Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter is the most iconic—and ill-fated—Cold War aircraft of them all. Conceived in the early 1950s by design legend Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the Starfighter was created to address a straight-out mandate: a high-altitude, high-speed interceptor to outspeed long-range bombers. Speed and technology were not niceties in those times; they were survival tools.
State-of-the-art from nose to tail, the F-104 set a new standard when it became history’s first Mach 2 fighter to cruise. With pencil-slender wings and a pencil-thin, short fuselage, it was affectionately known as “the missile with a man on board.” With the General Electric J79 engine, a behemoth motor that propelled the Starfighter to record altitude, it was only to be expected. In 1962, an F-104C was pushed to an operating altitude of 92,000 feet at Mach 2.5—a demonstration of how much it could stretch the flight envelope.
But the very same attributes that rendered the Starfighter so newsworthy gave it deadly bite. Those brief wings, so aggressively trimmed for the supersonic, translated to the aircraft’s vicious low-speed handling. The flyers pushed the airplane into high airspeeds, and the landing and takeoff procedures became ominously perilous.
Its awe-inspiring engine, so ferociously engineered, would eventually have to be flown by experts. The novel electrically powered system, though cutting-edge, was sometimes bizarre at best. A single glitch for one pilot took it to hair’s breadth margins.
Add to this the weather of the day—most pilots soon to be converted to the F-104 were accustomed to flying slower aircraft and not fully schooled in how to handle its quirks. The result was a string of crashes soon morbidly dubbed as “Widowmaker” and “Flying Coffin.” Its safety record was the bitter reminder of the ability to get ahead of preparation.
But the Starfighter wound up far and away with the air forces of allies. West Germany, to modernize as it joined NATO, embraced the F-104 as its front-line intercepter. Early service life was rough, but Lockheed sent technicians into the cockpits to ride with German crews and undertook such programs as the Starfighter Utilization Reliability Effort (SURE) in an effort to encourage maintenance and reliability. Its training, too, came to flourish, lowering the accident rates and in believing in the virtue of combining high-technology equipment with such excellent training.
Operationally, also, the F-104’s existence was as flamboyant as its appearance. It was flown by the United States Air Force from 1958 through the late 1960s, and saw combat in both the Taiwan Crisis and Vietnam.
When it was retired from front-line U.S. duty, it also lingered in the skies with the Air National Guard and even NASA, which employed the Starfighter as a test bed. Globally, 14 countries operated the aircraft, and it remained in service much longer abroad. Italy only retired its last military Starfighters in 2004, half a century after the airplane first entered service.
The Starfighter has a checkered history. It created the jet-fighter look, establishing the design standard for its predecessors. It also created a safety record that made commanders question whether raw performance was more valuable than pilot survivability. The F-104’s lessons—greater system reliability, better training, and hard-nosed risk management—are relevant to aviation today.
The Starfighter is not lost to the ages even now. Museums and air shows have kept it alive, and companies like Starfighters International bought unflown-surviving aircraft and refurbished them as flying testbeds for technology testing and research, flying out of the Kennedy Space Center. So the “man in a missile” continues to contribute his share towards making aerospace history.
The F-104 career was an epic of brave vision, costly mistakes, and lasting impact. It is a lesson that in the air, progress is ever one step ahead of risk, and the secret is trying to guess which recipe.
