BOC: HW: OFF: Sights in Munich

[Jon Jarrett]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Eric Siegerman wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 09:41:15PM +0200, Henderson Keith wrote:
> > F-104G!  "Uh, G?  Yeah, G!  You know, Herr Minister, G...uh, G for Germany!"
>
> Of course, if they really had named it to appeal to the
> customer's vanity, it would have been the F-104D :-)

        D was taken. D was the trainer version of the USAF's
fighter-bomber version ("ground-support, interception, reconaissance,
assault and battery..."). But they really did advance it to `G' for
Germany, there was no F-104F and the E was a version of the D supplied to
Germany to go with their freshly-ordered Gs.

> > [...] there were 269 crashes and 110 pilot fatalities.
>
> Out of how many planes total; did it say?

        Um, 210 plus 255 plus 89 plus 50 plus 50 plus 137 trainers and the
30 Ds is 801. "We need seven hundred at *least*"...

        What you have to weigh against this initial wastage is that the
remainder then stayed in service another couple of decades becaue the
Luftwaffe and Marineflieger got to like the fact that you could do Mach 1
plus at nearly ground level to almost anywhere in Germany and really
there was nothing much the enemy could do about it. Things got a lot
better once they firstly got used to the plane, and secondly, fitted
British ejector seats. Why did this latter make a difference? I'll tell
you. Because the American plane was originally designed as a "fair-weather
fighter" (bit unfair; it was alsways built to carry radar and work at
night too) operating at high altitudes the ejector seat ejected downwards
and this wasn't a real problem and meant they could build much stronger
canopies and so on. Unfortunately the Luftwaffe's preferred operating
altitude was about fifty feet up... And of course the Americans made a
fuss about not fitting British seats because it was good enough for
them. Cost a good few lives did that.

> Canada had a bunch of CF-104's (a further-"improved" version of
> the -G; go figure!).  The Royal Canadian Air Force's web site
> gives this alarming statistic:
>
> > About 110 CF-104/CF-104Ds were lost in accidents, out of 239
> > delivered -- a loss rate of no less than 46 percent.
>
> Yikes!

        Again, these aircraft were in service nearly thirty years; that's
a long time for a warplane. Their loss rate per year was never anything
like the Luftwaffe's, which was appalling.

> The last of them were decommissioned in 1986 -- and sold to
> Turkey...

        Turkey are still buying them up, mostly from Italy now, where they
are still the front-line interceptor (back to the original
function). Neither country has much problem with them. They'll do
Mach 2 and carry long-range missiles, this is all people want in an
interceptor it seems... Yours,
                                Jon

--
"I recognise that I have transgressed many of the precepts of the divine
law, and that I am subjected by various vices and iniquities, disobedient
to the words of the divine mystery brought unto me and a worshipper of the
delights of this military age." Marquis Borrell of Barcelona, 955 A.D.

             (Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College London)