Submitted by TEAM Public Affairs

NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, Patuxent River, Md. – The F-14 program office has won the prestigious Hammer Award for their work on extending the service life and enhancing the combat capability of the F-14 Tomcat.

The Fatigue Life Initiative program, a partnership with Northrop Grumman and the talents of the F-14 technical team, has saved the taxpayers millions of dollars and redefined the way that fatigue life is tracked for F-14 and potentially for other high performance Navy aircraft.

"I’ve never been prouder of the talented people we have working in PMA-241," said Capt. Ted Carson, PMA-241 program manager. "The F-14 program team has taken a near idle, aging Cold War relic and transformed it into a combat proven world class precision strike fighter."

The team embarked upon an innovative and risky 18-month program to redefine the assumptions and methodology by which fatigue life is determined for the F-14.

Through an investment of $10 million in program funds and the establishment of a specialized government/contractor team, an unprecedented state-of-the-art fatigue analysis effort was conducted. This exhaustive program defined new methods for controlling data quality, refined and updated existing fatigue life algorithms, validated fatigue test assumptions through extensive flight test, and generally overhauled Navy fatigue tracking methodology as applied to the F-14 aircraft.

The end result was a increase of 26 percent in F-14A life and a 16 percent in F-14B/D life, and a corresponding real cost savings of more than $268 million in budgeted structural modification and overhaul funds.

This represents a 27:1 return on investment for the taxpayers across the remaining life of the F-14 aircraft and provides significantly enhanced combat readiness for the fleet through improved aircraft availability.