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Originally Posted by Oberon
Tent Peg/ground nail for the F-104.
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I had not heard that one!
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The old joke with the F-84 was that at the end of the nose there was a little sensor that sniffed out the dirt at the end of the runway and then turned the controls on so the pilot could take off. 
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I have a book buried somewhere on the Korean airwar. One of the stories it tells is of the old straight-wing F-84-Es taking off on their first mission from a forward base, basically Marston Matting laid out in a big clearing. It was a bombing mission, and it seems that the fully-loaded Hawg caused the steel mat to bunch up under the wheels in a kind of wave mostion - not enough to see, but enough to slow them down. A large crowd of local villagers had turned up to watch the jets take off, and were standing at the far end of the runway. When the pilot realized he wasn't going to get airborne and had run out of space to stop in, he toggled off all his ordnance. The plane leaped into the air, barely clearing the trees at the end of the clearing, and the not-yet-armed bombs went bouncing down into the trees.
As the second pilot was ordered to stand down while they tried to figure out what the problem was, somebody noticed that the civilians had all disappeared.