The F-104’s safety record was, frankly, atrocious.
Lightweight. Simple. Fast. The F-104 Starfighter was designed, in a time of increasing aircraft complexity and size, to be a straightforward, single-engine rocket ship, capable of intercepting and deterring during a period fraught with geopolitical tensions.
Built by Lockheed, as one of the “Century Series” of fighters, the F-104 was built small and simple when trends in aircraft design were tilting towards large and complex. The end result was an aircraft that could fly fast and high—but which had such a concerning safety record that German pilots dubbed her the Witwenmacher, or “Widowmaker.” Let’s take a closer look at the gorgeous, but dangerous, F-104 Starfighter.
The F-104 Was Built for Speed
You can get an excellent look at an F-104 variant in the iconic film The Right Stuff. While the film doesn’t have a plot in the traditional sense, nor a traditional climax, the closest thing to a climax in the film is arguably Chuck Yeager’s joy ride in a NF-104 (the NF-104 was an F-104 modified to incorporate a rocket engine in addition to the standard GE J79 jet engine; the NF-104 was used as a high-performance astronaut trainer). The scene encapsulates the beauty and the inherent dangers of the aircraft quite well; Yeager experiences inertial coupling (uncontrolled spinning on multiple axis simultaneously) and has to bail out. He survives. The story is true and stems straight from Yeager’s own account.
The scene also gives viewers an up-close view of the Starfighter’s airframe, which was somewhat radical at the time. The fuselage is long and narrow, having been derived from the X-3 “Stiletto” and its distinctly needle-like shape. The F-104’s wings are thin and stubby, and situated further back on the fuselage than one might expect to find. The wings are also derived from the X-3 and that program’s experimentation with “low-aspect-ratio” wings—that is, thin and stubby wings which allow for low drag and high maneuverability. The wing design also bucked trends of the period, which called for swept-wing or delta-wing designs, noted for their performance, lift-generation, and storage capacity. But the F-104’s thin, straight, trapezoidal wings were deemed the best for supersonic performance—and that’s what Lockheed was after.
The Starfighter’s Safety Concerns
The F-104, with its thin fuselage and stubby wings, performs about as you might expect: fast and high-flying but with poor turning performance and high takeoff and landing speeds. Indeed, the F-104 set records for air speed, altitude, and time-to-climb in the late 1950s.
Yet, just as The Right Stuff suggests, the F-104 could be a finicky machine. The jet’s safety record was, frankly, atrocious. The West German Luftwaffe, who had received 916 Starfighters from the Americans, lost 292 aircraft and 116 pilots between 1961 and 1989. In 1975, Lockheed paid settlements to 60 widows and dependents of 32 Luftwaffe pilots who had been killed in the F-104.
Nor was West Germany the only foreign operator to have runaway safety problems with the F-104: Italy would go on to lose 37 percent of its Starfighter fleet, while Canada would lose 46 percent. Some jets are better left in the past.
About the Author: Harrison Kass
Harrison Kass is a senior defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
Image: Shutterstock / Prill.
