Tonight's 1980's movie is......

[Mega]

[GRG55]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

Hmmm. The Last Starfighter...and I thought we were starting a thread about these:

[shiny!]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

Hmmm. The Last Starfighter...and I thought we were starting a thread about these:

Want one :-)

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

Hmmm. The Last Starfighter...and I thought we were starting a thread about these:

What is the German word for Widowmaker?

That bird nearly killed Chuck Yeager.

I absolutely love aviation and high performance aircraft.

But that’s one bird I would never want to fly in.

[shiny!]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

What is the German word for Widowmaker?

That bird nearly killed Chuck Yeager.

I absolutely love aviation and high performance aircraft.

But that’s one bird I would never want to fly in.

It is a thing of beauty, a work of art. But agreed, you couldn't pay me enough to fly in it. Chuck Yeager and his kind were insanely brave.

[GRG55]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

What is the German word for Widowmaker?

That bird nearly killed Chuck Yeager.

I absolutely love aviation and high performance aircraft.

But that’s one bird I would never want to fly in.

It was a high altitude interceptor converted to a ground attack role for NATO members to defend Germany against the "Russian invasion threat". Anyone just looking at the pictures of it will readily understand it was a poor choice to pinpoint drop bombs or fire missiles at low altitude.
But despite that it had a lower fatality rate compared to the plane it replaced, the F86 Sabre.
Nobody in their right mind would call a ground attack plane a "Starfighter".

One of the phenomenal outputs of Kelly Johnson's Lockheed Skunkworks. An elderly career military pilot friend of mine flew them in the RCAF, along with every other operational fighter of the era, including the 101 Voodoo. Says the Starfighter is still his favourite ride. There's a privately owned one in Phoenix you can buy a ride in if you change your mind. I got to know the pilot/owner during successive visits to Reno for the annual Unlimited Air Races.

Just as an aside, I happened to be in Baden Baden, Germany a few years ago and was assigned a driver to take me to the airport. During the 1960s Cold War era it was a NATO contingent Royal Canadian Air Force base. He pointed out the arched concrete "hangars", covered with earth for camouflage, in which the jets were parked, and also the ice hockey arena the Canadians built.

[Mega]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

Every Sunday I go with my late Father to visit his father in Liverpool, almost every sunday we have the radio on & a new flash would come saying ANOTHER Starfighter had crashed in Germany. It went on & on.

Mike

[Mega]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

Ah...........the 1960's

[Woodsman]

Re: Tonight's 1980's movie is......

What is the German word for Widowmaker?

That bird nearly killed Chuck Yeager.

I absolutely love aviation and high performance aircraft.

But that’s one bird I would never want to fly in.

The Starfighter. Yes, she could be a crazy bitch. But don't lie, we all love them crazy ones. At least once. The German widowmaker thing had more to do with the peculiars of the mission the Luftwaffe tasked it to do, the operational environment, and the inexperience of the pilots than any specific defect in the F-104.



Kelly Johnson built it to do one thing: fly as high as possible as fast as possible to shoot down MIGs. The Germans, after some palm-greasing by some dirty Lockheed VPs, decided to put it to work moving mud. Brilliant decision, mein general. Add inexperienced pilots transitioning from subsonic F-84 Hogs, bad German weather, and is it any surprise they got a disaster?



Yeager's story was in the NF-104, a special one-off version with a rocket engine and reaction control jets on the wings and nose.



It was used for training astronauts and seems like a hell of a ride. Here's Yeager on the typical mission profile and how it went wrong:

"Clean the gear up on the airplane and the flaps, then accelerate out to climb speed, four to five hundred miles an hour, climb up to about 36,000 feet, then go into afterburner which accelerates the airplane out to about twice the speed of sound. Ease it up to about 45,000 feet, fire off the hydrogen peroxide rocket and accelerate it out to about 2.4 mach number. Then pull 4 Gs, or pull the airplane up into about a 70 degree climb angle. The characteristics of the J-79 engine, which is in the 104, as you go through about 55,000 feet, the afterburner blows out because of lack of oxygen. When this happens you gotta come out of afterburner position with the throttle in mil power and make the eyelids close to get more thrust out of the turbine engine. You gotta keep one eyeball on the tail pipe temperature, because that engine is going to over-temp at about 70,000 feet; it is not designed to run any higher. And when it does, you have to shut it down.



We shut it down and the hydrogen peroxide rocket takes you on over the top. We got the airplane up to roughly 118,000 max altitude. But then you are above 90 percent of the atmosphere, so you have to use these hydrogen peroxide rockets to change the altitude of the airplane to follow its flight path. When the airplane leaves say, 100,000 feet going up like this, if you don't do anything, it's going to come back in that way. So you have to rotate it to make it come back in nose first."

The scene in "The Right Stuff" where Yeager loses control and ends up ejecting is true to life. The Tom Conti soundtrack makes for nice drama. The Historian at Edwards recently released film of the actual event:

"We ran a series of flights; I was the pilot on it. Start at 118,000 feet, 116, 114, 112, coming into the atmosphere at about a 50-degree angle of attack, open up the thrusters at the top, push the nose down and then measure the rate. You can plot, at each altitude, at what rate the airplane recovers. We noticed it was starting to run into resistance at about 108,000 feet; 106,000 feet was a little slower. If you take the curve and extrapolate, it looks like we are going to run out of thrust in this hydrogen peroxide rocket where the aerodynamic pitch up will be more than the thruster, at about 92,000 feet. So we thought we were in pretty good shape.




We thought we would run one more. I flew a flight in the morning, with a pressure suit on, I think at 108,000 feet, and we measured the rotation. Then I landed and wanted to make another flight after lunch. I didn't get out of my pressure suit because if you get out of it, it's wet and you can't get back in. I made another flight at about 1:30 in the afternoon, at 104,000 feet. For some reason, we had dual thrusters on the bottom of the nose and dual thrusters on the top. We don't know, we may have had one thruster fail, but at 104,000 feet, when I came into the atmosphere at 50 degrees angle of attack, I couldn't get the nose down on the airplane.




What happened on this flight was that when the airplane came into the atmosphere, at about a 50-degree angle of attack, I couldn't get the nose down. The airplane pitched up and went into a flat spin. Now airplane is in a flat spin and, because there is no air going through the intake ducts, the engine stops. When that stops, then you no longer have hydraulic pressure to run the horizontal stabilizer, the aileron or the rudder. So you are in a no-win situation. That's exactly what it is. You sit there. But you have one other alternative, that's eject. I also had a drag chute on the airplane that we use for landing. The airplane was in a very flat, slow spin. I had my pressure suit on and it was inflated. I sat there and watched.



So, I rode it down to about 6,000 feet, which is not low, and ejected. The rocket seat blows you out of the airplane and gives you about one hundred mile an hour velocity away from the airplane. It just so happened that the airplane was falling at about 100 miles an hour, so when I used the seat, the airplane just fell away from the seat. The seat sat there, and then two seconds after you leave the airplane, the lap belt blows open on the seat, which is what holds you on the seat. You've got leg restrainers, cables that hold your heels into the seat for flailing when you come out at high speed.

I sat and watched the seat go through a sequencing, knowing when it was going to happen. Finally the lap belt popped open, and there is a butt kicker that kicks you out of the seat. I felt that go and also my cable cutters cut my leg restrainer cable from me [and] I fell through. When this happened, the F-5 release on your parachute is armed and as you fall through 1400 feet, the chute opens. Well, I was below 1400 feet, so the chute opened the minute that the F-5 release said to open, and it did. At about this time, the seat, which kicked me out up here, is also falling and it became entangled in the shroud lines of the parachute. I didn't know this either, but this is the way it happened. Finally I picked up enough speed, sixty or seventy miles an hour, with the canopy up there following, that quarter bag came off, the canopy popped and when it popped, the damn seat that is entangled in the shroud lines flopped me up like this (hand gestures). The seat hit me in the face piece of my pressure suit. And what hit me was the butt end of the rocket on the seat, which still had glowing propellant burning. When this happened, and you are feeding 100 percent oxygen. It's like a blow torch.

Fortunately, when this happened, the visor on my pressure suit was busted and frayed, it cut my eye down and my eye socket filled with blood, so it didn't hurt my eyeball. I got burned pretty bad on my neck and shoulder and it was very difficult to breathe. The only thing I knew, I was stunned from the blow, I knew I had to get the visor up on my pressure suit helmet. There is a button on the right, you push it and then you raise your visor. It's the way you get your visor up on most pressure suits. I knew I had to get it off, get that visor up to shut the oxygen flow from my kit that was in the back of my pressure suit to get all this fire out. So I did that. Then I swung a couple times and hit the ground. I couldn't see too much and I was having trouble breathing because there was a lot of smoke and fire.

But it worked out, you either do or your don't, and I didn't get killed in the flat."

Pretty good for a West Virginia farm boy who never saw an airplane until he was a 18 year old PFC in mechanic's school. Ending up fighter ace, a Brigadier General, and history's best known pilot ain't too shabby neither.

"Is that a man?"

"Yeah, you're damn right it is!"