BOC: HW: OFF: Sights in Munich

[Eric Siegerman]

On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 09:17:41PM -0400, Steve Youles wrote:
> Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters [...]
> was apparently a favourite among RAF aircrew
> in Germany at the time - I got the impression that they took it as being a
> piss-take of their German opposite numbers and no more than that...

Holy cow, the thing actually was "G for Germany"!  He says it in
those words; gee, I wonder if he's a closet HW fan.

There's an amazing amount of love for these planes out there, just
a few examples being:
  - starfighters.nl - everything you always wanted to know about
    the F-104, and lots more too.  Pretty dry, but this page
    gives the history of the German sale:
        http://members.home.nl/noor.luijkx/history/f104_11.html

  - starfighters.net - a couple of them in private hands, doing
    the American air-show circuit; they have a third currently
    being restored.  "The world's *fastest* airshow team", they
    bill themselves.

  - http://www.dcr.net/~stickmak/JOHT/joht12f-104.htm - a very
    good, and quite funny, article explaining why people love
    them so much, and also a bit of the "why" for those dumb
    decisions that Calvert only gave us the "what" of.  Oh, and
    an interesting take on all those German (and, presumably,
    Canadian) crashes -- he puts it down to bad training.  Well
    worth reading.  (It kind of bogs down in the middle with a
    lot of statistics, but don't give up; skim.  It gets fun
    again later on.)  "You can trust the Italians to recognize
    and appreciate a sports car," he says, "even if it does have
    wings."

Not too many F-104 pages mention "Captain Lockheed", though I did
find a couple:  a reader comment, and a link (broken, of course)
to "Catch a Falling Starfighter" on "Spirit of the P/Age".

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
[...] despite reports to the contrary, it is the rare programmer who
permanently loses his sanity while coding ("permanently" being the
operative word).
        - Eric E. Allen