Key Points and Summary – Despite its iconic status, the F-14 Tomcat was initially plagued by severe problems with its Pratt & Whitney TF30 engines.
-These engines, ill-suited for the dynamic flight envelope of a fighter, were prone to compressor stalls, particularly at high angles of attack.
F-14D Tomcat at Smithsonian In Washington DC. Image by Brent M. Eastwood/National Security Journal.
-This flaw led to the loss of 40 Tomcats (over 5% of the fleet) and tragically killed at least one pilot, Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the Navy’s first female carrier fighter pilot.
-The Navy Secretary famously called the TF30 a “terrible engine.”
-While the superior General Electric F110 engine eventually replaced it, the slow transition meant the dangerous TF30 remained in service until 2004.
Early Engine Problems of the F-14 Tomcat Explained
The Grumman F-14 Tomcat is one of the most iconic fighter jets of the Cold War era. Cinematic fiction accounts for much of its broad popularity—mainly thanks to the Top Gun franchise, but the 1980 sci-fi film The Final Countdown starring Kirk Douglas also added to its mystique.
Hollywood hokum aside, the Tomcat also built its reputation on deadly real-world combat performance, both for the U.S. Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF).
But as excellent as the F-14 eventually turned out to be, it was not perfected overnight. (Critics of the F-35 might want to keep that in mind.) Early engine problems nearly killed the program.
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
As Alex Hollings of Sandboxx puts it bluntly in the title of a 2021 article, “The F-14 Tomcat’s biggest threat was its TF30 engines.”
The 100-year-old Pratt & Whitney company has a longstanding reputation for building reliable engines. However, even the best companies make the occasional lemon, and the TF30 was an aggravatingly noteworthy exception to the rule of Pratt & Whitney’s excellence.
The TF30 certainly wasn’t lacking in power.
Indeed, it powered the F-111B, which had a gross weight of 79,000 pounds (35,800 kg), a full 18,000 lbs. heavier than the F-14.
However, the F-111B was more bomber than fighter, and bombers have very different flight envelopes. They don’t typically require operation at high angles of attack, or quick adjustment to the throttle position. Fighters do, and with the TF30, these actions had a rather disconcerting tendency to lead to compressor stalls.
The F-14 Tomcat, famed for its role in “Top Gun” and its mission to protect U.S. carrier groups, underwent a significant transformation in its later years.
Dubbed the “Bombcat,” the F-14B variant was repurposed with advanced systems like the LANTIRN pod, enabling precision-guided munitions delivery from high altitudes.
This prompted some to call it “a nice aircraft powered by two pieces of junk,” or, as then-Capt. Lee Tillotson, the Navy’s F14 program coordinator, put it more diplomatically during a 1984 interview with the Washington Post, “From the very start you essentially teach the pilots to fly the engine as a priority over flying the airplane.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, since the twin engines were mounted 9 feet (2.74 meters) apart to allow for greater lift and more weapons carriage space, a stall in one of those engines could throw the aircraft into an often unrecoverable flat spin.
Last but not least, the turbine blades inside the engine were prone to failure long before their anticipated service life expired, causing catastrophic damage to the engine and putting the lives of the pilot and radar intercept officer (RIO) at further risk.
Tomcat Tragedies
Though the TF30’s maladies didn’t end up killing the F-14 program, they did kill multiple Tomcat airframes and, sadly, at least one Tomcat driver.
A mindboggling 40 Tomcats were thus lost; with 712 total specimens built, this amounted to a loss rate of 5.6 percent of total production, and that’s before you even factor in the combat losses.
As then-Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. stated, the TF30 engine “in the F-14 is probably the worst engine-airplane mismatch we have had in many years. The TF30 engine is just a terrible engine and has accounted for 28.2 percent of all F14 crashes.”
The fatality in question was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Kara S. Hultgreen—call signs “Hulk,” “She-Hulk,” and “Revlon”—who lost her life on Oct. 25, 1994, a mere 20 days after her 29th birthday.
During her final approach for landing on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), Lt. Hultgreen attempted to correct her position with a sideslip, a maneuver that required heavy rudder input and excessive yaw angles.
The maneuver caused a compressor stall, which resulted in engine failure. Her RIO ejected and was rescued with only minor injuries.
F-14 Tomcat. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
To compound the tragedy, “Revlon” had been an aviation pioneer, as she was the first female carrier-based fighter pilot in the Navy.
At the time of her tragic and untimely death, she had logged 217 hours on the Tomcat, in addition to more than 1,000 hours in the A-6 Intruder and EA-6 Prowler. “
She-Hulk” was a Distinguished Naval Graduate of the Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS) at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida,
Problem Finally (Partially) Solved: General Electric (G.E.) to the Rescue
“GE: We Bring Good Things To Life,” went that company’s catchy advertising jingle of the 1970s and ‘80s. In the case of the Tomcat and her crews, GE saved their lives.
The specific GE product that accomplished this was the F110 engine, which offered more thrust—to the tune of a 6.1 to 1 thrust to weight ratio—and eliminated many of the reliability problems associated with the TF30. To this day, the GE-F110 is the choice of engine for 17 nations’ fleets; just one example is the F-15EX Eagle II.
The F110 started replacing the TF30 in 1987. However, some degree of trouble lingered to the very end of the F-14’s Navy career.
As Hollings notes: “The truth is, a yoyoing budget made the transition from the TF30 to the F110 slow going. By 1996, nine years after the F110 entered service in the F-14, the Navy F-14 fleet included just 126 Tomcats with the new GE engines, while the other 212 were still flying on the troublesome TF30. In fact, F-14A’s running the TF30 were still flying for the Navy until as late as 2004.”
About the Author: Christian D. Orr, Defense Expert
Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He is also the author of the newly published book “Five Decades of a Fabulous Firearm: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Beretta 92 Pistol Series.”
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