F-14 Fighter Aircraft

[twinmill5000]

We all know the F-14 is an inefficient aircraft, I don't know much about the military and I know the f-14 is a very high maintenance plane that could easily be compared to a wife. 48 hours of sucking up to 1 hour of riding time. So, I got out a pen and paper a while ago and started playing with the ideas to make the plane more efficient, the first thing I looked at was all the moving parts for the swept wing. I've been playing with a new idea for it with less moving parts. It's hard to explain, but if you've ever built a model f-14 before you know the wing is attached to gears. Make the teeth on the gears finer and use a material that won't wear away so easily singe the force of up to 800 knotts in air would be riding on the gears. Those would then be attached to iether a servo or a hydraulic to control the wing movement. It would be alot easier to just see a drawing of my idea. I'm no expert on planes but I designed some pretty cool concepts before, so my idea might not be the best, but hey, it's worth throwing out there.

I like the f-14, it's a stable aircraft.

 

[XaNDeR]

We all know the F-14 is an inefficient aircraft, I don't know much about the military and I know the f-14 is a very high maintenance plane that could easily be compared to a wife. 48 hours of sucking up to 1 hour of riding time. So, I got out a pen and paper a while ago and started playing with the ideas to make the plane more efficient, the first thing I looked at was all the moving parts for the swept wing. I've been playing with a new idea for it with less moving parts. It's hard to explain, but if you've ever built a model f-14 before you know the wing is attached to gears. Make the teeth on the gears finer and use a material that won't wear away so easily singe the force of up to 800 knotts in air would be riding on the gears. Those would then be attached to iether a servo or a hydraulic to control the wing movement. It would be alot easier to just see a drawing of my idea. I'm no expert on planes but I designed some pretty cool concepts before, so my idea might not be the best, but hey, it's worth throwing out there.

I like the f-14, it's a stable aircraft.

I don't know where you heard that but Tomcat is 1 of the best aircraft designed , it was the best Naval aviation fighter of its time ,its speed is impresive and so is the combat radius , Its very manevrable , it could carry 8 A-A missiles or alot of bombs , and it was a great aircraft.

 

[Systems Adict]

...While I hope I understand the reasoning behind your comments, I feel it's a bit of a moot point, seeing as...

#A, the aircraft was designed in the 60's, entered service in the early 70's & was retired from active duty after over 30 years of flying.

#B, with modern technological advances in fluid dynamics & modeling, fly-by-wire, & the whole genre of making an airframe as unstable & un-flyable as possible, so that the computers controlling the aircraft can achieve unnatural angles of attack, etc., all means that airframes are now capable of operating thru a fully transitional envelope from low to high speed/altitude, using a single wing form, rather than needing "swing wings".

#C, Maintenance costs for the F-14 airframe & downtime $ value associated with it where so negatively balanced, that over the lifetime of the aircraft, approx. one third of it's life it was "in maintenance" & the costs alone could have probably procured at least one modern replacement & supported it's thru-life costs !!


Wonderful aircraft to watch, but sad to say, too much for the DoD's budgets to bear.

Systems Adict