The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is arguably the most dramatic and divisive Cold War fighting machine. Conceived in the early 1950s by one of the airplane design legends, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the Starfighter was designed to address an escalating crisis: to allow a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor to catch up with Soviet bombers before they reached their target. Produced during the Cold War era of the space race, the Starfighter was the decade’s obsession with speed, altitude, and technological dominance. A revolutionary plane in its time, the F-104 was.
The first production aircraft to reach Mach 2 level, its needle-thin wings and teardrop-shaped, streamlined body made of aerodynamically honed metal made it nicknamed “the missile with a man in it.” Its speed was all about the General Electric J79 engine that delivered gargantuan thrust and enabled the plane to set records. One of the Starfighters had been flown at Mach 2.5 at 92,000 feet back in 1962, an achievement that went far to show how much flight had come along in the last decade. But the same strengths that made the F-104 such a speedster also made it a tough airplane to fly.
The short, narrow wings that cut through the air so efficiently at high speed created little lift for the airplane when landing and taking off. Pilots operated at extremely high airspeeds just to be cautious, with little leeway for error. Low-speed flight was crude, and the jet was temperamental and tolerated sloppy pilots. Its high-power plant made it that much more troublesome. Control of thrust at critical phases of flight took much skill, and its early iterations of electric flight controls were stubborn. When they did fail, they always failed fatally. Success or failure hung in the balance of a knife-edge for most pilots, particularly those who were not familiar with the airplane’s quirks.
Thus, the Starfighter gained a tarnished reputation. It was accident-prone, and it soon earned grisly nicknames such as “Widowmaker,” “Death Tube,” and “Flying Coffin.” So great was the danger of flying one of these machines that it taxed the technology, but it expected flawless performance of the pilots. The F-104 was a lesson in the dangers of overuse of raw performance to the detriment of survival for its crews. Despite this, the Starfighter was taken up by all air forces.
West Germany entered NATO in 1955 and chose the Starfighter to arm its new fighter. There were problems within the program, ranging from a production delay to early crashes, but these were met by Lockheed with technical support and special training programs.
It was utilized as the Starfighter Utilization Reliability Effort (SURE) to improve safety and maintenance, and additional training for pilots reduced the rate of accidents over the years. The F-104 had a sensational and phenomenal career. It was used by the U.S. Air Force from 1958 to 1969, was used in crises such as the Taiwan Strait crisis, and was then used in combat in the Vietnam War.
After retiring from active United States duty, it continued to serve with the Air National Guard and subsequently with NASA, whose speed and altitude capabilities made it a suitable vehicle for testing and research. It was flown in 14 nations outside the United States, with the last such nation, Italy, retiring the aircraft in 2004. Starfighter’s heritage is multifaceted.
On the positive side, it took jet aerodynamics to the limit and set the stage for its successors to deliver top-of-the-world performance. On the negative side, its accident rate compelled military planners and engineers to confront unpleasant realities in terms of balanced design, hard systems, and hard pilot training.
Those are lessons that have become part of the culture of military aviation since then. To this day, the Starfighter is still not extinct. Aside from appearances on air shows and museums, there are even some that remain in flight as research testbeds.
One of the various companies utilizing them for aerospace research and development is Starfighters International, which goes to show that, in spite of more than half a century now elapsed since its maiden flight, the F-104 remains an asset to innovation.
The history of the F-104 Starfighter is the ultimate story of ambition and cost. It was a fighter that combined the brains and the gamble of Cold War flight. Its legacy is not its victories nor its losses, but the lasting impact it has had on the design, operation, and concept of today’s daughters.