henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (08/11/90)
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) >From: phil@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Phil Gustafson) >The biggest customer was West Germany. In the 60's and 70's there were >multiple scandals about its accident rate. The most interesting thing about the German F-104 accident rate was that the Royal Norwegian Air Force operated exactly the same model of Starfighter for nearly a decade before their first fatal accident. There is fairly good evidence that the Luftwaffe Starfighter accident rate had a lot more to do with poor maintenance and inadequately-trained pilots than with inherent defects in the aircraft, although it was unquestionably a "hot" and unforgiving plane. In retrospect, it was a poor choice for a relatively young and unsophisticated conscript-based air force like the early postwar Luftwaffe. >The F-104 ejection seat fired _down_... Remember that the F-104 was designed in the mid-50s, when it was not so easy to be sure that an ejection seat could clear a high tail. That's why the downward ejection. It wasn't too unreasonable in what was meant to be a high-altitude dogfighter. Note also that the Luftwaffe replaced the downward-firing seats with Martin-Baker upward-firing seats fairly early, because this was a fairly obvious safety problem. It didn't help much. (The Norwegians, by the way, didn't bother with the change, since they weren't having accidents.) Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry -- It is not possible to both understand | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology and appreciate Intel CPUs. -D.Wolfskill| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry