Oops, I stand corrected. From the NASA publication "Flights of Discovery":
In the early 1980s, Dryden's assistance was sought again after the Navy lost several Grumman F-14 "Tomcat" fighters in spin incidents. The aircraft was having engine difficulties at high angles of attack, and if one engine stalled or flamed out, the asymmetric thrust from the remaining engine had a tendency to send the plane into a spin. The Tomcat had a flat spin mode that was proving very difficult to recover from and had resulted in the loss of several aircraft and crews. The Navy asked Grumman to look into the problem, and Grumman enlisted NASA's help in developing a solution. Working with Grumman, engineers at Dryden and Langley came up with a new control law that they thought might help the F-14's spin response. The new control law was then tested extensively in simulators before it was gingerly explored in flight with an F-14 loaned to Dryden for research. The flight research showed that the new control law did, in fact, make a significant improvement in the controllability of the F-14 in spins. Yet by the time the research was completed, Navy priorities had apparently changed and the control law was not implemented in fleet F-14s.
