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Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)



 
 
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  #11  
Old May 4th 08, 05:02 AM posted to sci.space.history
Pat Flannery
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)



Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer) wrote:
Sure did. In 1983, in a TF-104G. N824NA, to be precise.


Look! It's the "Supersonic Teenager" Mk. 2.
Toni LeVier watch out.
Mary's at your six.
Squeal, Mary, squeal!:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...4757-1,00.html

"Boy, this is the most!" squealed Toni Ann LeVier, 18, whipping a
Lockheed TF-104G Super Starfighter through the supersonic corridor near
Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., at twice the speed of sound. Toni, a
Pasadena high school senior and very likely the world's fastest
teenager, held a pace of 1,325-1,350 m.p.h., with Dad as her copilot—and
Dad is Supersonic Flight Pioneer A. W. ("Tony") LeVier, 50, now
Lockheed-California's director of flying operations. With another
father-daughter stunt in the offing, a cross-country flight to Andrews
Air Force Base, Md., Toni nevertheless talks like a girl whose aims are
thoroughly down-to-earth. "I want to get my private pilot's license,"
says she, "but I think I'd rather be a mother than a jet pilot."

What they missed in the article was that Toni wanted to have a child by
each member of the Rolling Stones. :-D

Pat
  #12  
Old May 4th 08, 05:40 AM posted to sci.space.history
Pat Flannery
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)



Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer) wrote:
It was built to be a Mach-2 interceptor, not a Northern European
fighter or strike aircraft. It was definitely not a knife fighter.

Don't get me wrong; I love the Zipper. But, as I said many times
before, aircraft can't be all things (except the F-4 Phantom, but
that's more the result of P_sub_s). The F-104 had exceedingly high
wing loading and that limited its capabilities.


At high altitude and Mach, the aircraft was a great bomber destroyer.
If the Air Force had used it as a point-defense interceptor against
incoming Bisons and Bears...they'd be toast, particularly if the wingtip
Sidewinders had been replaced with Genie nuclear AAMs.
Lockheed pushed it too far by selling it as the "One lightweight fighter
that can do it all".
The Lockheed Lancer on the other hand might have been a aircraft that
really _could_ do all that competently; as the F-16 does*:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0236.shtml
You could have sold those to NATO hand-over-fist.
When F-104s met MiG-21s in air-to-air combat during the Indian/Pakistani
wars, the F-104s generally lost.
The Lancer could have kicked their ass.

*And having crawled all over a F-16 while salivating, I think that
aircraft is the coolest fighter outside of the Incom T-65 X-Wing that
Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star with. :-D

Pat
  #13  
Old May 5th 08, 01:06 AM posted to sci.space.history
[email protected]
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)

On May 2, 6:26*pm, "Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
wrote:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:10:49 -0700 (PDT), spacearium

wrote:
45th Space Wing commanding officer, Brig. General Susan Helms, herself
a former space shuttle and station astronaut, called out the final ten
seconds before the charges were detonated on schedule at 9 a.m. EDT,
sending an Earth-shaking thunderclap rolling across the Canaveral
landscape.


Good grief. *I met Susan when she was a USAF Test Pilot School
student, down at the far end of the flight line from Dryden. *I got
her a flight in an F-104, going along in a chase plane for the HARV. I
was just wondering what she was doing these days.


[damn caps still not working]

the helmses lived a couple of blocks away when i was in high school,
and i even delieved their paper for a couple of years. i was 2 years
ahead of susie at parkrose sr high (which they unfortuntely tore down
about 12 years ago). if i recall correctly, she was one of the first
two girls in the air and space class at the school. she wouldn't
remember me at all, but it sure is nice when someone from the old
school makes good.
  #16  
Old May 6th 08, 06:31 PM posted to sci.space.history
Gene DiGennaro
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)

I think the Pakistani '104 drivers that were shot down tried to engage
Gnats and MiG21's on turning dogfights instead of playing the
vertical.
Gene
  #17  
Old May 6th 08, 09:32 PM posted to sci.space.history
Pat Flannery
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)



Gene DiGennaro wrote:
I think the Pakistani '104 drivers that were shot down tried to engage
Gnats and MiG21's on turning dogfights instead of playing the
vertical.
Gene


Trying to play the vertical in a aircraft that's going to fall apart if
you throw it into too abrupt of a climb is going to be tricky. :-D
One thing that did work against the F-104 was that the J79 in full
afterburner was a target made in heaven for a pursuing aircraft armed
with IR homing missiles.

Pat
  #18  
Old May 7th 08, 08:06 AM posted to sci.space.history
OM[_6_]
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)

On Tue, 06 May 2008 15:32:27 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

One thing that did work against the F-104 was that the J79 in full
afterburner was a target made in heaven for a pursuing aircraft armed
with IR homing missiles.


....That, and the fact that it couldn't hold up under a tractor beam.

OM
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  #19  
Old May 7th 08, 12:50 PM posted to sci.space.history
Peter Stickney[_2_]
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Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)

Pat Flannery wrote:



Gene DiGennaro wrote:
I think the Pakistani '104 drivers that were shot down tried to engage
Gnats and MiG21's on turning dogfights instead of playing the
vertical.
Gene


Trying to play the vertical in a aircraft that's going to fall apart if
you throw it into too abrupt of a climb is going to be tricky. :-D
One thing that did work against the F-104 was that the J79 in full
afterburner was a target made in heaven for a pursuing aircraft armed
with IR homing missiles.


Pat,
With reference to the F-104 and its pitchup behavior, You've got it
a bit muddled. The pitchup would occur at an Angle of Attack of about 21
degrees. Note that that's AoA, not flight path angle. In order to
generate that much AoA, you've got to be working the wing really hard.
Even with the F-104's high wing loading, it won't pitch up unless it's over
in the left (slow) side of its flight envelope. Not enough Qbar (Dynamic
Pressure) there to rip it apart.
I've never heard of one coming apart due to the pitchup. (It would,
however, plummet from the sky for several miles before recovering, if it
didn't fall into a stable spin.)
Note that the F-104 was not the only airplane of its era with these
problems. The F-101 was, if anything, worse. The One-Oh-Wonder wasn't
helped in that its only effective weapon, the AIR-2 Nuclear Rocket (Genie)
was launched from a snap-up maneuver, real close to the edge of the
pitchup.

In quoting the F-104's war record, especially with reference to the Indo-Pak
wars of '65 and '71, remember that both sides took prevarication to
astonishing levels. There is no way that any reports in the popular press
can be relied on.
The ACIG database
http://www.acig.com shows that Pakistani F-104As with 4 confirmed kills, 3
in the '65 war, vice 1 loss (To a Mystere IVA), with 2 unconfirmed (by
India) claims, and 1 confirmed kill and 3 unconfirmed claims in the '71
war, vice 4 losses, all to MiG-21FLs. The Indian government is notorious
for not admitting losses.
Note that these were all early "small bore" F-104As with the J79-GE-3
engine, which by 1971 was beyond tired - The USAF had replaced that engine
in their A models with the J79-GE-19, with about 3,000# more thrust, and
giving out of this world performance.
The MiG-21, with its high drag (low PsubS while pulling G) was even more
dependant on using its afterburner while maneuvering, with the extra
problem of not carrying much in the way of gas. (According to Dave Sutton,
who got hist MiG-21U from Burlington VT to central NJ with only 3 fuel
stops, a MiG-21 has grounds to declare a "low fuel" emergency as soon as
the wheels leave the ground.

Oh - and as for your previous comment that the wingtip AIM-9s could/should
have been replaced with AIR-2s - Man, do you know how _big_ the Genie was?
you're talking about scraping them on the ground in a crosswind.
There was a program to fit an AIR-2 on an extendable ventral rack. This
wasn't implemented due to the lack of space in the airframe for the bigger
radar and extra computers required to compute the launch parameters for the
weapon, and properly program its time fuze.
The rack equipped F-104A was tested as a platform for launching high
altitude sounding rockets, and studied as a launch platform for small
satellites.


--
Pete Stickney
Any plan where you lose you hat is a bad plan
  #20  
Old May 7th 08, 06:50 PM posted to sci.space.history
Pat Flannery
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Posts: 18,465
Default Historic Cape Launch Tower Demolished (With Video Clip)



Peter Stickney wrote:
Oh - and as for your previous comment that the wingtip AIM-9s could/should
have been replaced with AIR-2s - Man, do you know how _big_ the Genie was?


Not all that big, I've seen one close-up (inert).
(I don't think many people knew that Fargo, N.D. probably had nuclear
weapons out at Hector Airport when the NDANG was using the Voodoos.)
It was 9' 8" long and weighed 882 pounds.
I wasn't going to hang them on the wingtips, but on pylons under the
wings, like the bombs were carried on.
Since one of the weapons a F-104 could carry was the 1,323 lb Kormoran
missile, the Genie is easily within the F-104's carrying capacity.

you're talking about scraping them on the ground in a crosswind.
There was a program to fit an AIR-2 on an extendable ventral rack. This
wasn't implemented due to the lack of space in the airframe for the bigger
radar and extra computers required to compute the launch parameters for the
weapon, and properly program its time fuze.


That would have been a problem.

The rack equipped F-104A was tested as a platform for launching high
altitude sounding rockets, and studied as a launch platform for small
satellites.


I've seen artwork for the satellite launch mission.
The sounding rocket version was ALSOR.

Pat
 




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