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Originally Posted by Oberon
Well, no, but out of those 15 countries at least two of them lost pilots, the Luftwaffe crashed 292 and lost 110 pilots to it, Canada crashed 110 of them too, Belgium crashed forty one, Italy lost 137, Japan lost 36, and the US had 30.63 accidents for every 100,000 flight hours which was the highest of the 'century' series fighters. So at the very least (not including US losses) some 616 F-104s crashed in service. That's nearly 30% of all aircraft built (I don't know the precise number, too late to work it out).
Ok, the aircraft itself when used in the proper role was good, but it was used in the wrong role too often and in the wrong weather and then...splat, Tent peg time.
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The problem with the Starfighter was that due to its small wings, it had to land at a fairly high speed. One mistake and you were toast. But then the FW-190 in WW2 had the same problem.
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Plus, it severely burnt and took two finger tips from Chuck Yeager! I mean, the guy knows his aircraft but the F-104 chewed him up and spat him out.
Stopped his record attempts too.
Was a bit of an Icarus, reached for the sky but then burnt its wings off.
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Yeager was not flying a regular F-104, but an NF-104 which had a rocket engine attached to reach record high altitudes. The rocket turned out to completely screw up the aerodynamics of the plane and Yeager got into a flat spin that he could not recover from (as I recall, the book "The Right Stuff" has a detalied description of the flight).
When he ejected, he wound up colliding with the retro rocket of his ejection seat, which started a fire
inside his helmet and his glove.