WHAT AIRPLANE IS THIS?

The Missile with a Man in it

The time was early 1951. The rocket-powered Bell X-1 had broken the sound barrier, with a maximum speed of just 1.05 Mach (about 35 mph past the speed of sound) only 4 years ago. Most of the current jet fighters in the Air Force’s active inventory had straight wings and could reach 600 mph in level flight, but not much more. The swept-wing F-86A was in squadron service but its top speed was just over 600 mph. The 670 mph “E” model had flown but had not yet entered service and most of those were being built in Canada. The definitive F-86H model (690 mph) was still more than a year away from its first flight.

Now some idiot at the Air Force’s procurement office decided it would be a good idea to request a Mach 2 capable fighter. America’s first true supersonic fighter, the F-100A was still two years away from its first flight and now “They” wanted a fighter that would fly twice as fast!

In those days, when the Air Force asked for the impossible there was usually only one place they could get it. Since 1938 when they designed the world’s only truly capable twin-engined piston fighter, the P-38 Lightning, the special design team at Lockheed did the impossible before breakfast so they could work on “lunatic ideas” during their regular work day. Led by one of aviation’s foremost designers and team managers, C.L. “Kelly” Johnson, the Special Design Team best known as the “Skunk Works” took on the Mach 2 project.



In less than 3 years, on Match 4, 1954, the sleek silver airplane made its first flight. It looked like nothing else then airborne. The fuselage was nearly 55 ft. long. But the wingspan was only about 22 ft. and much of that was fuselage! Those tiny wings, probably only about 8 ft. on each side, were sharpened to a razor point. The wings were so sharp that ground crews had to put covers over the leading edges to prevent being cut during handling.

Ready to fly, this thing weighted nearly 28,000 lb. meaning that each square foot of wing had to lift 240 lb. Think about that wing loading next time you look at your sport RC airplane and think that 25 ounces / sq. ft. is a lot! More on wing size later.

The Starfighter, that’s the name they gave it, had many innovations. Because the wing was so thin, the main landing gear retracted into the fuselage. If not the very first, the Starfighter was one of the first jet fighters to drop the wing’s leading edge during flap deployment. When combined with the trailing edge flaps, this created an under-cambered effect, the bottom of the airfoil curved inwards toward the top of the wing, not outwards as do most symmetrical airfoils. This provided extra lift during takeoffs and landings.

But not enough extra lift. Those tiny thin wings needed still more help to get the airplane away from the ground with less than a two-mile takeoff run. So the Skunk Works invented something called Boundary Layer Control (BLC). When the flaps were lowered, 8% of the engine’s thrust was vectored out over the wing acting like airflow. This made the wing “think” it was flying faster than it really was.

With full flaps and BLC operating, the F-104 had a “sedate” touchdown speed around 150 knots, light.

But if the flaps didn’t work, meaning the BLC didn’t either, the minimum landing speed approached 300 knots. Imagine trying to control this airplane with its very narrow gear at ground speeds over 300 mph. In fact, it proved impossible to do. Therefore, the F-104 was the first airplane to “red flag” a no-flap condition. In Air Force parlance a red flag event means get your butt out of the darned thing. That’s right, if the flaps didn’t work, you had to eject.

In fact, the Starfighter had 27 red flag events, the most for any airplane of its day. If hydraulic power was lost, you got out because the air-driven backup pump required 20 seconds to develop pressure. In 20 seconds without control, the F-104 could almost reach the center of the planet. If the 14,800 lb. thrust (with afterburner) Wright XJ-65-W-6 engine stopped working, you got out. Speaking of ejecting, going by my memory only, I believe the Martin-Baker Mk GQ-7A ejection seat sent the pilot out the bottom of the airplane. If true, this gives a whole new meaning to a “zero altitude” ejection seat.

Fully loaded with four external fuel tanks, the F-104 needed almost two miles of runway to get airborne but could then fly nearly 2,000 miles without refueling. The fastest version, the “A” model, couldn’t refuel in the air but later “C” models could. But it could GO. On its first test flight, the Starfighter hit Mach 1.79. Later flights reached a top speed over Mach 2. The “A” model climbed at 56,000 ft. / min. with a service ceiling over 60,000 ft. Those are impressive numbers for its day.

The Starfighter was armed with the then new 20 mm M-61 Vulcan rotary cannon and two Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. The F-104C was used in Vietnam as a tactical fighter bomber during the early days. That must have been “exciting” for the pilot as attack speed near the ground was about 400 knots. Turns were something else as the airplane, at full speed near 50,000 ft., required several miles to make a 180-degree turn. Not much of a dogfighter.

The US Air Force used only about 350 Starfighters. But so many other countries built and used this aircraft that it has become a legend. Japan, Canada, and a European Consortium of Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands built over1,500 Starfighters and many are still in service today. About 24 countries operated, or still operate this aircraft.

There is something about this airplane’s style that says speed and excitement. Hollywood even made a movie about it called, “Starfighter” and if you can find it, buy or rent it. The plot is stupid and the acting worse, but the feature length movie has more than an hour of flying shots of this airplane in action. The movie “Right Stuff” used an F-104 as Sam Shepard’s (Chuck Yeager) “rocket” airplane.

This is legitimate since NASA used an F-104 for rocket-powered high altitude research sending the airplane up to nearly 120,000 ft. They also used it to train astronauts about landing the Space Shuttle. With power off, gear and flaps deployed and speed brakes on full, the Starfighter had a 20,000 ft. / minute descent rate. In this condition, the airplane had to be flared for landing at 15,000 ft. If the pilot pulled the flare 14,900 ft high, the airplane landed 100 ft. underground. Interesting.

Someone who shall remain nameless, except to say he was Darrell Greenmayer, built an F-104 in his backyard from junk pieces, temporarily “borrowed” a GE F-100 engine from an F-15 the Air Force left parked unattended on a Friday night, and set the Low-Altitude (under 50 ft.) World Speed Record of over 1,000 mph over the weekend. He did return the engine Sunday night, however.
In movies, legend and in truth, the Starfighter was quite an airplane.

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