Lockheed F-104: The Price of Leadership

Video from the channel SkyShips en Español about Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 22:19. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary about the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the first production fighter capable of reaching Mach 2, which traces its origin, development, service and the bad reputation that earned it nicknames such as "flying coffin" or "widowmaker".

The Korean War and the appearance of the MiG-15 convinced the Pentagon that radical solutions were needed. Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, of Lockheed, concluded that aircraft needed to fly higher and much faster, and from 1952 the company studied a lightweight single-engine aircraft for an altitude of about 20 km and at least Mach 2. That project, the L-246, won the competition in early 1953 against proposals from Republic, North American and Northrop. The XF-104 first flew in March 1954 at Edwards base, with provisional J65 engines pending the General Electric J79; both prototypes were lost during testing. The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft derived from the same fuselage, fitted with a long, sturdy wing.

It had a very thin trapezoidal wing, with leading edges about 4 mm thick, a T-tail, a length of 15 m and a wingspan of 6.7 m, and was the first user of the M61 Vulcan rotary cannon. Production aircraft received adjustable inlet cones, boundary layer control and the J79, with almost 70 kN in afterburner. The first F-104A entered service in 1958 and the aircraft set altitude records (27,811 m in 1958 and 31,513 m the following year) and a speed record (2,259 km/h). NASA used twelve examples between 1956 and 1994; in 1966 an F-104N was lost in a collision with the XB-70 Valkyrie. Its poor lift at low speed, with takeoffs and landings between 300 and 370 km/h, made it dangerous for ordinary pilots. The United States received only 296 of the more than 700 planned, but the F-104G, developed at Germany's request and built under licence, sold in the hundreds across Europe, where the accident rate and corruption scandals sank its reputation. The Italian F-104S served in Italy and Turkey until the early 21st century. 2,578 units were built, 741 of them by Lockheed.