BUSH PILOT HUGH PRYOR
Recently, a Belgian friend of mine, who will forgive me for guessing his age to be not far from mine, was expressing regret at never having flown the F104 Starfighter.
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HE FASTEST MACHINE which I’ve flown is the Lear 25, which is a horrible little gremlin, and had a reputation for killing anybody it didn't like. It was based on a Swiss-designed fighter which never made it into production. The Lear 25 had a straight wing and a Mach limiter set for Mach 0.84. At that speed, power would be reduced and the control column would be eased back automatically to keep the aircraft below Mach 0.84. The Mach limiter could be disabled simply by pulling its circuit breaker.
An annoying, but less fatal feature of the aircraft was that its fuel tanks were on the wingtips and if they were empty and the refuelers filled only one, the aircraft would fall over onto the full wingtip. So the solution was to put enough fuel in the other tank, just to keep the thing upright. They could then fill one side before going back to top off the...err...where was I? And then there was its tiny cockpit. If you see a Lear 25 flight crew walking down the street, it’s easy to tell which one is the Captain. The Captain will be the one with his head leaning on his right shoulder and the Co-pilot will have his head leaning on his left shoulder, because that’s how they’re forced to sit in the confines of the mean little flight deck.
a noseover of such ferocity that occupants exit through the roof
The vicious nature of the Lear 25 was demonstrated dramatically at Mach 0.87, where it fell foul of the phenomenon known as 'Mach tuck'. At that speed the wave of compressibility moves the centre of lift aft across the chord of the wing, until the effectively stalled horizontal stabiliser no longer has the authority to keep the nose up and it stalls, thus pitching the aircraft into a nose-over of such ferocity that the wings fail downwards and the occupants exit through the roof.
That’s what happened to four Lear 25s during the year I flew the type as co-pilot. In each one the Mach limiter circuit breaker had been pulled, indicating that the pilots were involved in some kind of race, but sadly were unaware of the catastrophe to which their games would lead. 6
FlightCom: February 2022
The F104 is of a similar temperament, particularly for pilots in the Luftwaffe. It killed more than sixty of them, possibly because the German Air Force insisted on hanging an extra ton on those silly little wings. No, I prefer big honest slabs of lift to keep me off the ground. Give me a Twin Otter or a Pilatus Porter any day, so that I can last long enough to enjoy a good old age full of Happy Memories.
