Grumman F-14 Tomcat F-14AM

In the early 1970s Soviet MiG-25 reconnaissance aircraft were overflying Iran with impunity and the Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF) had nothing that could intercept them. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi went looking for a fighter that could; according to a former pilot writing on iiaf.net, Iranian crews flew and tested practically every fighter then available, including MiGs secretly in other countries, and the final report singled out the F-14 Tomcat and the F-15 Eagle as the best. The US Navy and Grumman staged competitive demonstrations of both at Andrews Air Force Base for the Shah and his senior officers, and in August 1973 the IIAF chose the Tomcat, partly because Iraq had been negotiating with France since 1970 to buy the Mirage F1. In January 1974 Iran ordered 30 F-14s and 424 AIM-54 Phoenix missiles, launching Project Persian King, worth US$300 million; in June another 50 aircraft were added, for a total of 80 Tomcats and 714 Phoenixes with spare parts and replacement engines for 10 years, a complete armament package and the construction of Khatami Air Base near Isfahan.

The Iranian order did more than extend the production line: it saved it. The state-owned Bank-e-Melli lent Grumman $75 million to partly replace a $200 million US government loan that had just been cancelled, enabling the company to secure a further $125 million from a consortium of banks and keep the programme alive. Iranian aircrews, mostly veteran F-4 pilots, began arriving in the United States in May 1974 to train at Miramar and Oceana; back in Isfahan they trained the rest with the help of four American instructors included in the contract, and one of them, Major Mojtaba Zangeneh, was the Iranian pilot who tested the Phoenix in the United States.

The Iranian Tomcats were virtually identical to the US Navy version, with only a few classified avionics items omitted, and being late on the production line they received the TF30-P-414 engine, far less prone to compressor stalls than the P-412. The first two of the 79 aircraft reached Iran in January 1976; by May 1977 there were 12. That summer, with Foxbats still crossing the country, the Shah ordered a live-fire warning: in August 1977 an Iranian crew shot down a BQM-34E target drone at 50,000 feet with a Phoenix, and the Soviet overflights promptly stopped. The aircraft carried US Navy serials 160299 to 160377 and Iranian serials 3-863 to 3-892 and 3-6001 to 3-6050; the last of the 80 built, 160378, stayed in the United States as a test bed. Deliveries ended in 1978, with Khatami at Isfahan as the main base and one squadron at Shiraz. Of the 714 Phoenixes ordered only 284 had been delivered when the new government cancelled, among other contracts, an order for 400 more.

The 1979 revolution changed everything. The United States imposed a strict embargo, many pilots and technicians followed the Shah into exile or were purged, and the new regime even considered selling the F-14s and Phoenixes back to Washington. With spares cut off at the source, by 1980 the air force was a shadow of its former self, and the embargo would have an especially severe long-term effect on the Tomcat.

The war opened on 22 September 1980 with an Iraqi air attack on six Iranian air bases and four army bases. The next day Iran hit back with Operation Kaman 99, involving 206 F-4, F-5 and F-14 aircraft, and while all 148 Phantoms and Tigers were over Iraq, 60 Tomcats were scrambled to defend Iranian airspace. According to Farzin Nadimi of the Washington Institute, the Iranians got the F-14s fully operational quickly despite the departure of the American technicians. In the opening months, with fuel and endurance to spare, Iranian fighters won most engagements; according to Tom Cooper, the F-14s scored at least 50 air-to-air victories in the first six months against MiG-21s, MiG-23s and Su-20/22s. Repeated purges gradually eroded that training edge.

The Tomcat was often used as a kind of mini-AWACS, guiding less sophisticated aircraft with its powerful radar while being kept out of harm's way, and was concentrated on the defence of Tehran and of Kharg Island, the hub of Iranian oil exports. The Iraqi high command ordered its pilots not to engage the F-14 and to stay clear whenever one was known to be operating; its presence alone was often enough to turn enemy fighters back. Shortages were constant: in the summer of 1984 Iran is estimated to have been able to fly only 15 to 20 Tomcats, maintained largely by cannibalisation, and through the war it kept "20 to 30 operational" by turning many of the rest into hangar queens that donated parts. Even so, on 11 February 1985, 25 F-14As made a mass flypast over Tehran.

The tallies vary. Based on research by Cooper and Farzad Bishop, Iran claimed at least 160 Iraqi aircraft shot down by its F-14s, including 58 MiG-23s (15 confirmed according to Cooper), 33 Mirage F1s, 23 MiG-21s, 23 Su-20/22s and nine MiG-25s, as well as five Tu-22s and several other types; most kills were made with the AIM-54A. A colonel interviewed by The Aviation Geek Club claims 16 victories in the Tomcat, eight with the Phoenix, two with the M61A Vulcan gun and one with a MIM-23 Hawk pressed into air-to-air use because of missile shortages late in the conflict; another pilot recounts dodging some twenty Matra missiles fired by the Mirage F1 escorts of a MiG-23BN formation, and the IRIAF counts seven pilots with more than six kills, mostly in the F-14, including Assadollah Adeli with five victories. On the debit side Iraq claimed more than 70 F-14s, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service estimated 12 to 16 losses, and Cooper documents three shot down by Iraqi pilots and four by Iranian surface-to-air missiles; other accounts give ten confirmed losses, four of them to Mirage F1s that ambushed several Tomcats before their presence was known. On 31 August 1986 an F-14A carrying at least one Phoenix defected to Iraq, and on 17 January 1987 another was shot down, according to some sources by a MiG-23ML. An Iranian Tomcat still downed a Mirage F1 in the spring of 1988, and General Yadollah Khalili set the record for the longest continuous fighter flight during the war: eleven hours in an F-14 with eight aerial refuellings.

Sustaining the fleet under embargo took ingenuity and smuggling. As early as 1985 eight suspects were arrested over F-14 parts stolen from the carrier USS Kitty Hawk and sent to Iran, and the embargo fed a long-running ring of brokers and front companies; one later conviction for attempting to smuggle parts cost a US citizen five years in prison and a $125,000 fine. When the US Navy retired its Tomcats in 2006 Iran sought to buy spares, and the Pentagon chose to destroy the retired aircraft so that their components could never reach the country; the Department of Defense also suspended sales of surplus parts. Even so, according to Wikipedia, Iran managed to increase its stocks of spares and its number of airworthy Tomcats significantly, though not for the weapon systems: in 2008 only seven Tomcats were combat-ready, and Combat Aircraft estimated 44 F-14s in 2009.

Missiles were the most persistent problem: Iran fired almost all its Phoenixes during the war. In 1985 Project Sky Hawk set out to adapt the I-Hawk surface-to-air missiles in its inventory to the F-14; since the Tomcat could carry only two, it was dropped, and an attempt to integrate the Russian semi-active R-27 also failed. The answer was the Fakour-90, a missile that packages the Hawk's guidance system in the Phoenix airframe, though some analysts regard it as an air-launched Hawk with AIM-54 control surfaces. Iran announced series production in October 2011, unveiled it officially in April 2017 before President Hassan Rouhani, with footage of a test firing from an F-14, and on 23 July 2018 declared it in mass production. Iranian media credit it with a range of 150 km, Mach 5 and guidance independent of the launch aircraft's radar; it has been criticised for having less range than the original Phoenix. It is carried solely by Iran's F-14s.

In October 2010 an air force commander said Iran was overhauling and optimising its aircraft and had installed Iranian-made radar systems on the F-14, and in 2012 the Mehrabad Overhaul Center delivered a Tomcat with upgraded weapon systems and locally sourced components, the configuration designated F-14AM. Russian engines and ejection seats and an anti-ship capability have also been rumoured, without confirmation.

Iran's F-14s went on doing their interceptor job. On 24 July 2002 an F-14A confronted two Azerbaijani MiG-25s threatening an Iranian P-3F over the Caspian and held one on radar until it turned away; on 17 April 2008 they flew over Tehran in the army day parade; on 26 January 2012 one crashed three minutes after taking off to intercept an intruder heading for the Bushehr nuclear plant; in November 2015 they escorted Russian Tu-95, Tu-160 and Tu-22M bombers striking targets in Syria, and on 14 May 2019 another crashed on landing at Isfahan-Shahid Beheshti Airport. The 81st and 82nd Tactical Fighter Squadrons have been assigned to the type since 1979, and the IRIAF inventory has run to as many as 25 aircraft.

According to Tom Cooper, before the 2026 war the IRIAF had a total of 10 operational Tomcats. Satellite imagery on 9 March 2026 showed at least eight F-14s destroyed at Isfahan by the Israeli air strikes of Operation Roaring Lion, after Israel had claimed first two and then three more destroyed on the ground; Cooper maintains that some of the aircraft hit were wooden decoys. Ward Carroll, a former Tomcat RIO, believes the images may show the destruction of the last operational F-14s anywhere in the world, while admitting that against an F-18 or F-35 "a Tomcat would have no chance" and that the loss would be largely symbolic. Cooper, for his part, holds that the aircraft was 20 years ahead of its time and that the saga of the Iranian Tomcat may not be entirely over.