Whipped Cream Difficulties

Our movie for New Year’s Eve (before we set off fireworks) was “The Starfighters“. (Specifically the MST3K version with “B-1” Bob Dornan, though I’m not sure there is a non-MST3K version available on home video.)

Personally, I feel that it could have used more refueling and flight scenes, and less romance and character development. But that’s just me.

The F-104 is an interesting aircraft, especially in terms of its operational history.

The Germans lost 292 of 916 aircraft and 116 pilots from 1961 to 1989, its high accident rate earning it the nickname “the Widowmaker” from the German public.

…

Some operators lost a large proportion of their aircraft through accidents, although the accident rate varied widely depending on the user and operating conditions. The German Air Force and Federal German Navy, the largest combined user of the F-104 and operator of over 35% of all airframes built, lost approximately 32% of its Starfighters in accidents over the aircraft’s 31-year career. The Belgian Air Force, on the other hand, lost 41 of its 100 airframes between February 1963 and September 1983,[160] and Italy, the final Starfighter operator, lost 138 of 368 (37%) by 1992. Canada’s accident rate with the F-104 ultimately exceeded 46% (110 of 238) over its 25-year service history, though the Canadian jets tended to be flown for a greater number of hours than those of other air forces (three times that of the German F-104s, for example).However, some operators had substantially lower accident rates: Denmark’s attrition rate for the F-104 was 24%, with Japan losing just 15%[164] and Norway 14% (6 of 43) of their respective Starfighter fleets. The best accident rate was achieved by the Spanish Air Force, which ended its Starfighter era with a perfect safety record. The Ejército del Aire lost none of its 18 F-104Gs and 3 TF-104Gs over a total of seven years and 17,500 flight hours.
The cumulative destroyed rate of the F-104 Starfighter in USAF service as of 31 December 1983 was 25.2 aircraft destroyed per 100,000 flight hours. This is the highest accident rate of any of the USAF Century Series fighters. By comparison, the cumulative destroyed rates for the other Century Series aircraft in USAF service over the same time period were 16.2 for the North American F-100 Super Sabre, 9.7 for the McDonnell F-101 Voodoo, 15.6 for the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, and 7.3 for the Convair F-106 Delta Dart. By comparison, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) experienced an overall loss rate of 11.96 per 100,000 flying hours with the Dassault Mirage III, losing 40 of 116 aircraft to accidents over its 25-year career from 1965 to 1989. The Royal Air Force lost over 50 of 280 English Electric Lightnings, at one point experiencing twelve losses in the seventeen months between January 1970 and May 1971; the loss rate per 100,000 hours from the introduction of the Lightning in 1961 to May 1971 was 17.3, higher than the lifetime West German Starfighter loss rate of 15.08.

Why was the German accident rate so high? Lots of reasons.

“Why Germany had so many accidents with the F-104 Starfighter”.

Bonus #1: “F-104 Starfighter Walkaround”.

Bonus #2: I hope you like Starfighters, as this is basically “The Starfighters” without bots, Mike, skits, or all that annoying character development stuff.

I’m still a little behind schedule from yesterday. Also: recent events.

So today I thought I’d do a couple of videos on the X-1.

“Frontiers of Flight: The Sound Barrier”.

(Here’s a higher quality version, but it feels like some has been cut off of this.)

“Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier”, from Deep Space TV. This is a little shorter and better quality.

Bonus: this is long, but…a 1991 interview with Gen. Yeager.

I thought it might be fun to do a couple more WWII aircraft videos today.

“P-38 Flight Characteristics”, made by Lockheed around 1943. And in color!

Bonus #1, but this is more for the soundtrack than the video itself: “Warbird Engine Starts — Props & Radials”.

Bonus #2: I thought I’d throw this in. “Eclipse aviation cartridge starter and Plessey starter motor”.

Why? We watched “Flight of the Phoenix” (the good one) a while back, that’s why.

This could, maybe, fall under travel, but I thought I’d use these here today instead.

Great and good FotB RoadRich joined us for Thanksgiving dinner, and we spent some time afterwards sitting around, chatting, and watching a few videos on the ‘Tube. Here’s one that came up: Jimmy Stewart talks about flying planes out of LAX…before it was LAX.

In 1928, the Los Angeles City Council selected 640 acres (1.00 sq mi; 260 ha) in the southern part of Westchester for a new airport for the city. The fields of wheat, barley and lima beans were converted into dirt landing strips without any terminal buildings. It was named Mines Field for William W. Mines, the real estate agent who arranged the deal. The first structure, Hangar No. 1, was erected in 1929 and is in the National Register of Historic Places.

Bonus #1: “The Story of Modern Airline Transportation”, from American Airlines. “Modern”, in this case, being 1933.

Bonus #2: RoadRich mentioned this to me, and I couldn’t pass it up. This is actually what got us started down this path. From 1953, “Flying With Arthur Godfrey”, a vintage Eastern Airlines promo film.

Godfrey used his pervasive fame to advocate a strong anti-Communist stance and to pitch for enhanced strategic air power in the Cold War atmosphere. In addition to his advocacy for civil rights, he became a strong promoter of his middle-class fans vacationing in Hawaii and Miami Beach, Florida, formerly enclaves for the wealthy. He made a television movie in 1953, taking the controls of an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed Constellation airliner and flying to Miami, thus showing how safe airline travel had become. As a reserve officer, he used his public position to cajole the Navy into qualifying him as a Naval Aviator, and played that against the United States Air Force, who later successfully recruited him into the Air Force Reserve. At one time during the 1950s, Godfrey had flown every active aircraft in the military inventory.

In addition to Godfrey actually flying a Constellation, Eddie Rickenbacker shows up as well.

“I used to sit around up there at 20,000 feet with the sun at my back waiting for the enemy Fokkers to come around.”

“No, no, no – these fokkers were Messerschmitts!”

This is an amazing video that popped up in my recommendations, and that I could not pass up.

“Out Of The Sun” is a General Dynamics promo film for the F-16. Unlike a lot of plane specific promo films I’ve run across, though, this one concentrates mostly on air combat history and tactics, building towards a case that the F-16 is the “fighter pilot’s fighter”.

What makes this amazing to me is the interviews in this video:

Aces interviewed include W.C. Bill Lambert from World War 1 (footage of Manfred Baron von Richthofen is also in this segment), the second-ranking American ace of World War I. Lambert claimed 18 air-to-air victories, eight fewer than “Ace of Aces” Eddie Rickenbacker, and won the DFC. Also interviewed is the Luftwaffe’s Adolf Galland who flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2; the Royal Air Force’s Douglas Bader and Robert Stanford-Tuck, Norway’s Sven Heglund, American David Lee “Tex” Hill, the WWII Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann; U.S. Air Force pilot Francis Gabreski from World War 2 and the Korean War; USAF pilot Ralph Parr from the Korean War; and Steve Ritchie, the only ace from the Vietnam War.

As best as I can tell, all of these interviews were done specifically for this film. (Mr. Lambert and Sir Bader both passed in 1982: according to the YouTube notes, this dates to 1983, so I think it is possible that the makers managed to get in interviews with both men before they passed.)

While I was checking Sir Bader’s date of death, I ran across this story that I had not heard before:

During one visit to Munich, Germany, as a guest of Adolf Galland, he walked into a room full of ex-Luftwaffe pilots and said, “My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive”.

Bonus #1: here’s a 1965 interview with Sir Douglas Bader.

Bonus #2: I don’t have any other place to put this, and it is kind of related. The backstory: Saturday night, we were watching “The High and the Mighty” and we noticed the Coast Guard was flying B-17s. This, in turn, led me to research the operational history of the B-17 (and, yes, the Coast Guard did use B-17s, in the PB-1G variant, as late as October of 1959). That in turn led me to this rather remarkable paragraph:

On 28 May 1962, N809Z, piloted by Connie Seigrist and Douglas Price, flew Major James Smith, USAF and Lieutenant Leonard A. LeSchack, USNR to the abandoned Soviet arctic ice station NP 8, as Operation Coldfeet. Smith and LeSchack parachuted from the B-17 and searched the station for several days. On 1 June, Seigrist and Price returned and picked up Smith and LeSchack using a Fulton Skyhook system installed on the B-17. N809Z was used to perform a Skyhook pick up in the James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965. This aircraft, now restored to its original B-17G configuration, is on display in the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

As great and good FotB RoadRich said when I brought this up, it’s a wonder that they were even able to get into the air, given the weight of the giant brass balls on everyone involved.

“Fishing from Airplanes for Soviet Secrets: What was Skyhook – Operation Coldfeet?” from Dark Docs.

I thought I’d take a break from WWI today and go back to something slighlty more contemporary.

I know some folks who are fans of the F-8 Crusader. I never quite acquired that gene myself, but this is a kind of fun (and short) documentary about the F-8 from “Dark Skies”: “The Last Gunfighter”.

Bonus #1: I don’t know where this came from (other than the “AVHistoryBuff” channel) but here’s a second, shorter documentary: “Chance Vought’s F-8 Crusader II and III – the Mig Masters”. It seems very professionally done, like a corporate promotional video.

Bonus #2: Here’s a vintage US Navy training film on the F8U-1P, the photo recon version of the F-8.

Bonus #3: And for those of you who haven’t had enough Crusader yet, “Last of the Gunfighters”. This one’s a bit longer.