John Francis <[email protected]> wrote: >On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 07:27:02AM +0000, Chris Mitchell wrote: >> Yep, I thought "Starfighter" when I saw it. I recall that it was >> dogged by safety issues . . . > >Many (possibly even most) of which were caused by pilots >insufficiently familiar with the aircraft, or operating >with payloads and/or flight conditions beyond what the >manufacturer specified. The F104 wasn't designed for use >as a terrain-hugging low-level strike aircraft. > >A lot of the incidents were with F-104s operated by the >German units, not the USAF.
IIRC, the big safety issue was with the early versions of the F-104. At the time it was introduced there wasn't an ejector seat that the designers were confident could clear the high-mounted tail plane. So the first versions of the aircraft had a *downward-firing* ejector seat. The idea in the case of a low-altitude emergency was to roll 180° before ejecting. Unfortunately, the F-104 had a very poor roll rate with a dead engine and also tended to drop like a stone... Later versions had a conventional upward-firing ejector seat. -- 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.
