The Anomaly of the F-14 Tomcat: What Generation Fighter Should We Consider It To Be?

Systems of classification are often less than perfect. We use them anyway because they can be useful even without being perfect--generalization, as anyone with the slightest acquaintance with logic knows, one of the indispensable tools of reasoning. (Indeed, anyone who says "Don't generalize" is likely to be telling you "Don't think"--and anyone saying "Don't think," likely to be telling you "Just believe--and do--what I say.")

In fact I would go so far as to say that even the imperfections can be useful--by helping focus our attention on what does not fit in, and in the process find new patterns.

So does it go with that generational system for classifying fighter aircraft in the jet age, which I have found highly useful--while being well aware of a number of anomalies that simply do not fit in, among which there was indeed a pattern. In particular most of the better-known jet fighters that did not fit in tended to be planes of the 1960s and 1970s that seemed too advanced to fit in with the second-generation jets as we usually talk about them (the F-104s, the Mirage IIIs, the MiG-21s), but at the same time did not fit in with the later generations either (the multipurpose third-generation jets like the F-4 and Mirage F-1 and MiG-23, the air superiority-oriented fourth-generation jets like the F-15 and Mirage 2000 and MiG-29). I speak of planes like the unrealized U.S. YF-12 and F-108 and F-111B, and what actually did follow from them in actual service, the F-14 Tomcat; of jets like the Russian MiG-25 and MiG-31; and perhaps even the anomaly that is the British Lightning (a '60s-era jet with ahead-of-its time hands-on-throttle-and-stick controls and actual supercruise capability), or the European Tornado ADV ("Air Defence Variant," which can seem like a European answer to the F-111B).

What these planes had in common was their being built for the mission of the second-generation fighter--not operating as multipurpose jets capable of handling aerial combat, strike and the rest as needed, or air superiority jets designed to win dogfights, but high-speed, high-altitude interception against formidable attack (the MiG-25 intended to engage B-70 Valkyrie bombers, the F-14 to shoot down waves of Russian air and missile attackers attempting to sink American carriers); and at the same time their being set apart from the classic, generally '50s-era, second-generation fighters by their later appearance (in the era of third- and fourth-generation aircraft), and their being so much more capable, due to

1. Aircraft performance, as with the near-Mach 3 speed and extreme high altitude flight of the Russian MiGs, or the Lightning's supercruising, or

2. The potency of their radar and armament. Where the second generation jets mainly relied on ranging radars and guns and infra-red-seeking missiles, these planes often packed relatively massive and long-range radar and by the standard of the time very long-range radar-guided missiles, often far exceeding the capabilities of later planes--exemplified by the MiG-25's radar and AA-6 missiles, the YF-12's 300 mile-range radar and AIM-47 missiles, and the F-14's AWG-9 radar and AIM-54 missiles (developed from the YF-12's radar and weaponry), which was supposed to let the F-14 fire all six of those 100 mile-range missiles simultaneously at separate targets.

It is, of course, common to lump in the F-14 with the other contemporary fourth-generation jets with which its performance was thought at the very least comparable--while the F-14 towered over its later-generation contemporaries in the public imagination (as the #1 movie this year, Top Gun: Maverick, has reminded everybody). Part of this, I think, was the plane's look, which had its effect on people who know nothing about the intricacies of radar performance—that the big plane, with its twin tails and swing-wings looked like the future (the more in as it had the cachet of carrier aviation, and yes, the way in which pop culture has made the most of it, not least that movie). Still, it seems to me worth talking about it (and the similarly quasi-fourth-generation Tornado, the MiG-25 and MiG-31, etc.) as more properly describable as part of that weird but interesting category that one could call "second generation super-fighters."