Word: tomcats
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Initially, the Navy placed great weight on the detection of a so-called Mode II IFF (identification, friend or foe) signal from the approaching aircraft that identified it as an F-14 Tomcat jet fighter. Although crew members on the Vincennes CIC claimed to have seen this military signal, tape recordings show only a Mode III code, which is used by both civilian and military aircraft...
Except, of course, that the plane identified by the Vincennes as a 62-ft.- long F-14 Tomcat fighter turned out to be a 177-ft.-long Iran Air Airbus carrying 290 civilians on a regularly scheduled flight to Dubai on the other side of the gulf. As a horrified world last week watched the pictures of torn bodies displayed by Iran on TV screens, questions mounted. Outside Iran, hardly anyone seemed to doubt that the shootdown had been a genuine mistake. But how could so sophisticated and costly ($600 million a copy ) an intelligence-and-weapons system...
...Sahand and the Sabalan, fired on American reconnaissance aircraft, U.S. warships went after them. A Harpoon missile launched by the U.S. destroyer Joseph Strauss hit the Sahand. The missile, delivered from a distance of 20 miles, blew a hole in the Iranian vessel's hull. An F-14 Tomcat from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise in the Strait of Hormuz delivered a laser-guided cluster bomb that disabled the * Sabalan. Even though the Sabalan was the ship that had been targeted to be sunk by the Navy because of its frequent attacks on merchant ships in the gulf, Carlucci...
...skirmish in the skies marked the first encounter between U.S. and Iranian forces since Khomeini took power in 1979. The incident occurred while a U.S. P-3 Orion reconnaissance plane and two F-14 Tomcat fighters were flying over the Persian Gulf toward Oman. Suddenly two aging F-4 Phantom jets rose up from Iran's Bandar Abbas air base, near the Strait of Hormuz, and streaked toward the American planes. The Iranians kept coming even after two more Tomcats swept down from a higher altitude and tried to warn them off by radio. One of the Tomcat pilots ordered...
Only a few at the topmost levels of U.S. policymaking had foreseen how Veliotes would get his wish. More than 30 hours after the seagoing hijack drama had ended, a flight of four F-14 Tomcat fighter-interceptors from the aircraft carrier Saratoga pulled alongside a chartered EgyptAir Boeing 737 jetliner just south of the Mediterranean island of Crete. The Egyptian aircraft had left Cairo's Al Maza military airport 1 hour and 45 minutes earlier, apparently headed for Tunis. Aboard it were the hijackers, accompanied by two representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a number of Egyptian diplomats...