Flying the F-14

I just finished Scott Kelly's book Endurance about his year (-ish) in space on the International Space Station.  Before Kelly was an astronaut, he was a US Navy naval aviator flying the F-14 Tomcat.  He surprised me by ragging on the F-14.  What's his criticism?

Hiiiiighway to the danger zone!

 

What Scott Kelly said 

Twice in the book Kelly references the flying qualities of the F-14:

Page 157 (talking about his training in the type):

All of  this training would culminate in taking the airplane to the ship, which would be much harder than it had been in the T-2 and the A-4, since the Tomcat had such poor flying qualities and we had to qualify at night. [Emphasis added]

Page 169 (talking about his assisting in a crash investigation):

When Kara [the aviator killed in the incident] turned the airplane too tightly, the airflow to the left-hand engine was disturbed, causing a compressor stall - a known issue with the F-14A. (The F-14 had horrendous flying qualities in general, and the scene in Top Gun where Goose smashes into the canopy is one of the more accurate moments in that movie.) [Emphasis added]

I'm already on-record as preferring the F-14 to its successors from a cosmetic standpoint, and the F-14 was undeniably faster and longer-ranged then the F-35 or F/A-18.  Because the F-14's designed mission was air superiority and it was ground-up designed for aircraft carrier operations, I assumed that it had "good flying qualities"; maybe it wasn't easy to fly (?), but "horrendous" is really harsh.

Further research

I started searching for additional detail.  I didn't find anyone who put their opinion as strongly as Kelly, but it sounds like the F-14 was particularly difficult and dangerous during carrier takeoffs and landings (cats and traps).  If so, I could believe that someone whose job included many more cats and traps than dogfights might call it "horrendous" if every cycle was riskier because they weren't flying A-6s or F/A-18s.

My main source for this argument is Paul Nickell writing with Tyler Rogoway in The War Zone.  Regarding training in the TA-4 before converting to the F-14, Nickell writes:

One of the beauties of the TA-4 was that in the approach environment, it flew exactly like what you were taught to think a navy jet should fly like. Attitude controlled airspeed and power controlled rate of descent. So once you got it trimmed in pitch, it pretty much maintained that speed. If you started to see a change in glideslope from the meatball, you simply made the appropriate power correction to return to a centered ball. I loved flying it, and the way that it flew.

By contrast, his experience in the F-14 was it required both stick and throttle inputs to control rate of descent, which also complicated the aviator's control of airspeed.  His word-picture of an F-14 landing also deserves to be reproduced:

Needless to say, the jet was large and had a lot of moving parts when coming aboard the boat. Because of it’s [sic] tendency to slide around laterally in the groove, some called it the “frisbee.” Lineup was difficult to maintain, especially at night, yet it was critical due to it’s large wingspan. Because of it’s size and many moving flight control surfaces flapping around on an approach, most called it the “turkey.”

Taking off from a carrier in earlier F-14s was also dangerous.  As Kelly alluded to in his second quote above, the TF30 engines on the F-14 were prone to stalls and shutting down in flight.  With the F-14's widely-separated engines, the asymmetric thrust from an engine shutdown could easily induce an unrecoverable flat spin.  Replacement engines and digital flight controls would eventually solve that problem for later Tomcats.

Eran Malloch talks about this on Fights On!:

The TF30 had been plagued from the start with susceptibility to compressor stalls at high AoA and during rapid throttle transients or above 30,000 ft (9,100 m). The F110-GE-400 engine provided a significant increase in thrust, producing 23,400 lbf (104 kN) with afterburner at sea level, which rose to 30,200 lbf (134 kN) at Mach 0.9. The increased thrust gave the Tomcat a better than 1:1 thrust-to-weight ratio at low fuel quantities. The basic engine thrust without afterburner was powerful enough for carrier launches, further increasing safety. [Emphasis added]

So on takeoff too the Tomcat with TF30s could be difficult to handle.

Conclusions

Given that Scott Kelly was a Navy test pilot before he flew the Space Shuttle, it's hard to discount his criticism of the Tomcat.  Given how few corroborating sources I've been able to find on the Tomcat being hard to handle, I'm going with the theory that:

1. It was harder to trap an F-14 on a carrier than its contemporaries, and that is a regime where aviators will be most aware of the flight-characteristics of the airplane, and
2. Asymmetric thrust risk due to widely-separated unreliable TF30 engines was top-of-mind for Kelly.  Pilots would have been made aware of incidents so that they might avoid them, and his specific experience with a crash investigation would have made him even more aware.

But I want to hear more!  Anyone have any stories about handling the Tomcat and how well it responded?  Feel free to comment here, on LinkedIn, or by emailing me at blog@saprobst.com.