De lo Más PELIGROSO de Volar - F-104 Starfighter

Video from the channel Mundo de Aviación about Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 11:52. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

Spanish-language documentary on the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, conceived as a day fighter and converted in the early 1960s into an all-weather multirole aircraft, and on the bad reputation its accidents gave it.

Kelly Johnson, at Skunk Works, started from what the Korean War pilots who had faced the MiG-15 asked for: a small, simple, fast aircraft capable of flying high. In 1952 his team studied more than a hundred configurations and chose a roughly 5,400 kg design with a single engine, the General Electric J79. The two prototypes used the J65; the first flew on 4 March 1954 and the second was lost weeks later during gunnery trials. After 17 pre-production YF-104As, the first production F-104A entered service on 28 January 1958. Germany requested a fighter-bomber and reconnaissance version, the F-104G, which it manufactured together with Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy; Canada also built it, for a total of 2,578 units. It was operated by 15 countries, with Italy the last to retire it, in 2004.

Its very thin trapezoidal wing forced fuel and landing gear into the fuselage; it had a T-tail and a boundary-layer control system that cut landing speed by more than 30 knots. It reached 2,459 km/h, but was limited to Mach 2 because of J79 overheating. It had seven hardpoints for 1,800 kg of weapons and a 20 mm M61 Vulcan cannon, of which it was the first carrier. In Vietnam it flew 2,937 combat sorties. Lockheed's bribery scandals tarnished its export sales, and the Luftwaffe lost 292 of its 916 aircraft and 116 pilots between 1961 and 1989.