High Flier

he Navy's F-14 has been reborn as a strike fighter, able to hit targets on the ground as well as in the air.

t was just before midnight in Baghdad on Dec. 16, 1998, when Navy F-14 Tomcats lifted off the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and streaked across a dark sky to deliver a message to Saddam Hussein. For weeks, Iraq had failed to cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. So the United States and its allies dispatched the Tomcats, along with other aircraft and missiles, to bomb Iraq's air-defense installations near Basra and Baghdad.

Operation Desert Fox, as the mission was dubbed, wasn't the first in which the Navy had enforced sanctions against Iraq. But it was the first time the F-14 had dropped bombs in combat. The legendary fighter, immortalized by Tom Cruise in the movie Top Gun, was designed to face off against enemy fighters. Just a few years prior to the midnight bombing run against Iraq, the aging F-14 had been rendered all but obsolete. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, it became apparent that single-mission air-to-air fighters would play a limited role in future warfare.

That the F-14 Tomcat, first introduced into the fleet in the early 1970s, could become the F-14 Bombcat demonstrates how determination, creative programming and support from high places turned a Cold War legacy system into a critical component of current defense planning. The F-14 has played key roles in recent military operations and is the Navy's only manned aircraft capable of conducting tactical reconnaissance currently in the fleet. By taking proven systems used on Air Force and Army aircraft and modifying them for the F-14, program officials have turned the legacy fighter into the Navy's strike aircraft of choice.

Capt. Theodore Carson, an F-14 pilot with 20 years of flying experience, said the Persian Gulf War was a demoralizing experience for F-14 backers. With few potential adversaries willing to take on the United States in air-to-air combat, it looked as if the F-14 was an unintended victim of U.S. air superiority. In 1994, after a tour commanding an F-14 squadron in the Gulf, Carson was assigned to Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, Md., as chief engineer for the F-14 program.

"I came to NAVAIR with the thought that the F-14 was a single-mission aircraft that was not going to be used much anymore because it was a Cold War relic. If we didn't expand our role, the future of the F-14 was in question. And it was a shame, because it's a beautiful aircraft," says Carson, now the
F-14 program manager.

The Gulf War showed that the aircraft that had the largest utility were those that could strike targets on the ground in addition to those in the air--strike fighters. "We always planned on retiring the F-14 in the 2010 to 2015 time period. But the budgetary realities of the mid and late 1990s were such that we probably would have been forced out of the inventory a lot sooner just being a single-mission aircraft," Carson says.

So Carson and others set about trying to turn the F-14 into a strike fighter. In less than a year--record time in the acquisition world--engineers in the Navy and at Northrop Grumman, the F-14's manufacturer, took a targeting system used by the Air Force and modified it so the F-14 could drop laser-guided bombs. Other modifications and upgrades followed quickly thereafter. The F-14's performance in two major conflicts since the Gulf War--Operation Desert Fox in Iraq and Operation Allied Force in Kosovo--demonstrated the worth of the upgrades.

"The F-14 strike fighters were major participants in both conflicts and performed flawlessly," Carson says.

Striking Out

The heart of the F-14 upgrade is the low altitude navigation and targeting infrared for night (LANTIRN) targeting system. Navy engineers modified the Air Force system to deliver weapons guided by the global positioning satellite system (GPS) from the F-14. The upgrade will allow the Navy to incorporate on the Tomcat new, all-weather, air-to-ground weapons, such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), just now coming online.

And because a strike fighter faces different threats from a fighter, the F-14's survivability also has been improved with a radar warning system, night-vision capability and other enhancements.

"We have not developed anything truly from the bottom up," says Carson. "What we have done to turn ourselves from a fighter into a strike fighter is to look around our own services and across the seas to Great Britain for additional flight control systems. We were looking for systems that were already proven and then we integrated them on the F-14. And we did it in most cases in record time, and very cheap for acquisition purposes. We just got tremendous bang for the buck," Carson says.

The F-14 upgrade program came into being just as the Defense Department, and the Naval Air Systems Command in particular, were hopping on the acquisition-reform and management reengineering bandwagon. Huge cuts in Defense modernization funding had forced the services to look for savings in existing programs to pay for new weapons. At NAVAIR and other Defense offices, program officials turned to the private sector to improve maintenance operations and automate business practices with commercial, off-the-shelf technologies.

"We tried to make ourselves as businesslike and up-to-date as we could, says Carson. "We've [used] lots of unique management techniques to lower the cost and enhance the outcome of our programs." The F-14 team adopted detailed inventory and installation tracking software programs that would mine information from databases accessible to
F-14 sites around the country.

Wayne Abba, a former senior program analyst for contract performance management at the Defense Department, says that by adopting improved management, particularly in depot-level maintenance and emergency maintenance, the F-14 team proved that legacy systems can be much more efficient. "They have brought that entire process out of virtual chaos into a well-organized, well-managed process. It has become a model for the rest of naval aviation," says Abba. His office was supportive of the upgrade program and provided key political support within the department at a time when competition for funding was fierce, he says. (After Abba retired from DoD last year, he went to work for Dekker Ltd., a company that develops software management tools for the F-14.)

Not Your Daddy's F-14

Besides giving the F-14 the ability to strike ground targets with precision weapons, engineers also found a way to incorporate fast tactical imagery (FTI) into the aircraft in late 1998. FTI had been used on the Army's Apache helicopter, but never incorporated into fighter aircraft. The system allows the aircraft to capture imagery from on-board sensors and transmit those images back to the carrier battle group. As a result, any upgraded F-14 flying in hostile territory can send images back to battle group commanders, who can then decide when and how to attack particular targets.

In the past, an aircraft encountering the unexpected might have to return to the carrier to download and process images before a strike decision could be made. In the meantime, if the target was mobile, it might not be there by the time the commanders could decide to attack.

In ongoing operations in southern Iraq, where the United States enforces a no-fly zone, and in the Kosovo conflict in 1999, FTI guaranteed the F-14's continued role. "The theater commanders have embraced the capability. And whenever that happens, that's going to get everybody else's attention," says Carson. The F-14 is the only tactical strike aircraft in the world that can do this today, Carson says, although the F-14's
replacement, the F/A-18F, is expected to eventually incorporate the capability.

For the air crew--the pilot and the radar intercept officer--flying an upgraded F-14 is nothing like flying the old Tomcat. Digital avionics allow the crew to receive more information faster. "It was more than I expected. It's a brand new thing," says Capt. Gene Garrett, the F-14 wing commander at U.S. Atlantic Fleet, based at Oceana Naval Air Station, Va. Garrett commands all F-14s in the Navy and had flown the aircraft for about five years prior to the upgrade.

"It was amazing. Having GPS available to you in the airplane takes a tremendous burden off the air crew. Now they can spend much more time tactically on weapons deployment.

"Technically, it is a significant difference. Before, a lot of your attention was paid to 'Where am I?' This is an order of magnitude better," says Garrett.

The upgraded F-14 gives commanders more flexibility than they've had in the past, he says. The crew can navigate independently of other aircraft, and thanks to the improved, digital avionics, can receive information from other platforms, such as the Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), a surveillance aircraft. "And because of the digital format, and because of GPS, we can bring in future weapons you would not have otherwise been able to bring in."

Carson, who has not flown the upgraded Tomcat he has been so instrumental in creating, says he'd have to relearn how to fly the aircraft before he climbed into the cockpit. "I've got over 3,000 hours in the F-14, and I have to tell you if I got into an F-14 today, I wouldn't know what to do."

Still, he doesn't mind that he's not flying the plane, as long as somebody is. "I've spent almost 28 years in the Navy, and I've had tour after tour of just terrific jobs working with terrific people, but by far the most rewarding job I've ever had, and the one that I feel made the most contribution to the Navy and my community, has been this job, from chief engineer to program manager. It's a terrific aircraft and a world-class strike fighter today."

Buying Time

Things didn't always look so rosy for the F-14 program manager, however. In 1997, well into the upgrade program, new calculations on the wear and tear on F-14s showed they would not last as long as the Navy had planned--until sometime between 2010 and 2015. The calculations were based on data collected from structural recording instruments that had been on the aircraft for many years but had just then accumulated enough data to be crunched.

"It actually shocked us," says Carson. The new data took about 20 percent of the predicted life away from the F-14 fleet, and forced the Navy to program about $300 million worth of structural modifications and maintenance in order to keep the plane flying.

"Although we thought the [fatigue estimates] were conservative, we had to prove they were conservative or we would have to [spend] that $300 million," Carson says. The Navy and Northrop Grumman then began the Fatigue Life Initiative to analyze the data to determine more clearly the lifespan of the aircraft.

Over the next 18 months, the Navy invested $10 million, mainly in flying structural test aircraft and doing in-depth analysis of all the fatigue data collected.

"We really needed to peel the onion back and look harder at that [fatigue data] and how we were arriving at that information," says Dick Dalrymple, deputy operations officer on the F-14 program. "What makes the F-14 such a great airplane to fly is the swept wing geometry. But unfortunately it complicates the aerodynamics so much that it's a really complicated airplane for the fatigue guys to understand and determine what that means in terms of keeping that airplane going."

New calculations, corroborated by structural tests, showed not only that the initial fatigue life estimates were incorrect, but that there was more life left in the aircraft than previously believed, says Dalrymple. While the flight data recording systems on the F-14 were state of the art at the time the aircraft was fielded, they were not sophisticated enough to capture the data needed for determining accurate fatigue rates. That accounted for the incorrect initial readings, he says.

As a result of the testing, the Navy was able to devise new methods for controlling data quality, refine existing fatigue life algorithms, validate fatigue test assumptions through extensive flight tests, and revamp
F-14 fatigue tracking methods.

The upshot was that the new data showed that $268 million of the $300 million programmed for structural modifications and maintenance in 1997 could now be returned to the fleet. In addition, the new data predicted a lifespan increase of 26 percent for the F-14A, and a 16 percent increase in lifespan for the F-14B/D versions. On average, an F-14 will burn somewhere between 4 percent and 5 percent of its life per year flying; a 25 percent increase in life expectancy would mean another five years of flying time on the aircraft.

The Fatigue Life Initiative program garnered the team a Hammer award in March, and established a model for determining the fatigue life of other high-performance aircraft. As a reward to the F-14 team for making the initial $10 million investment in recalculating the fatigue life of the aircraft, the Navy gave the program $97 million for additional upgrades to the aircraft.

Early Retirement

The extra $97 million will be used to pay for safety and readiness enhancements to the entire F-14 fleet, and warfighting enhancements, including GPS-guided weapons and enhanced LANTIRN laser capability, to the F-14B/D versions. Those upgrades will take place over the next year.

Success of the upgrade program notwithstanding, the F-14s will be retired from the fleet before they reach the end of their lifespan. The oldest aircraft, the F-14As, are scheduled to be out of the inventory by 2003. The B and D aircraft are scheduled to be retired by 2007, although there is no technical reason the aircraft couldn't stay in the fleet for another seven or eight years.

"You never want to keep an aircraft until it drops out of the sky for fatigue. You always want to retire it while you still have a little bit of life left. That's just common sense," says Carson.

"The increased life of the F-14 could argue for some slowdowns in expenditures on other programs, namely the F-18, which is to replace the F-14," says one Navy official, who requested anonymity. But that isn't likely to happen. The F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is one of the Navy's top procurement priorities. And despite concerns about the program's ability to meet performance criteria, the Navy in June authorized full-rate production of the aircraft.