AVIATION

Death and the Starfighter

FRANK WHITFORD

About five years ago a new type of joke en- tered the t3erman language, der Starfighter- whz. The year 1965 had been the worst for the Starfighter since its adoption by the Luftwaffe in 1961, and so many of these highly complex and supposedly versatile air- craft, the backbone of Germany's air de- fence, had broken up, blown up and crashed that the sick-humorists could overlook it no longer. 'How do you acquire a Star- fighter?' asked the best-known joke. 'Just walk into the nearest field and wait.'

Very recently another of these advanced weapons-systems killed its pilot over Lower Saxony. This was the third crash since the end of August alone and brought the number of Starfighters lost up to an astonishing 124. Although the Luftwaffe now proudly points out that the accident rate is only one-tenth of what it once was, no one who has fol- lowed the long, involved and tragic history of this aircraft can Believe that this latest crash will be anything like the last. 'The Widow-Maker', 'the Flying Coffin' and 'the Jinx Jet', as it is variously known to the men who fly it, has not yet managed to live down its noms de guerre.

The Starfighter, designed and built by Lockheed, first became operational as an interceptor-fighter during the last phase of the Korean war. At that time it was one of the most advanced aircraft of its type, twice as fast and only half as heavy as anything comparable. More like a missile than an aeroplane, its vestigial wings are so thin that Padding is needed on the ground to prevent mechanics and pilots from accidental ampu-

tations. In the air it could reach Mach 2.2 and quickly established several world altitude and speed records.

Although the USAF cancelled the Starfighter after initial deliveries, apparently in favour of missiles (today the aircraft is used in the us only by the National Air Guard), Lock- heed and the Pentagon saw a rosy future for what they called the 'Free World Fighter'. They launched a wide-ranging sales cam- paign hoping to convince the allies of the Starfighter magic. Their first target was the new Luftwaffe which was desperate to re- gain a place in the big league after so many years in the military wilderness.

The Lockheed campaign in Germany has been described as powerful, efficient, slick, and misleading. Members of Parliament were showered with glossy four-colour brochures, defence chiefs were taken to the States to see the Starfighter working miracles, and they were soon convinced that the aircraft would be the answer to Germany's air de- fence problems for many years to come. In the face of intense competition from Britain and France, who also wanted the lucrative privilege of equipping the young air force, Lockheed won the day and an agreement that they would build sixty-six modified Starfighters, the F-104 o, at a rough cost of £800,000 apiece. At the same time the Ger- mans were to build another 190 of the same aircraft under licence.

As Lockheed was in deficit at the time, the smiles were not all on German faces. But the Germans were as delighted. In 1957 Franz Josef Strauss, the then defence min-

ister, had assembled a team of pilots with World War tt combat experience and had sent it around the world to look for the aircraft which would bring the Luftwaffe up to date. Now they had found it, and having been restricted to obsolete and obsolescent weapons since being permitted to re-form. the Luftwaff‘ could now leap ahead and draw abreast of the world's most advanced air forces. More than this, by building the Starfighter under licence, the German air- craft industry, and especially Messerschmitt, after an enforced pause of more than a decade, could now gain vital experience in advanced aerospace technology and modern aircraft production. What the Germans had bought was not just a plane but fifteen years of American know-how.

There was another, even more important factor. The new Starfighter would be able to carry nuclear bombs. Early in 1960 NATO had decided to arm its European members with atomic weapons. Strauss saw that the sooner the Starfighter was in operation the sooner Germany would have a say in the disposition of NATO's nuclear capability. The Starfighter would be the ticket for the country's backdoor entry into the desirable nuclear club.

This explains why, having signed the agree- ment, the German defence ministry rushed the construction programme ahead so fast that even Lockheed was moved to advise against such haste. Moreover, Strauss per- sonally raised the order from 250 to 700 and in 1960 before even the first prototype of the F-104 o had flown, the production lines were ready for 900. All this was against the advice of the Bundeswehr general staff which, like the Americans, believed that no more than 250 aircraft of any type should be brought into service during any five-year period because of the training and main- tenance problems which every new model brings with it.

It was, as many observers later ironically remarked, truly a crash programme, for not long after the first Starfighters had been handed over to an eager Luftwaffe, which had even asked its band to compose a stirring march in the aircraft's honour, the plane began to develop serious faults. More than that, many of the parts delivered by Lock- heed arrived at Messerschmitt in damaged condition, and even when assembled, the aircraft did not seem capable of performing all the functions Lockheed claimed it would. Public and parliament began to wonder if they had been sold a star-spangled pup.

The crashes multiplied and the death roll grew. At one time there was the almost incredible average of two Starfighter crashes a week. An anti-Starfighter lobby formed in- side parliament, court cases were brought against the Luftwaffe by its own pilots, and Strauss's successor at the defence ministry, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, resigned. The Luft- waffe must have wished that it had been a Trauermarsch that they had ordered from their band.

Gradually the true nature of the Star- fighter became generally known and the de- fence chiefs were forced to come to terms with the inelegant haste of their minister. Neither pilots nor strategists were in any doubt that the aircraft is basically a master- piece of aviation design, but having been told that only minor modifications would be required to adapt the original Starfighter to Luftwaffe requirements, they were horrified to discover that the first designs had been changed so much that theirs was to all intents and d purposes an entirely different'aircraft. Far from being a straightforward develop- ment of the original Starfighter, the F-1040 was the result of no fewer than 10,000 design modifications. No longer used just as a fighter-interceptor, it had been adapted to become an all-weather fighter-bomber and a high altitude reconaissance aircraft. It had even been forced in yet another modified form on the navy, although the admirals had protested loud and long that what they really wanted was the British Buccaneer. In addi- tion to the basic design modifications the German Starfighter had been equipped with an automatic pilot, a sophisticated radar system, an advanced bomb-aimer andmany other refinements. Significantly, the USAF Starfighter weighed 17,500 pounds, while the German version, now expected to do so many things, weighed 29,200. It was nothing like the original version at all. All it had In common with what the German experts had seen flying over California was a few similar elements and roughly the same shape.

These modifications led to an aircraft of such complexity that the Red Baron would have had a nervous breakdown before getting it more than a few feet into the air. The Starfighter ended up with more dials, knobs and gauges than a large bomber. Its pilot's handbook is three inches thick and a mini- mum of twenty experienced technicians is required to keep the aircraft airworthy. For every hour in the air it needs between thirty- eight and forty-five hours ground servicing, ten of which are needed for the electronics alone. Moreover, weighed down with so much equipment, the F-1046 requires at least 3,000 yards of concrete runway to take off, and even then needs a reheat to get it into the air. Reheating uses great amounts of fuel and cuts down the aircraft's range accordingly.

It was in fact the very complexity of the aircraft which the Luftwaffe first referred to when defending itself against charges that it had bought large numbers of useless killer aircraft. The German air force, ran the ex- planations, was not yet experienced enough to make the best use of such an advanced weapons-system. Neither pilots nor mech- anics were yet able completely to cope with it. But, the explanations concluded, in a few years the experience would be there and the initial and inevitable teething troubles would be overcome. In other words, in an attempt to become a major air-power over- night and to share in Europe's nuclear wea- pons, Germany had burdened itself with so many aircraft of such complexity that it was beyond the Lutwaffe's capabilities to use them adequately. Desperate to buy fifteen years' worth of advanced technology, Ger- many had overlooked the enormous prob- lems that a construction programme of the Starfighter kind implied. And Lockheed, anxious to get out of the red by settling one of the biggest military export deals in American history, had not been anxious to point out that the Luftwaffe was perhaps not yet ready for such a sophisticated aircraft.

But the Luftwaffe's delay in recognising what it had let itself in for was a minor fault in comparison with its delay in attempt- ing to improve the situation. Its first concern should have been the number of fatalities caused by Starfighter crashes. The aircraft had been equipped with Lockheed Gemini 2 ejector seats, and most of the pilots agreed that the G 2 was inferior to the British Martin-Baker seat. But even though the de- fence ministry quickly ordered a change- over to Martin-Baker, the Luftwaffe held on grimly until a public outcry forced them to implement the ministry decision. No one knows why the Luftwaffe held on for so long, for since the adoption of the new ejector seats the number of deaths has dim- inished dramatically.

Every aspect of the Starfighter affair re- flects the same shortsighted refusal to face facts. Incredibly, the aircraft is still the key- stone of Germany's air defence and there are no plans for its replacement until around 1977 when the Anglo-German variable geo- metry MRCA becomes operational. Clearly the most urgent question is no longer why the Starfighter is so dangerous, but why the Luftwaffe persists in asking its pilots to go up in it.

Why, in 1960, instead of ordering a smaller number of an aircraft type which would have better suited the limited capabilities of the German aircraft industry and the Luftwaffe, did Germany insist on such a huge leap for- ward, especially as it was a leap in the dark? Why, in 1968, instead of looking for another aircraft, or phasing the Starfighter out, did the Luftwaffe order sixty more Starfighters to help replace the eighty-one lost until then? Why did the defence ministry insist that one aircraft with such a critical profile be used to perform so many roles?

According to those responsible for the various decisions, according to people like General Steinhoff, head of the Luftwaffe, the basic reason was finance. Bonn chose the Starfighter as a multi-role aircraft be- cause it could not afford the full range of single-purpose weapons-systems, and it stuck by the Starfighter throughout, for the same reasons, convinced that the pilots and mech- anics would grow to understand it. Certainly some of the statistics seem to point to the wisdom of the Luftwaffe's decisions. Lately

the Starfighter accident rate in Germany has been reduced to a tenth of what it was during the worst years, and according to Luftwaffe reports, the pilots are no longer demoralised and clamour for the chance to fly such a high-performance aircraft.

But not only the Germans fly the Star- fighter, which is used by thirteen other air forces, and not only the Germans have had troubles. At one time the Japanese grounded all their Starfighters after a long series of problems. The Italians, who went ahead with their Starfighter programme much more slowly than the Luftwaffe, recently attempted to hush up a number of crashes which looked remarkably like those which had blighted the Germans, and the Canadians, with one of the most experienced air forces in the world, are also reported to have had serious problems with their Starfighters, signifi- cantly, when it was used by the USAF, the Starfighter was affectionately known as the `Beautiful Death'.

In the light of the experience of other air forces, the Germans can claim with some pride that only the Dutch have a better record with their Starfighters than they, but their expressed belief that all their troubles with this aircraft are now over does not look totally convincing. No one expects from a military aircraft the same sort of safety record that is expected of a commer- cial plane, but the history of the Starfighter and the recent crashes suggest that the Star- fighter may still be basically too hot to handle. During the war German children played a game with tissue paper. They would burn it and watch the ashes rise towards the ceiling. The game was called 'Hess flies to England'. Today, if they still play it, the game is probably known as 'Starfighters'.