F-104 Starfighter

[Stuart Galbraith]

it might be a training issue.There was an Indian veteran on a recent episode of The Fighter Pilot Podcast, think he was a retired wing commander or something, and he fell in love with it. Well worth listening to.

https://www.fighterpilotpodcast.com/episodes/082-mig-21-fishbed/

 

 

 

The Red Eagles loved the early examples they got from indonesia, or maybe that was just preference to the Mig23, which they seem to have found fairly terrifying.

[Nikolas93TS]

US evaluators obtained those early MiG-23s from Egypt, and then heavily criticized the plane and it's flying properties, citing loss of controlled flight and all sort of other issues. However, the issue causing those problems was probably a total lack of engine maintenance.

 

Egypt in fact withdrew the type because they lacked means to maintain the fleet once Soviet maintenance operators departed.

[Stuart Galbraith]

It was something to do with the engine mounting, which allowed the engine to move under heavy G loading (or was it the engine deform? Something like that), and the fan blade would rub against the engine casing, fragment, and you would have lots of fan blades exploding from the engine, causing loss of power and presumably other mayhem if there were important bits in the way. Supposedly the Red Eagles found an example in one of the spares that had suffered an identical failure, which suggests one Egyptian pilot had to dead stick one back and they never repaired it. I imagine it wasn't popular when stories like that got around.

 

It was fast, but from what Zuyev said in his book, even later ones had an annoying tendency to depart for no particularly clear reason when under g loading.

[RETAC21]

It was something to do with the engine mounting, which allowed the engine to move under heavy G loading (or was it the engine deform? Something like that), and the fan blade would rub against the engine casing, fragment, and you would have lots of fan blades exploding from the engine, causing loss of power and presumably other mayhem if there were important bits in the way. Supposedly the Red Eagles found an example in one of the spares that had suffered an identical failure, which suggests one Egyptian pilot had to dead stick one back and they never repaired it. I imagine it wasn't popular when stories like that got around.

 

It was fast, but from what Zuyev said in his book, even later ones had an annoying tendency to depart for no particularly clear reason when under g loading.

 

Yes, because it wasn't intended for dogfighting and they tried to make it do things that they weren't supposed to be doing. Zuyev sounds more than happy to switch to MiG-29

[Daan]

US evaluators obtained those early MiG-23s from Egypt, and then heavily criticized the plane and it's flying properties, citing loss of controlled flight and all sort of other issues. However, the issue causing those problems was probably a total lack of engine maintenance.

 

Egypt in fact withdrew the type because they lacked means to maintain the fleet once Soviet maintenance operators departed.

Or projected engine life and structural weaknesses:

 

The maintainers’ first problem was that the MiGs were not built to last. The Soviet design philosophy was based on consumption; they made a lot of any given aircraft, expecting they would break down and be discarded. The cheapness of the materials used in some of the MiG engines limited their expected life span to 500 hours, for example. For the 4477th, which had no access to Soviet factories, that wasn’t good enough. The crew members had to do something to make them last.

....

It was the MiG-23 that was the maintainers’ nightmare. The Flogger was a compromised design, in the US view. Made light for speed, the airframe didn’t have sufficient strength. The wing box which carried the weight of the swing wings was particularly prone to cracks. https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0407peg/

[Perun]

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=jate

An HFACS Analysis of German F-104 Starfighter Accidents - Purdue University