CRASH SPURS NAVY TO GROUND TOMCATS.

Byline: Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

For the third time in a month, a U.S. Navy F-14 "Tomcat" fighter has crashed, this time in the Persian Gulf, and the Navy has ordered all of the notoriously challenging jets to stop flying for a three-day safety review.

The two-man crew survived the crash, ejecting into the northern waters of the gulf, and was rescued and returned to the carrier Nimitz.

The glamorous but dangerous F-14 is a supersonic, two-seat, swing-wing jet that can track up to 24 targets and attack six at a time with its sophisticated weapons systems. The Navy's premier fighter, it starred in the movie "Top Gun."

But the Tomcat has a history of problems - from a flight-control system that reportedly caused deadly flat spins to a tendency for engine stalls at low speed.

The spins were blamed for the deaths of six aviators in 31 crashes between 1976 and 1993, and an engine stall was blamed, in part, for the October 1994 death of Kara Hultgreen, one of the Navy's first female combat carrier pilots.

In 1993 the Navy said it would spend $78 million through the year 2000 to correct the mechanical flight-control system that was suspected of causing the spin crashes. A contract had been awarded to a British firm to do the work, and the first F-14 with the new system was scheduled to fly in 1994.

Lt. Conrad Chun, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, said Thursday he did not know the status of that work, or even if it had ever been done.

Navy officials said that during the shutdown, special engineers and other safety experts would review the evidence available from the three recent crashes and inspect the rest of the fleet for defects in the planes, in their maintenance, or in pilot training.

Earlier models of the fighter, called the F-14A, were plagued with engine problems when they entered the Navy's fleet of carrier-based jet fighters in 1973. Specifically, the engines used on the first model were not powerful enough for a fighter of its size.

The engines installed in later models, the F-14B and the F-14D, were more powerful and have proved more reliable. Despite the troubles of the F-14 fleet, the rate of accidents among all Navy fighter planes has come down dramatically in recent years, a record that has made the recent spate of crashes all the more alarming.

The latest crash happened about 3:30 a.m. PST Thursday when the $38 million, 32-ton F-14A, operating off the USS Nimitz, plunged into the water of the northern gulf.

On Sunday, an F-14D, operating off the carrier USS Carl Vinson, crashed into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, killing its pilot and radar intercept officer. Their bodies were recovered from the water shortly after the crash.

Twenty days before, on Jan. 29, a Navy F-14 crashed into a residential neighborhood in Nashville, Tenn., moments after takeoff, killing the two crewmen and three people on the ground.