Grumman F-14 Tomcat Quickstrike

In the early 1980s the US Navy expected a single advanced carrier-borne multirole fighter, the VFMX programme, to replace both the F-14 and the A-6 Intruder in the long term. That plan was short-lived and split into two separate efforts, one for fleet air defence and one for deep strike; the latter became the ATA programme that produced the A-12 Avenger II. In 1988 the Navy also announced that it would buy a navalised derivative of the Air Force's Advanced Tactical Fighter, the NATF, as the definitive Tomcat replacement.

The end of the Cold War upset that scheme. With shrinking budgets and a steep rise in the unit cost of the ATF and NATF caused by lower production rates, the Navy concentrated its resources on the A-12 and cancelled the NATF in 1991, judging that an upgraded F-14D would remain viable for fleet air defence until 2015. Shortly afterwards the A-12 itself was cancelled because of cost overruns and technical problems. The Navy then launched the A-X programme for a new attack aircraft, while the F-14 with LANTIRN and other air-to-ground upgrades would cover the gap in the meantime.

Against that background Grumman put forward a series of improved Tomcat derivatives during the 1990s. The first was Quickstrike, conceived as a low-cost replacement for the cancelled A-12 with a mission comparable to that of the Air Force's F-15E Strike Eagle: take the in-service F-14D and give it a substantial ground-attack capability so that it could assume the role of the A-6 Intruder once that aircraft retired.

Quickstrike was not a new aircraft but a package of sensors, avionics and weapons carried on the F-14D airframe. Its core was a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) pod and the extension of the AN/APG-71 radar with synthetic aperture and Doppler beam sharpening ground-mapping modes, together with upgraded navigation and targeting pods and moving-map displays in the cockpit. With that suite the Tomcat would move from fleet interceptor to multirole strike fighter.

Weapons carriage was reorganised around four hardpoints under the centre fuselage, each with five munitions substations, plus two wing-glove pylons with two substations each. The planned weapons included laser-guided bombs, the long-range SLAM land-attack missile, the Maverick air-to-surface missile, the HARM anti-radiation missile and the Harpoon anti-ship missile. In effect Quickstrike built on the fact that the F-14D was already the most capable Tomcat, with F110 engines, digital avionics and Link 16 datalink compatibility, and added the strike mission with minimal structural change.

The proposal called only for remanufactured F-14Ds, with no new-build airframes. That approach mirrored the F-14D's own history: 37 examples were built new and another 18 were converted from F-14As before Tomcat production ended. Grumman even offered a still cheaper option, the F/A-14D, which would have brought existing F-14A, F-14B and F-14D airframes up to a common standard with a FLIR, a new databus, a towed decoy and a full night-vision cockpit, while extending the APG-71 with terrain-following, sea-surface search and moving-target-indication modes.

Quickstrike failed to convince Congress, which did not regard it as a sufficient step beyond the F-14D, and Grumman shifted its effort to the Super Tomcat 21, a proposal that kept the same sensors and weapons layout but added deep changes to the airframe. None of the Tomcat derivatives went ahead: facing political opposition from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to Grumman's proposals, the Navy chose the cheaper F/A-18E/F Super Hornet for the strike-fighter role. The F-14 was finally retired from US Navy service in 2006, with the official retirement ceremony held on 22 September that year at Naval Air Station Oceana. Quickstrike remains the first link in a family of proposals (ST-21, AST-21 and ASF-14) that never left the drawing board.