We owe a debt of gratitude to the men who built the F-14 and the men who flew it.

Navy Times: Goodbye to the F-14
The Navy today is holstering the F-14 Tomcat, the top gun in its Cold War arsenal and one of the most recognizable warplanes in history...

“There’s something about the way an F-14 looks, something about the way it carries itself,” says Adm. Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations. “It screams toughness. Look down on a carrier flight deck and see one of them sitting there, and you just know, there’s a fighter plane. I really believe the Tomcat will be remembered in much the same way as other legendary aircraft, like the Corsair, the Mustang and the Spitfire.”

The Tomcat was designed in the late 1960s with one enemy in mind: the Soviet Union. Typically launched from an aircraft carrier, the Tomcat’s twin engines propelled it at twice the speed of sound. Its armaments deterred Soviet bombers designed to fire missiles at Navy ships.

“It was intended to do one thing really well,” says John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank based in Alexandria, Va. “The Soviets evidently respected it. Their answer was to build bigger and faster bombers. Fortunately, those attacks never came.”

After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, the F-14 was something of a stray cat. It had no real enemy in a world with one superpower. Eventually, the Navy armed it with precision bombs and targeting systems and added attack missions to its resume. Tomcats, with their two-member crews of a pilot and a backseat radar officer, flew missions in Desert Storm, in the Balkans and, until February, in Iraq.

After today’s ceremony, the Navy will mothball some F-14s in the Arizona desert and ship others to aviation museums. A monument at Oceana Naval Air Station will be dedicated to the 69 Tomcat aviators who were killed while flying the plane, says retired rear admiral Fred Lewis, chairman of the Tomcat Sunset Committee, a non-profit group established to organize farewell ceremonies for the F-14. “That’s the risk we all accepted when we flew the plane,” Lewis says.

The only other country still flying F-14s after today will be Iran, Pike says. Starved for spare parts, the Iranians struggle to keep them in flight. Smuggled parts will be even harder to come by after the Navy retires the Tomcat.

“Nobody will be sorrier to see them go than the ayatollahs,” Pike says.

The Navy’s last F-14s made their final cats and traps from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in July. Read Navy Times coverage, and watch video from the event.