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| Posted 2005-01-24 09:06:37 |
|
 | The Tomcat''''s final flight |
 As their 32-year run as the premier Navy fighter begins to wane, the F-14 Tomcats that no one needs are being fed into a junk yard’s shredder, nose first, to become blocks of aluminum for cans, crates, even cars.
The soft gray carcasses lying on a broken concrete tarmac at the northwest corner of Oceana Naval Air Station – not far from the maintenance hangars where they were once kept pristine – is an ugly sight for the Tomcat air crews still flying overhead.
“I try not to look down,” Cmdr. Rick LaBranche, executive officer of the “Tomcatters” of Fighter Squadron 31, said, referring to whenever he flies over Oceana’s “bone yard.”
Stripped of their engines, ejection seats, radar and guns – everything valuable or reusable – the planes barely resemble the $50 million supersonic jets once capable of firing missiles from 100 miles out, winning any aerial dog fight they picked, and dropping precision-guided munitions within inches of their mark.
The F-14s will cease flying in late 2006, when the last of the 633 that were built for the Navy shuts down at Oceana, ending an era that began in the mid-1970s. They were designed to protect the fleet, built primarily to intercept long-range Soviet strike aircraft, once thought to be the Navy’s biggest threat.
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