Iran-Iraq War fighter pilots

[GoranA]

Well, the story of Iranian F-14 operation is rather complex, so this post is a bit longer …

F-14 with AIM-54 was main Iranian air defense asset. Around 80 airframes were delivered before the war, although only around 20-30 were operational at any given time– main reason being the lack of spare parts (they had to be bought on black market and smuggled to Iran).

F-14 (and other) pilots were mostly loyal to Shah and were, after the islamic revolution, moved to some unimportant posts (at best), or purged from the AF, imprisoned, some even executed.

After the Iraqi invasion they were quickly recalled back - the Airforce and Army aviation Cobras were actually the main factors in stopping the Iraqis. But this didn’t look good to Islamic regime, and they tried to marginalize the “Shah pilots”. After the war, they officially credited most of the shot downs to IRGC (Pasdaran) air defense units (they were armed mostly with guns and MANPADS and have probably shot down more Iranian than Iraqi aircraft), officially crediting Air force with only 80 kills (out of estimated 220+). Few years after the war, the Iranian authorities also managed to “accidentally” destroy most of the air force archives. The Regime also cracked down on the plots that didn’t show enough revolutionary zeal – some were imprisoned, some escaped to the West and some died in freakish accident (like Jaleel Zandi).

The USA are not much better in this regard – while they probably have enough relevant intelligence information, they are still considering them top secret. Official US line during the war was, that F-14s were not operational for the lack of spare parts, AIM-54 were sabotaged by US technicians and if occasional F-14 was filmed flying, it was probably used as a mini AWACS.

Iraqi losses are also difficult to estimate, Iraq never published (or admitted) any kind of aircraft losses. Pilot losses are well known (they are still remembered and celebrated as heroes), while aircraft loses (where the pilot survived) were not reported by unit and base commanders. Some can be calculated from delivery documentation, Desert Shield losses and later losses and aircraft found in Iraq after US occupation, but the actual cause of loss is difficult to asses.

The Iranian F14 picture started to get clearer with the publication of Iran-Iraq War in the Air by Bishop and Cooper (Osprey’s Iranian F4 and F14 are spin-offs of this book). This book was just a first step and it is based on information known an available at that time, but still contains lot of myths, speculations and unsupported claims. The quantity and quality of available data have significantly improved since then.

One of the interesting documents that surfaced few years ago is a copy of aircraft munition expenditures (on this account https://twitter.com/LTmilad but it looks like twitter doesn't archive tweets from early 2022)


Below are AA missile expenditures from that list, with my “guesstimates” for kills
AIM-7E Sparrow (194 missiles expended): ~30 F4 + few F14
AIM-9 Sidewinder (269 missiles expended): 30 F4, 20 F5, 10 F14
AIM-54 Phoenix (201 missiles expended): 100-120 F14