Aging Tomcat Jet Makes Last Runs Over Iraq

MANAMA, Bahrain -- The Navy's F-14 Tomcat, a Cold War-era fighter jet emblazoned in the public's imagination as Tom Cruise's sleek ride in the movie "Top Gun," is beginning its final weeks of combat sorties over Iraq before being retired from the U.S. arsenal.

A pair of Navy squadrons with the last 22 operational Tomcats are flying bombing and strafing runs on insurgent targets in Iraq, jetting off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which departs the Persian Gulf for its base in Virginia early next year.

By next fall, Navy pilots will have switched to the smaller, more reliable and easier to fly F-18 Hornet, said Cmdr. Jim Howe, deputy commander of the Roosevelt's F-14 squadrons.

"It's a bittersweet time for all the Tomcat people," Howe, 38, of Pittsburgh, told The Associated Press by telephone from aboard the Roosevelt. "The powers that be figured it was time to put it to rest."

Despite the dogfighting flash of the 1986 film, in real life the Tomcat _ a big two-seater with signature retractable wings _ was so tough to fly and maintain that it became known as the "turkey," Howe said.

The first squadron of Tomcats screamed across the skies in 1971 after rolling off Grumman's assembly line in Bethpage, N.Y.

The jets were considered a major coup in the U.S.-Soviet arms race, carrying up to six Phoenix air-to-air missiles that could be fired simultaneously and guided to six separate targets.

The Pentagon envisioned the F-14 defending carrier groups against fleets of Soviet bombers, said Rear Adm. John W. Miller, a former Tomcat radar operator who is deputy commander of Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain.

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