Last mentioned: Mar 24, 2026
Fleet Destruction
Airstrikes reportedly destroy the last operational airframes in Iran.
U.S. Retirement
The U.S. Navy retires the F-14; Iran becomes the sole operator.
Iran-Iraq War
The F-14 becomes the dominant air-to-air platform in the conflict.
Islamic Revolution
U.S. cuts off all support and spare parts for the Iranian military.
The 'Persian Cat' Deal
The Shah of Iran signs a deal for 80 F-14 Tomcats and 714 Phoenix missiles.
Recent airstrikes have reportedly eliminated the final operational F-14 Tomcats within the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force, concluding a fifty-year operational history. These aircraft were the last of their kind flying anywhere in the world following the U.S. Navy's retirement of the platform two decades ago.
This page surfaces every story mentioning F-14 Tomcat across our space & defense coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running space & defense beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where F-14 Tomcat was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |