Great vids in this thread - the Italian model Gscholz posted, a friend of mine that runs the website "The Aviationist" is x Italian air force and has written a great book about Italian F104s, and has a lot of great articles on his site too. Book here - https://theaviationist.com/2010/03/10/italian-starfighters-eng/
A favorite of mine as well, the CF104 was a fighter the RCAF flew here for a long time for better and worse. Norway, Denmark, and Turkey all flew Canadair 104s in their fleets as well. The first model I built which I did a decent job on was a Tiger Meet CF104, and it's still my favorite.
It had the rep of the "widowmaker" in the Canadian media too - 110 major class accidents in the 25 years the RCAF flew it, but it did do the job during the cold war, with a lot of Canadian squadrons forward deployed in Germany/etc. Considering that the predecessor F86 in only 12 years of flying had over 250 major class accidents for the loss of 3x more pilots than the F104, the title IMO while sort of fair considering 1/2 the airplanes built were lost, wasn't completely accurate considering past fighter losses, and that 1/3 of the pilots killed in the F104 when compared to the 100+ in the F86.
Fantastic plane to see at airshows, for sure. The CF5 is the only other fighter Canada has built and flown in great numbers during the cold war. It was a great low level attack performer, taken from Wiki, but I've read this quote many places before -
- and, it was a rocket on the deck, again, the air shows it would put on largely consisted of very, very high speed passes, which were always a good time.
Theaviationist is one of my favorite aviation related news sites as well. Usually quite balanced and objective journalism.
No. 637 is a CF-104D two-seater, built in your great country. We had two squadrons operating Starfighters; 331 Sqd. flew the F-104G while 334 Sqd. flew the CF-104. 334 Sqd. lost four jets; two were controlled flight into terrain, one loss of control at low alt, and one engine failure. 331 Sqd. suffered far more with nine losses. Six of those were due to malfunctions or loss of control.
The F-104 was very unforgivable. It could not be landed safely without its blown flaps and boundary layer systems working. This meant that with any engine malfunction resulting in loss of thrust, any problems with the flaps, any problem with the boundary layer system, the only option for the pilot was ejecting. Add to that the fact that the 104 was prone to accelerated stalls due to its high wing-loading, and that if stalled at speed the nose would pitch up and the aircraft would pancake into the direction of travel and enter into an unrecoverable flat spin. Well... you end up with an aircraft that everything must work right and you must do everything right, otherwise your only option is to put your life into the hands of Mr. Martin and Mr. Baker. In US service the F-104 had almost twice the accident rate of the other century fighters.
I still love it though... It just looks
right.
