Farewell to an Old Friend

For the umpteenth time this week I had been browsing airliners.net when I read something really shocking. Well it was shocking to me anyway, and it concerned the retirement of an old buddy from my childhood days - The F-14 Tomcat. Back then, she and her navy fighter pilots were my heroes, appearing on numerous TV shows (Supercarrier comes to mind) and magazines. I really thought I could fly her one day when I grew up and became a fighter pilot myself. There were days when as a kid of just 7 or 8, I would lull myself to sleep imagining how much fun it would be catapulting off a carrier over the sea and into the blue sky, safe in the cockpit of my beloved Tomcat. Alas, how differently things had turned out to be...

But if there was one thing that remained the same throughout, it was the F-14. She was and still remained to me everything a fighter jet should be: huge, powerful and armed with the best weapons there were. So here's to the Tomcat, the plane I 'flew' as a kid.