By ALIN HETT
Hays Post
WAKEENEY—The F-14 Tomcat Association is bringing together naval aviation veterans, volunteers and aviation enthusiasts for an unusual restoration project centered on a retired Grumman F-14 Tomcat that is on display in WaKeeney.
The F-14 carries a direct personal link to one of its most experienced participants, Rear Admiral for the U.S. Navy, Hamlin Tallent, callsign “Ham.”
Tallent, a former U.S. Navy aviator and instructor in the Top Gun training pipeline in San Diego, said he not only taught fighter tactics, but also flew the very aircraft now being restored. He logged 11 flights in the jet during his time in squadron service.
Tallent said the fighter jet itself was once part of VF-213, better known as the Black Lions, a squadron Tallent said will be honored in the restoration with markings planned for the fuselage. The association also intends to paint “154” on the tail, reflecting its squadron identity and service history.
"I checked my log book to see, and when I was in Fighter Squad 154, sure enough, we had this airplane in the squad at that time," Tallent said.
Tallent said his naval career also included flying the F-4 Phantom into Germany years earlier, adding to a long operational background in carrier aviation and Cold War-era deployments.
His time as an instructor at Top Gun, Tallent said, reinforced his respect for the maintainers who kept fighter aircraft ready for flight, a perspective that has taken on new meaning while working directly on the grounded jet.
“You never do this,” Tallent said of pilots performing hands-on maintenance. “When you are down underneath this thing, sanding, you really are thinking about those guys.”
The fighter jet being restored is demilitarized, with engines, weapons systems, cockpit equipment removed and its wings fixed in place. Even so, volunteers and veterans have spent weeks sanding, masking and preparing the jet for repainting.
Tallent said the restoration has drawn participants from across the country, including veterans and teenagers who heard about the effort online who arrived from as far as South Carolina and West Virginia to lend a hand.
Tallent said originally, the jet was recovered from a reserve base in Ohio and transported to WaKeeney through a complicated permitting process that required rerouting across multiple states.
The project is being promoted locally by the WaKeeney Travel and Tourism Department, which has helped coordinate attention and community support for the effort. Lynelle Shubbert, director of the department, said the restoration represents the culmination of roughly 15 years of planning. She also said the work is tied to preserving the aircraft after it was damaged in a hailstorm almost eight years ago.
It is worth noting that this F14 Tomcat was actually featured in the 1986 movie Top Gun, shown on the deck of an aircraft carrier in some of the film’s most iconic aviation scenes.
Those sequences helped define the visual identity of naval fighter aviation for an entire generation, putting the Grumman F-14 Tomcat on the global stage and turning it into one of the most recognizable military aircraft ever filmed.
Now grounded on jacks with its tires deflated and its systems stripped, the F-14 remains a static display, but it is, as Tallent said, a reminder of the people, pilots, maintainers and now volunteers, who have kept the legacy of naval aviation alive long after the engines were shut down.