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Grumman's F-14s being shredded to dust...
***I am so glad my Grandpa is not here to see this happen.
Grumman's F-14s being shredded to dust
BY JAMES BERNSTEIN
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July 5, 2007, 8:22 PM EDT
Bill Barto has had heartbreaks in life, but there is one he doesn't think he can ever forget: the day not long ago when he heard through friends that F-14 Tomcat fighter jets -- once the pride of the Navy's fleet -- are being shredded to fine dust.
"It [the F-14] means a tremendous lot to me," said Barto, of Bay Shore, who worked for 20 years at the former Grumman Corp. in Bethpage, most of it as a technical illustrator on the Tomcat program.
"This is something you put your heart, soul and blood into," Barto said. "It's more than a piece of metal. It's more than just an airplane."
Maybe so, but the way the Pentagon views things, F-14s -- out of active Navy service for more than a year now after a three-decade run -- are a liability to keep whole. Defense Department officials became concerned that Tomcat spare parts and classified radar and other equipment might fall into the hands of Iran -- which, in the late 1970s, when the Middle Eastern country was a U.S. ally, bought 79 of the supersonic planes.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon suspended sales of any F-14 parts, Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department, said this week. Further, Dearden said, the Pentagon has signed a three-year, $3.7-million contract with a St. Louis firm, Tri-Rinse, to shred F-14s, which cost about $35 million each.
So far, she said, 23 of the planes have been shredded. Each plane is dismantled, piece by piece, then the parts are run through a mechanical shredder. Navy officials declined to say how many more F-14s are facing the shredding machine.
The mood on Long Island and elsewhere in the world of naval aviation about the shredding of the F-14 is mixed.
Pete Remmington, a retired F-14 program manager who moved to Reading, Vt., from Stony Brook, was sad to learn that the Tomcat has indeed run out of lives. But, Remmington said, sadder still was that F-14 production was discontinued in favor of the F/A-18 built by McDonnell Douglas Corp., once Grumman's chief rival in the Navy airplane-building business.
"The fact that they're being shredded is less disturbing to me than that it's no longer in service," Remmington said. "There should have been a follow-on model. It was the finest airplane ever built."
J.R. Davis, executive director of the Tailhook Association, a fraternal organization of Navy pilots, was an F-14 pilot for over a decade, beginning in the late 1970s. He remembers the piloting experience as "great fun" because the F-14 was reliable, stable and had flight controls that were easy to reach and handle.
"It's difficult to see an airplane you've flown mashed by a giant machine with claws," said Davis. "Sure, I feel a little bit of distress."
But Dan Polofsky, 74, of Plainview, who spent some of his nearly 40-year Grumman career working on F-14 software programs, has a more philosophical view.
"Nothing is forever, including me," Polofsky said the other day. "Someday they'll shred me."
The former Grumman -- acquired by Northrop Corp. in 1994 and now known as Northrop Grumman -- built 713 F-14s beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until the early 1990s, when **** Cheney, then-defense secretary under the first President George Bush, decided to end the Tomcat program. Tomcats have been replaced on Navy carrier decks by newer F/A-18 Hornets, built by McDonnell Douglas, now owned by Boeing.
Brian Nicklas, deputy reference chief for the archives division at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., said yesterday he believes only "a handful" of F-14s survive. Nicklas and other experts said some F-14s were lost in training accidents, others are at air museums around the United States -- including the Smithsonian -- and still others at what is called "the boneyard," a roped-off area at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., where "de-militarized" airplanes are kept.
Nicklas said shredding out-of-service military airplanes, tanks or even ships is common practice. But in the case of the F-14, there was an extra urgency because of concerns about Iran getting hold of parts. The Iranians used F-14s in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and it is unknown how many of the Iranian F-14s are still capable of flying.
According to Northrop Grumman, only one F-14 was lost in combat, during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, when it was hit by an Iraqi missile. One of the two-member crew was rescued immediately; the other was held by the Iraqis for several months until he was freed.
But twice during the 1980s, F-14s shot down Libyan MiGs, which approached the Tomcats in what the Navy said was a "hostile fashion." The F-14 gained fame among the movie-going public in the mid-1980s, when it was featured in the Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun."
Even though he is long gone from the company, Barto said he still associates himself with Grumman and the F-14.
"I don't know why the whole airframe has to be ripped apart," he said. "I still have friends in the F-14 community. I still feel part of it. That last cord wasn't severed."
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