Aircraft Graveyard sattelite image

Skull Leader · June 2, 2005

we're looking for the F-14's, right?
I wonder how much it would take to get them to let me take one of those jets (unarmed) off their hands...

Unfortunately they don't sell to private contractors (unlike the company in Oklahoma that bought like 35 foreign F-16s, which have been de-milled I believe and can be purchased). Most of the tomcats you see there at Davis-Monthan are listed under what they call "72 hour turnaround", that is, in a time of crisis those planes have to be servicable and on the flightline within 3 days. I don't know how they'd get any F-14As running though, virtually all of the P/W TF-30 engines are sitting at Tinker AFB, not Davis Monthan. Most of the tomcats seen in those pictures are probably F-14Bs and what few F-14Ds that are no longer being used (I believe they gave all of the production F-14Ds to VF-31 and 213 after VF-2 and 124 gave theirs up, so they'd have the newest airframes available)

Museums have to contact NAS Pensacola to see about getting a Tomcat. They are the ones that determine who gets them and who does not. The only reason we were able to get the one in Tulsa is because the then-commander at NAS Oceana (Eric Benson) was FROM Tulsa, and he wanted the air museum to have one. Working with the museum, I've met a lot of ex-naval aviators that were kind of upset that we HAD one since Tulsa isn't a navy town. I find this strange because Topeka has one also (theirs is from NSAWC actually, it's still in agressor colors!).

I'm the Tulsa Air and Space museum's consultant and plane captain for their Tomcat. It's BuNo 161598, one of the 'cats involved in the initial bombcat trials! Ours is actually still flyable (both engines intact and installed, all avionics intact, etc), but it is my understanding that most museum Tomcats can no longer fly... they cut the main wing-spars and do a few other things to guarantee that it wouldn't make it off the ground (or at least, wouldn't stay there if it got OFF the ground). The navy has been back once or twice since we got this tomcat to get spare parts off of it (pretty bad, eh?). They took the HUD projector (I'm assuming for one of 211 or 154's tomcats before they gave theirs up), our flight stick is from a T-38 actually (they took the Tomcat grip when they left it here), both of the dummy light panels (forward cockpit and rear) were taken, and blank panels installed in their place. That was all before I got involved with taking care of it, but I try to keep track of it all. We're trying to get accurate replacement parts for these now (as well as a TCS lens, I wanna get that damn bullet-nose off of the chinpod). I guess we'll see!

Edited June 2, 2005 by Skull Leader