From Wikipedia on the F-15:
“The
United States Air Force selected McDonnell Douglas's design in 1967 to meet the service's need for a dedicated air superiority fighter. The Eagle first flew in July 1972, and entered service in 1976.”
So the F-15 took five years from contract to first flight and four more to get it into production.
Grumman was selected for the contract award in January 1969. First flight was achieved in December of 1970. A remarkable two year achievement. Well, maybe not so remarkable ...
From Wikipedia on the F-111 and F-14:
“Lacking experience with carrier-based fighters, in 1962 General Dynamics teamed with Grumman for the assembly and testing of the F-111B aircraft. In addition, Grumman would also build the F-111A's aft fuselage and the landing gear.”
“With the F-111B program in distress, Grumman began studying improvements and alternatives. In 1966, the Navy awarded Grumman a contract to begin studying advanced fighter designs.”
So the reality is that Grumman started on the F-14 design four years before first flight, and borrowed a great deal from the F-111 design and development three years before that.
Back to FARA. If first flight is to occur in 2023, that means there is only 33 months remaining to design and build a near production aircraft. Adding to schedule and manpower hurdles, both Sikorsky and Bell are working on FLARA production designs, and the country is in the middle of a pandemic.
Should be easy, right?
Although Grumman did benefit from the F-111B, the F-14 was not just a revised F-111B, it was a new design that shared some common concepts with it. For example, like the F-111 it had a variable sweep wing, but it was a new design. Just look at the way they did the pivot points. BTW, four of the submitted designs also featured variable sweep wings. Everyone was working on new designs because it was obvious the F-111B was not going to be able to handle the air superiority, escort or attack roles. The Navy's basic wants were finalized in November of 1967 after discussion with a number of companies, not just Grumman, and they received permission to go forward with the solicitation in June of 1968 (everything was faster then!). The thing that really accelerated everything was the 1967 Domodedovo air show., so everyone would have had to meet the same schedule. I might point out that if the F-111B helped Grumman a tremendous amount, then certainly it would have helped GD even more since it was their design, but they never even made it to the final cut. The other finalist was MDD.
Grumman, like everyone else was sniffing for a contract for some time. They figured there would be a need for a new Navy true fighter but so did everyone else except GD itself. Seven years before the F-14's first flight puts it a year before the F-111A's first flight and almost two years before the F-111B, so at that point they didn't realize yet just how much trouble was coming. I might point out that the F-15 was also developed with what we would call remarkable speed, just not so much. This is not unique to these planes. For CVNs, from contract award to having a ship in the ready for tests we could have one every four years (even faster before we had to dedicate the only dock big enough to RICOH instead of also using it alongside the other dock for construction). However, because of the way we run these programs, it takes at least seven. The Ford situation is hopefully unique and illustrates the problem when your expertise ages out. Same thing is starting to happen to the Virginias.
Using the FLRAA, back in 2015 Bell said they thought they could achieve LRIP/IOC with what would be the V-280 by 2025 with an aggressive program, I believe Sikorsky implied the same. We're looking, though, at at least four more years beyond that. This for a craft that we've already been working on this for at least five years and the first of the two finalists flew 2 1/4 years ago. I fear that anything that takes this long runs the risk of being delayed to the point where it just withers away. I also fear what stretching these out does to our industrial expertise base. So you can see why I'm not a fan of stretching out FARA. The requirements are not that big a push beyond wat we have now as so we should move on it soonest. There's also the consideration that if we add two years to FARA, we run into the possibility of its funding spike starting to overlap that of FLRAA, which could be a big problem for both of them in getting to production.