THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 30, 1996 TAG: 9603300269
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
The Navy has again stepped up restrictions on most of its fleet of F-14 Tomcat fighters, telling air crews not to use the afterburners until its probe of a crash off Southern California on Feb. 18 is completed.
Investigators looking at engines recovered this week from that crash have said they may have sustained burns through their afterburners' titanium liners - a problem the Navy has known about since 1992 and believed it had fixed.
The afterburners, which give the jets added thrust from additional fuel that is pumped into the engines, still can be used in emergencies, according to the latest directive. And they can be used if a pilot finds himself in combat, one official said.
But until the probe is complete and additional engineering analysis is conducted, the Navy wants to restrict use of the afterburners, said Cmdr. Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force, headquartered in Norfolk.
The readiness of the F-14 fleet has not been affected, the Navy insisted. The aircraft can still fly at supersonic speeds.
``It just takes a little longer to get there,'' said one officer.
Both the ``B'' and ``D'' models, which use the General Electric 110 engines, are restricted, the Navy said. The earlier, less powerful ``A'' models are not restricted because they use a different engine.
The F-14s assigned to the carrier George Washington, on deployment in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, are ``B'' models. They do not need to use their afterburners on takeoff.
The Feb. 18 crash, in which both crewmen died, involved a ``D'' model and was the third for an F-14 in less than a month. On Jan. 29, an F-14A crashed after takeoff near Nashville, Tenn., killing both aviators, and three civilians on the ground. On Feb. 22, an F-14B flying from the carrier Nimitz in the Persian Gulf crashed into the sea. Both crewmen were rescued.
That brought to 32 the number of F-14s that have been destroyed over the past five years.
The Navy ordered a three-day halt to F-14 flights after the Feb. 22 crash in order to conduct a series of safety briefings.
The Navy never has found a single, common cause of F-14 accidents. Pilots have complained that the earlier F-14A engines were underpowered. Three years ago, the Navy carried out upgrades to keep the afterburners on some F-14Bs from melting through their linings, an occurrence that could cause the craft to disintegrate in midair.
In a report on a 1993 F-14 crash off Kitty Hawk, N.C., released to the public just last month, the Navy acknowledged that it was aware of afterburner liner burn-through as a potential problem as early as 1992.
Investigators said the 1993 tragedy could have been prevented.
The afterburner liner on the jet's starboard engine burned through its titanium casing, melting hydraulic lines and destroying the horizontal stabilizer and rudder controls.
Molten titanium sprayed throughout the engine bay, melting fasteners ``in a blowtorch-type fashion,'' said investigators.
The result was ``near-instantaneous aircraft structural breakup, incapacitation of the air crew and probable separation of ejection seats from the cockpit,'' investigators concluded.
The investigators recommended that afterburner use be restricted until new liners were installed. That action was completed by September 1995, the report said.
All of the three most recent crashes involved West Coast-based F-14s. No East Coast F-14 - all of which are based at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach - has experienced any such accidents.
The Navy will be moving all of its F-14s to Oceana within the next year under a consolidation move.
The F-14 Tomcat, a two-seat, twin-engine craft, has been the Navy's workhorse carrier-based fighter since the early 1970s. Its role is to seek out and attack enemy aircraft that might threaten a carrier battle group. The plane is no longer in production, and the 336 remaining fighters are to be phased out by the year 2010. The most recent craft cost from $35 million to $38 million each. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Navy investigators are looking at whether, in some engines, the
afterburners' titanium liners can be burned through.
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY F-14 CRASH ACCIDENT by CNB