aspect sidewinders appear, there's no difference.  Prior to that the Navy's Sidewinders were better than the AF and if the Tomcat got into trail, the Eagle was at a bigger disadvantage than if the opposite was true.

At guns ranges...  Given an equal stick the Eagle wins.  Consistently.

In exercise after exercise the Eagle wins too.  The armchair pundits like to point this out as proof but it fails to account for something very important.  The Navy put lots of performance restraints on the F-14A in peacetime training so as to not affect airframe life.  Those things are expensive, see?

When the artificial constraints are removed, the F-14A starts winning, consistently.  And it comes down to the Navy having a better training program than the Air Force when it comes to dogfighting in the late '70s and early '80s.

As training became more equal, the F-14A+ (aka F-14B) and F-14D starting coming down the pipe.  The engine in these versions of the Tomcat are derived from the same engine the F-15C uses.  The Tomcat community stopped referring to beating an F-15 as WORK, but they will concede that it was still not a sure thing because the Air Force guys were getting better skill wise through the '90s.