You're right about the ejector seat, Mark. And John's right about it's low level (in)capabilites.
It was designed as a high altitude, high speed fighter - bomber. It did that very well setting numerous altitude, climbing and speed records. I had an uncle in the RCAF who spent time in Germany in the sixties and seventies. Canadian pilots told him that the problem with German pilots and the Starfighter was that so many of them were used to "flaring out" on landing. As John said, bad idea. They had to be flown right down to the runway at relatively high speed and then hit the 'chute right away in order not to roll off the end of the runway. For whatever reason many pilots had trouble making that adjustment, much to their detriment. At low speeds they could be very hard to handle and unpredictable. At high speeds and altitude they were incredible. I'll say one thing: to my eye they were one of the most beautiful airplanes ever designed. I lived about a kilometre from the Canadair factory in Montreal when they were being made there. They literally flew over my house. There was no sound like that straight jet engine, afterburner glowing, screaming a couple of hundred feet over your head! Cheers, frank Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: >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. “Analysis kills spontaneity.” -- Henri-Frederic Amiel -- 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.
