Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: rdh@sli.com (Robert D. Houk)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: US Fighter Designations
Message-ID: <1990Aug12.214544.2818@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 12 Aug 90 21:45:44 GMT
References: <1990Jul31.223607.6367@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
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From: rdh@sli.com (Robert D. Houk)
In article <1990Aug7.040812.6711@cbnews.att.com> phil@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Phil Gustafson) writes:

   >F104: Starfighter, Lockheed.  Thank You again, Kelly Johnson.  Known
   >        as the "missile with the man in it"  While never achieving
   ...
   One problem was its ejection system.  Most modern fighters have "zero-
   altitude" ejection seats -- the ejection cannon shoots the pilot high
   enough that he can eject more or less safely while the plane is on
   the ground.  This is handy for malfuntions on takeoff and approach.

   The F-104 ejection seat fired _down_, making this difficult.  I've
   heard undocumented stories of desperate pilots in damaged, low-flying
   F-104's flipping inverted to eject upward, but not surviving. Yuck.

This goes back far enough that I don't even know in which box to look for
the book, but...

The first F104s ejected upwards, "normally". Then they discovered a minor
drawback of the high "T" tail vis-a-vis ejecting pilots, so they changed
to a downward ejection. They then discovered that trying to eject on a
aborted takeoff (e.g., an inconvenient flameout) was not so good, so trained
the pilots to be sure to flip the plane over before ejecting on an aborted
takeoff.

The wings were also unusually "sharp" - you could literally cut yourself
on an unprotected leading edge.

Interesting plane...

					-RDH
--
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