Ok, I'm REALLY Confused with this???lqcorsa wrote:Wow I didn't know the F-104 is still the fastest jet. I guess it makes sense though. Last year there was an airshow at my home airport with a bunch of F-104's. Every time I would hear the jet I'd run outside to check it out but it had already left (WAY obvious he was going faster than the speed of sound. I did get a good look at it though after it darted out of some trees for about 10 seconds. As for headsets I like to use the MS260.
Who had F-104s? You're in Washington state right? It wasn't us.. thats Boeing country & we're made by Lockheed in Palmdale, CA!!
NASA retired their last aircraft in early 1994, the Italians (last country flying the -104) stopped operation in September 2004 (Practica De Mare was in 2005 in Italy for one last 15 ship flyover!), Mark Sherman out in Arizona has an F-104D but that hasn't flown for god knows how long, since he "Tarmac'd" his tip tanks when he pulled the power out on final... DOH!
That leaves us & we have 3 aircraft, the CF-104C (hasn't flown since our Atlantic City show last year, its getting a new engine which we'll have in the next month), the F-104B which has been undergoing MAJOR overhaul for a over a year to be all pretty for next year & the CF-104D which is what we've been taking to the airshows for the last two years as a single ship demo... and we weren't at Seattle last year. So i'm interested to know who has a "bunch of F-104s" because we have the only flight worthy ones in the whole world!
I guess my next question is, how could you see an F-104.. 25 miles away thats MACH 1+? The aircraft is VERY hard to spot even at an airshow only 3 miles away, with its low profile, let alone seeing him on the deck through some trees! You can't tell from sound (other than a sonic boom) how fast someone is going.. let alone hearing it 25 miles away.. He also had about 30 seconds of gas left at Mach 1+ at sea level before he ran out of gas, hell we use 700lbs of gas just to start up & taxi!!
Even 25 miles away you windows would be rattled 'almost' out of the frames by a supersonic footprint from a sonic boom! Besides you're looking at having your license revoked & insurance & airworthiness cut up & burned.. follwed by a nice big fine & possibly a jail term for Mach 1+ over the continental US.. You cannot go supersonic at airshows!
You can legally go Supersonic out past the ADIZ where the Class E floor differential changes altitude, but thats still pushing it, we generally go out about 75 miles into the gulf of mexico four our MACH runs.
I'm just having a hard time figuring this out, it might be a total misunderstanding on my part! Are you sure you just 'thought' it was supersonic? I still can't figure out for the life of me who had F-104s!
