now THAT... took some BALLS!!!
Posted on 08/30/2019 7:38:25 AM PDT by NorthMountain
Video of an unusual/experimental method of launching the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.
Runway? RUNWAY??? We don't need no stinkin' runway!
I guess the ejection rocket seat was available. Like the one Chuck Yeager used during his flat spin.
After my son and I took an aerospace tour of southern California a couple years ago, I read “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed” by Ben Rich, the successor of Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works. Kelly Johnson was an amazing man.
It is hard for us to remember what a hot point W.Germany was in the 1950-70s. This film shows the effort to position the F104 outside the fixed base airfields that were a prime target. Anything to keep Ivan uncomfortable.
Still, doing this with the F104 is a real reach. A misfire or short-burn would leave Wolfgang little time to punch out as that plane did NOT glide!
I wasn’t aware of an aviation ping list. Do you, or anyone remember his screen name?
How can we make the Flying Coffin even more dangerous? Halt mein Bier...
My father was a junior engineer on the XF-104 project; he reported to one of the Skunks Works men. He told me many years later, when I was an adult, that he worked on the wing-root and T-tail sections.
On a related scale model test, he was at the base, with another junior engineer, when the XF-104 first took flight.
They were running up the X for its first test hop, with the J65, since the J79 was not ready. My father said that, as he and his partner watched, two Air Force pilots walked up, stared for a while at the prototype as it taxied, then one of them turned to my father and said, “Where’s the rest of the wing?”
My father said, “I’m sorry, that’s all there is.” The X then took off.
This must have been the test hop on 28 February 1954, not the maiden flight of 04 March 1954.
My father did top secret work most of his life, with Lockheed and NASA. He was a quintessential engineer: white shirts, black ties, gray car. He never bragged about anything.
He virtually never talked about work at home. I did not know of his involvement in the Starfighter (one of my favorite aircraft) until, as a teenager, I was visiting my godfather’s house, and admiring his model of one on the mantle. He said, “Your father helped design that, you know.” I had not known. (He also had a model of the P2V Neptune; my father had worked on that project also.)
I did not have a full grasp of his career until I was 20, home from college. My mother assigned me to clean up around the house, since I did not yet have a summer job. I found a three-foot high stack of old newspapers, major ones from coast to coast, with my father the top-of-the-fold front-page story. I was stunned.
I went to my mother and demanded an explanation. She said, “Oh, yeah, that was a big deal. You were a little boy, and wouldn’t remember.” It turned out he had been on the Today Show with Dave Garaway, and had spoken at an international symposium on aeronautics, as a result of his own independent design project.
I could not imagine my taciturn father speaking on television or at an auditorium. I said so. My mother said, “He just viewed it as another part of the job.”
Learning about all that was a surreal experience.
It turned out that the high accident rate in Germany - much higher than in Japan and other nations - was in part the result of sabotage.
It was one of the few incidences of proven sabotage during the Cold War.
See 47.
That is very interesting. Is there more to the story?
now THAT... took some BALLS!!!
If you mean his 15 minutes:
He designed a space station on his own time after clocking out. It was inspired by a hypothetical concept by Werner von Braun.
If you are familiar with the common science-fiction concept of a spinning doughnut providing articial gravity, this is where it originates, apparently. It was to be built in orbit by robot tugboats.
My father designed it; an industrial artist drew the illustrations. Two man project. Since he was a Lockheed employee, they owned it, even though they did not contribute.
NASA was intrigued, but it preceded Mercury: too advanced. The re-entry vehicle looked like a mini-space shuttle.
My mother’s indifference stemmed, I infer, from his spending evenings away on this project while she was raising three very young children. I was the youngest, and do not remember it.
My love of airplanes and rockets and such developed completely independent of my father’s career, since I did not really know much about what he did until later.
I knew he was an “engineer”; that made me think he ran choo-choo trains when I was very young.
The comment by
Adam E:
“No sheep were harmed in the making of this film.”
Yes, but the whole thing had inertia. Pretty quickly it would get aerodynamic roll stability (as much as tiny wings could get), and no induced force to create a yaw tendency. Pitch probably was the tricky thing, especially with that big fireworks thing hanging off the lower aft section of the aircraft (especially right after it was jettisoned).
Did you used to watch F104s flying out of either Fairchild or Moses Lake like I did?
(He also had a model of the P2V Neptune; my father had worked on that project also.)
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Wow! That brought memories.
When 17 and in Oct. 1959 of my Sr. year in HS, I joined the Naval Air Reserve at NAS Dallas. I was assigned to VP-702, which flew P2V2 aircraft. Good airplane.
*ping of interest*
Yes. Elegant for that kind of craft. The -7 had those cool jet engines.
Can you provide details or references? First I'd heard of this ... want to know more.
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
I don’t think we’ve ever thought that far ahead. In Germany the roadbeds can be 8 plus feet thick with different materials layered. The autobahn runways are placed where you have a couple miles of flat land. The four lanes come together to form one strip and metal dividers are inserted down the center. They are high enough so oncoming headlights are not visible, with the hammer head and fuel tanks on one end of that strip, big enough to enable refueling and rearming a couple aircraft at a time. In case of an emergency they could remove those two miles of dividers in a few hours with a couple bobcats or fork lifts. We’re too far away from our adversaries to worry about having to reconstitute our fighter force. It would go ICBMs long before it got to that point.
Just something I was thinking about. You’d think the guys designing the thing would get the bright idea that, hey....this is a long flat stretch....what if we made it so you can knock down the lighting standards and signs, reinforce the roadbed, and have a potential airstrip? Seems like you could get a lot done just about anywhere you could get KC-135s and C-130s on the ground. I suppose with all the ICBMs the Soviets had pointed at us, it would just be one more target. Disrupting the interstates would probably be a goal, regardless.
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