Talk to Jetson — F-104 Virtual Copilot

I heard this story from my friend, the late Dave Groark — he flew the F-104 during the Berlin crisis. The squadron used to run an unauthorized game with the East German air force. They would take off from West Germany, point the airplane straight at the border, and run toward it. The East Germans would scramble MiGs to intercept. The trick was to pick bad weather — the East Germans were not strong instrument pilots. Some of them crashed trying to recover. The F-104 pilots would close on the border, turn parallel, and then zoom-climb. Back then they wore the early Flash-Gordon-style pressure suits — capstans up the side, a chin strap that pulled your head down so you could see. Marginal kit. One of Dave’s friends zoomed to seventy thousand feet, got into a spin, and rode it down to thirty thousand before he caught it. He pulled out, barely. That stunt is probably the reason the Air Force shut the whole thing down. As Dave put it, they were just a bunch of amateurs zooming airplanes up like that. But, he said, it was a lot of fun.

Here is another one from my friend, the late Dave Groark — this time from Edwards Air Force Base. When he got to Edwards he was flying zoom profiles in the F-104 to practice re-entry — preparation for the guys who would be coming back in lifting bodies. By then they had the full pressure suits, the same kind you see in the Apollo footage, so the suit was not the limiting factor anymore. The airplane was. The F-104’s compressor inlet is magnesium. Push it too hot and you get a compressor stall — the engine chokes itself. You watched two instruments. The Compressor Inlet Temperature gauge, max around one hundred. And a slow light that blinked at you past that. Slow. Slow. Slow. The briefing at Edwards was: take it to Mach two, then zoom. Do not push past Mach two — you do not want to go too far. Dave had a friend who had already learned what too far looked like. A tremendous compressor stall. If your seatbelt was not tight, you ended up pinned to the front of the cockpit. But fighter pilots are competitive. The question on every flight was: who got the airplane the highest? So Dave pushed it. Two point two. Two point two five. Two point two six. Then, a little under Mach two point three, he pulled back and zoomed. On the way up: at thirty thousand feet, dump cabin pressure. At seventy thousand, come out of afterburner — or you will overtemp the turbine. At about eighty thousand, shut the engine down entirely. That was the only time he ever intentionally shut down a single-seat fighter’s engine. From there, ballistic. Just riding the airplane. He could see the curve of the Earth and the black of space. He topped out at ninety-two thousand feet. Stayed there four or five seconds. Then started back down — with one question on his mind. Is this engine going to relight? It did. He landed. Dave said it was a very good flight.