Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, o "fazedor de viúvas" da Força Aérea dos EUA

Video from the channel Hoje no Mundo Militar about Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 12:12. Language: Portuguese. Video type: Documentary.

The episode looks back at the history of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a very fast fighter marked by its accidents, which earned it the nickname "widowmaker".

During the Korean War, American pilots faced the MiG-15, lighter than the F-86 Sabre. Drawing on interviews with them, Kelly Johnson, Lockheed's chief engineer, conceived a lightweight supersonic fighter. The prototype flew in March 1954, and the aircraft entered service with the US Air Force on 20 February 1958. It was first an interceptor, but soon became a fighter-bomber, and in Vietnam it was used mainly for ground-support missions. The Air Force began retiring it in the second half of the 1960s. Germany bought it amid allegations of Lockheed bribery, which were repeated in Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, and which also affected other aircraft such as the L-1011 TriStar. Erich Hartmann, the greatest ace in history, openly opposed its adoption.

Its wings were small, very thin and trapezoidal, so fuel and landing gear were housed in the fuselage. Thanks to them it accelerated and climbed very well, but turned poorly. Its General Electric J79 engine produced about 15,600 pounds of thrust with afterburner and took it past 2,400 km/h. It carried a 20 mm M61 Vulcan cannon, firing more than 6,000 rounds per minute, with 725 rounds. The early downward-firing ejection seats launched the pilot downward. In Germany it suffered hundreds of accidents with more than a hundred pilots killed, and Canada lost almost half its fleet. In December 1958 it climbed to 25 km altitude in just over four and a half minutes. More than 2,570 were built, 1,122 of them F-104G, and Italy was the last to retire it, in 2004.