I have seen these Starfighters twice now this year. The amazing thing I heard about them is that they are brand new. Made in 2006. It seems that Canada is the only country still licensed to make the Starfighter. There is another team of Starfighter pilots, both retired Air Force Generals I believe, who have restored two older versions. I had a chance several years ago at Oshkosh to hear General Chuck Yeager talk about his experience with the F-104. He is the one who set an altitude record with it back in the 70's of almost 120,000 feet. Of course, it did have an extra rocket engine strapped on! He said the biggest problem with the German versions was the engines they put in them. They had a much higher thrust and the compressor blades kept shattering resulting in cutting the plane in half. If that happened at low altitude you don't have much time to punch out! The other thing I never understood about the German 104's.... you could fly from one end of the country to the other (East/West back then) in less than a few minutes!
Walt On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Adam Maas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:24 AM, frank theriault > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Brian Walters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> <snip> >>> No. 6 is my favourite. I always thought that the F104 was a beautiful >>> piece of machinery. >> >> I've always loved Starfighters, too. I always thought they were just >> so cool and sleek looking - even if they had a propensity to fall from >> the sky every so often. >> >> cheers, >> frank > > Note that's a CF-104 being flown by Starfighters in that shot. > > And there's nothing unsafe about the Starfighter, it was a superb > high-altitude interceptor and was quite safe in that role. The problem > was the crazy idea that the Canadians and Germans had of using the > things as low-level strike platforms that caused most of the crashes. > heck, the CF-104's were air-to-ground only (and actually, Nuke-only > until 1972) having no air-to-air capability whatsoever. We shoulda > bought F-105's instead. > > -- > M. Adam Maas > http://www.mawz.ca > Explorations of the City Around Us. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
