Goodbye, F-14 Tomcats!

AP: 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."
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The Navy's Tomcat pilots will be retrained to fly two versions of the Hornet, the two-seat F-18F and the one-seat F-18E, Howe said. Most remaining F-14s eventually will be mothballed in the desert on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz.

The Tomcat isn't the oldest combat jet in the U.S. arsenal. The B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which entered service in 1954 and still blasts targets in Afghanistan, wins that honor.

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