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The Dud

I found an old friend today. Well, sort of –- kind of a shipmate, you might say. The problem is, my old friend is a dud of an old aircraft -– Bureau Number 160905, to state the number by which the Navy tracks aircraft. An aircraft with a tie to my own history in the Navy.

Old aircraft and ships fascinate me. I found this one tucked away in a corner. In the Kitty Hawk’s forward-most hangar bay is an old aircraft -– the shell of an F-14A Tomcat that is making a final voyage back to the United States from Japan along with the ship. It was used by the Kitty Hawk’s crash and salvage team as a large training aid to help them learn how to fight fires and rescue pilots on the flight deck.

“We would use it onboard when we were going to sea without the airwing as a way to maintain proficiency,” said Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (aircraft handling) (AW/SW) Scott Cook, who heads Kitty’s Crash and Salvage Team. “We would leave her on the pier when we went on deployment.”

Cook says every carrier has a “dud” for just such training purposes, but this one is the last Tomcat being used for that reason -– all the other carriers have since converted to F/A-18 aircraft, reflecting the bulk of their airwings today. The F-14 Tomcat made her last curtain call on Kitty Hawk with Fighter Squadron 154 during operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Following that cruise, VF-154 returned to the United States to transition into F/A-18 E and F models.

In 2006, the Tomcatters of Fighter Squadron 31 made the airframe’s last combat deployment and last carrier qualifications. At 4:42 p.m. July 28, 2006, the final Tomcat left the TR’s decks and two months later, there were no more Tomcats in active service in the U.S. Navy.

But when this venerable old girl returns to the states, she won’t get a cushy slot in a museum somewhere. She will most likely be cut up and disposed of as officials seek to keep spare F-14 parts out of the hands of the Iranians, who purchased a number of the aircraft from the United States in the 1970s. Some of those aircraft are still in use by the Iranian air force, and spare parts are a tough commodity to come by now.

So, as the last Tomcat makes her final journey at sea, there are no final moments of glory, no “lasts” of any kind, and she barely gets any notice from the crew. In fact, her bare engine compartments are now filled with excess supplies with nowhere else to go, causing some to joke that she’s simply a store room … compartment number 1-F14-0.

But I almost forgot -– I knew her once. This aircraft and I were both aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on Aug. 4, 1980, when we left Norfolk on a nine-month-long Mediterranean deployment. I was ship’s company -– worked in the photo lab. The dud, well, she was a proud member of VF-32, one of the “Swordsmen,” proudly carrying the side number 203. I spent many long hours on the flight deck and, no doubt, watched and photographed this aircraft leave and return to the ship.

We were both at the beginnings of our Navy careers then. I would soon go off to Navy second class dive school and 160905 would switch squadrons and spend nine years in Fighter Squadron 74 flying off the carrier Saratoga, even making the ship’s final deployment during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Her final assignments were in fighter squadrons 11 and 24, before being struck from the active flying rolls Feb. 28, 2006, six months before VF-24 was decommissioned Aug. 31, 1996.

She most likely made the trip to Japan on the Kitty Hawk, as there is no record she ever served with Fighter Squadron 154, which was the only forward-deployed Tomcat squadron the Navy ever had.

Farewell, old friend. It was nice to share a small ride with you once again and bring back some good memories from when we were both much younger.