The climactic battle of the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun saw U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats battle fictional MiG-28s flown by an unnamed nation. Interestingly, this movie dogfight was inspired by an…
When Lt. Kara Hultgreen died while trying to land on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the event touched off a national debate about women in combat roles and the military pushing women who weren’t ready into active service. Except Hultgre…
There was only one foreign customer for the advanced F-14 Tomcat fighter during its heyday: Iran. The Shah chose to buy 80 Tomcats instead of the F-15 Eagle – and it was a good investment. Even after Imperial Iran gave way to the Islamic Republic …
The Grumman F-14 Tomcat is one of the most iconic American fighter jets. Its appearance in Top Gun made the interceptor a pop culture icon forever associated with a need…
During more than 34 years of fleet service, the F-14 Tomcat transformed from analog fighter to digital precision attack platform. Originally designed to keep Russian bombers away from the battle group by employing Phoenix missiles at very long rang…
Exercise “Display Determination 87” was supposed to be a routine NATO exercise, pitting U.S. Air Force Phantoms out of Zweibrucken Air Base in West Germany against F-14 Tomcats from the…
In 1986, a pair of aviation movies took America by storm. Both Doug Masters in Iron Eagle and Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun took to the skies and dominated America’s enemies (we all know
A few weeks ago I posted a video by DCS player Forest Rat who recreated the aerial scenes in the very first minutes of “Top Gun” (when the two F-14s piloted by Mav and Goose and Cougar and Merlin are vectored by the aircraft carrier to intercept t…
A lot of crazy sh*t happened in the Iran-Iraq War. The backbone of the Iranian Air Force at the time was the beloved F-14 Tomcat, a plane the Iranians still fly. Purchased by the Shah of Iran before the rise of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s Air Forc…