Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Had to laugh What was the F104 good for?

The Germans flew them for a long time. I saw a German fly one under a highway bridge somewhere around Wurzburg during REFORGER82 and thought that he was one crazy MOFO!

That is underselling it a bit. It was a legit Mach 2.2 -2.3 aircraft limited only by the engine overheating and damaging the turbine blades.

Trust a pilot to nit-pick!

I don't think the Lightening really came of age until the early to mid 60's after they upgraded the engines, strengthened the nose cone and changed the design of tail...

I have to say the F104 certainly looked the part although Kelly may have been too influenced by his kids lawn darts! lol

The Lightening on the other hand looked like a design exercise in brute force!

That said, it was rated to do aerobatics, and apparently handled well....

Re that picture of the German Kommet, following the war, the Saunders Roe produced their own updated version the SR 53, but with a jet engine over a rocket engine, plus proper under carriage



Although a couple of prototypes got to the flying stage by 1957,
the advent of planes like the Lightening and the F104 more or less killed the project.

Guineas always had some on the ramp at NAS Sigonella in the early 80s. I remember the "blade protector" over the leading edge of the wings. SOB had a landing speed close to 180 KTS.

I also remember those rubber leading edge guards! If you bumped your head on the wing of an F-104 it would split your scalp.

For a long time, the 104 had the nickname of "Missile with a man in it."

Got intercepted by one in the Adriatic once. My pilot looked over at me and said "what the hell is that". He said the same thing about an RAF Nimrod we had tanked off of a few months prior. He just selected for Admiral.

Wasn't it also called the "Widow Maker?"

I'll stay with Mach 1.7 since pushing the envelope past 2 and having serious gremlins manifest themselves isn't anything to brag about, sorta like blowing a rifle case while claiming stars wars velocity.

Yeah, but the F 104 was capable of sustained Mach 2 flight. It wasn't pushing the envelope.

It was designated as a daytime interceptor - at which it was good. Then to increase sales attractiveness, it became an everything fighter/bomber - at witch it was horrible. Beautiful plane though.

Yes, as was the Martin B-26. With it short small wings, ti as easy to stall. With it's downward ejection seat (in the Us versions). a pilot would be ejected into the ground if he ejected on landing.

Killing pilots that stalled the plane trying to land. The big single engine had slow response time and cut power too much on approach and it fell out of the sky like a rock before they could get the power back. I don't know what the glide ratio for it was but it had to be right there with a rock.

Statistics say plenty of widows would probably disagree. 104's in their SEA years saw plenty of problems and not at Mach 2 speeds.

Yes, there is a big difference between what a plane can do and what it can do safely in a sustained manner ie operationally, with a "normal" pilot, not a even more highly skilled test pilot...

I know the original Lightening need a number of modifications before it was rated of continued operational use above Mach2....

Only some of the F-104A's had the downward ejecting seat. By 1960 they were being retrofitted with the C-2 upward seat and the rest of "A" model production and all the models had a standard upward seat. Not a zero zero seat still it was better than the downward seat.

Operational and sustainable are apples and oranges in the combat environment.The 104's comparatively short deployment in SEA was testament that its combat role was totally outside most design parameters.The AF would have done well by capitalizing on strength rather than weakness and used its speed strictly in RF mode.

That's the point. You were probably safer in a F 104 at Mach 2 than trying to land it.

Except that after getting to Mach 2 you were then so short of go juice that you had to land pronto - and had only one shot at it before you ran out.

Only the Air Force would designed downward ejection seats. Might as well been forward firing and use them as a last resort ordnance!

If you want your mind blown, consider that the F 104 made its first flight a mere nine years after WW II. It was a Mach 2 aircraft with speed and climb specs that would be respectable today in a fighter.

So much if that stuff was cutting edge and beyond at the time. The high tail was necessitated to counter the effects of inertial coupling and all that which mandated the downward ejection seat because none of the existing seats could clear the tail and so on and so forth.

As a simple fighter-interceptor that would have made one pass and sped away from everyone and everything, it probably would have been pretty effective. But that, of course, was not what really any Air Force wanted and it ended up doing all kinds of roles for which it was never intended. And where it actually engaged in combat in places like Pakistan and India, its pilots allowed it to get sucked into low speed turning fights where it was never meant to be.