Tag: Iran

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (III)

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (III)

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buy Lyrica in australia Part III

As beloved as the Tomcat is in many Navy aviation circles and in portions of the general public, there are a few remaining on active duty, but with a potential adversary—Iran.

Norman Polmar’s article goes into that. All I will share here is my work on the images of two of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF).

My primary source for the drawings was Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop’s Iranian F-14 Tomcat Units in Combat, #49 in the Osprey Combat Aircraft Series.

I also used a number of images from the internet, primarily from Airliners.net, which has many international contributors.

One interesting sidelight to the Iranian use of the Tomcat is their testing of U.S. Army MIM-23 Hawk missiles, provided to them during the Iran-Contra Affair, as air-to-air missiles.

This was unusual enough that I chose to include it on one of the drawings.

Here are the pair that resulted:

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (II)

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (II)

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El Oued Part II

Although the majority of the work was done in Illustrator, I did use Strata 3D for some of the smaller detail work, primarily the missiles. Drawings of the AIM-7 Sparrow III that I had were not very detailed, but good enough for the scale of the aircraft.

The drawings I had of the AIM-9 Sidewinder, however, had a surfeit of detail and therefore resulted in a better model.

The same was true for the AIM-54 Phoenix.

All too often, however, details—such as a reasonable representation of the ejection seats—are forgotten. I did not have a good 3-view of the Tom’s GRU-7A seat, but starting from an outline and referencing photographs such as the two below, I was able to at least create a flat view of the seat. It is reasonably accurate (per the photos) and good enough for the work required.

Because I wanted to the Tomcat both clean and with the gear down, canopy up, and refueling probe out, I chose two different squadrons, VF-1, the first to receive the ‘Cat, and VF-84, because they sported the classiest marks around.

I worked from about 25 photographs such as these from VF-1:

The work marks looked like this:

Before resulting in this:

I used fewer than a dozen photos from VF-84. Primarily because I did not need to look for the standard marks such as national insignia and placards. Here are a few:

They resulted in this (again pretty thin because of the standard marks):

Data block research from Koku-Fan.

And the final drawing:

Part III will be posted soon.

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (I)

Grumman F-14A Tomcat (I)

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Part I

Norman Polmar’s contribution to his Historic Aircraft series in the April 2012 issue of Naval History was one of his most ambitious. It covered three pages instead of the usual two and featured two of my illustrations. Could the F-14 Tomcat deserve anything less?

It also was the perhaps the most complex project for me because there is so much information available about the Tom. There was so much to work with that the first difficult aspect of the project was selecting a base drawing to work from. In the end, it turned out to be base drawings. I ended up with 15 folders of work that included nearly 40 base drawings and hundreds of photographs.

These are a few of my reference drawings.

I think the Japanese do some of the best line work and drew primarily on Famous Aircraft of the World Volume 83 of March 1977 and Volume 89 of September 1977. The Russians also do good work. I used a couple of their books as well. I’ve never been impressed by Kinzey’s work, most of his drawings are little detailed, but I did have his F-14 In Detail & Scale, as well as all the usual offering by Squadron Signal for generic information. Danny Coremans’s Uncovering the Grumman F-14 A/B/D Tomcat is a fantastic picture book that provides a wealth of detail information. Cannot recommend it highly enough.

Because again of time, I opted for 2D. This was a lot of fun because it forced me to work with the interaction of compound curves and light. Still not a master but the end results are acceptable.

Part II to come.

All photographs and illustrations on this site are © J. M. Caiella unless otherwise indicated.
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