"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 17:12:58 -0500, "John Carrier"
wrote:

The F-18 and particularly the F-18E/F has significantly better high alpha
capability than the F-14.


I'd read that in flight testing the Tomcat they flew at 60 and even 90
degrees AOA and that the AOA limitations were mainly due to the crappy
TF30. Are the B&D any better or is it indeed an airframe limitation?

The F-14 has great pitch rate (more or less equal to the F-18). But it will
take that big bite and then stop flying, it can't sustain the very high
alpha. There's video somewhere of the test program in which they take the
aircraft to somewhere near 90 degrees alpha, but it's momentary and they
really couldn't do much with it after the pitch pulse except recover.

You could enter a split S in the F-14 at 300 knots in full a/b and slap the
stick into your lap. The airplane would give you about 90 degrees of pitch
almost instantly, the airspeed would decelerate to about 120 knots just as
quickly. Then you had to unstall the tails to pull through the rest of the
maneuver ... it wasn't at anywhere near 90 degrees alpha (maybe 25 or so?
AOA gauges are calibrated in units which rarely reflect true alpha in
degrees).

While the TF-30 engines were pretty poor, it was not a function of honoring
their limitations. Purely a matter of aerodynamics.

R / John