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Comment by quercusa | Hacker News Reader

I've always been fascinated by the F-104. It looks fast even on the ground.

Cockpit: http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html

I went to that museum (U.S.A.F. museum in Dayton, OH). If you like warplanes, I highly recommend it. It's an incredible value for your money, and you get to be up close and personal with tons of amazing planes (SR-71, YF-23, B-52, etc.) You definitely want to give yourself two days.

I have a fascination for the similar looking T38 Talon:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwa...

- still used for US fast jet training, apparently.

I'm also terrified by that wing aspect ratio. Fast it must have been, but it seems that they sacrificed a lot of common (flying) sense to get there.

I know so little about this but aren’t fighters much more ballistic in order to be nimble? My loose amateur sense is that a fighter pilot is always flirting with their plane no-longer behaving like a plane and more like a guided missile if they flew it just the slightest wrong (or right?) way.

You're thinking of something different. Modern (computer-controlled) fighters are aerodynamically unstable because that makes them more manouverable, but that's about being able to turn or spin rather than flying balistically.

For traditionally-shaped planes (delta wings work differently) there's a fairly straightforward tradeoff between big wings to increase lift at low speeds and small wings to reduce drag at high speed. Flaps help but there's a limit to how much you can change the shape of a wing in flight. So if you build a plane to go very fast, you tend to end up with a plane that has a high minimum speed as well, which makes take off and especially landing difficult.

Thank you.

To simplify, are you basically saying that with more unstable wing configurations, at slower speeds the plane simply wants to fall out of the sky rather than glide? Is that sensible to imagine for this topic?

It's not "unstable", it's low-lift, those are two orthogonal concerns.

It's more likely to stall at the lower speeds and then fall out of the sky.

Stability is how the aircraft reacts to disturbances (control inputs, turbulence, ...). Stable aircraft resist disturbances and settle into going where they're pointed at a predictable speed, so you can let go of the controls and attend to other pilot things. Unstable aircraft, when disturbed, go more and more in the direction of the disturbance. (e.g. a turn gets tighter and tighter, nose oscillates up and down more and more, ...) You need to correct this with more control inputs, but these will also have unstable results. So they only let computers fly unstable aircraft.

A car has good stability in turns: it wants to go straight, if there's a bump or you jerk the wheel a bit it still goes straight. If you apply a control input and get a turn, it will let you maintain the turn but it also wants to unwind and go straight. This is stability but not aerodynamic stability.

The reason one might want a less-stable aircraft is that stability is the opposite of manoeuverability. Super-stable aircraft like training gliders really resist turning and can feel too much like hard work.

As another commenter mentioned the wings don't contribute much to stability. The two big fins at the back (the stabilizers) are the main source.

(disclaimer: I fly fixed-wing acft and gliders, barely, and am no physicist.)

Yep. Killed so many pilots that the guy out of Hawkwind made a satircal concept album about it.

It makes a lot of sense in that lift grows linearly with area, and exponentially with speed.

Yeah, but first you have to get off the ground and gain some altitude! Jet engines don't really start developing power until they're moving forward fast (forcing more oxygen into the intake).

My dad said flying a jet out of Denver was always a challenge because the jet would just lumber along refusing to develop power. (Denver is at high altitude.) He'd always start the takeoff roll with the tail hanging over the edge of the runway start.

And you would be right. The starfighter was widely deployed in Western Germany and had a terrible safety record (>100 pilots and >200 planes lost out of 900). I recall it widely being discussed in the media when I was young and the plane was called the widowmaker for that reason.

Iy was, a common joke was that if you wanted a Starfighter all you had to do was to buy an acre of land and wait for a while...

Truth be told, the Starfighter was an interceptor, designed to carry air-to-air missiles fast towards approaching Soviet strategic bombers. That's it, nothing else. The German Airforce wanted a multi-role fighter, some creative Lockheed marketing assured the the Starfighter was bought in the F-104G variant. At that G-variant turned it into a brick to fly, stall speeds close to minimum take off speeds among other things.

The starfighter's safety record with other operators was a lot better.

>creative Lockheed marketing assured

It was bribery and corruption - not marketing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals

There is a reason Franz-Josef Strauss became as rich as he did being a "mere" minister and state prime minister. He never got caught so... In the end his insistence on a multirole fighter and the fighter being the F-104G (already almost oboslete at the time) killed a lot of pilots. Great example to show the cost of corruption.

Don't mention that in Bavaria though, or you risk being driven out of town. He's still a legend here, especially for the ruling party (CSU) of this virtual one-party state. The Munich airport is named after him, and AFAIK the current state prime minister still has a bust of him on his desk.

> He's still a legend here, especially for the ruling party (CSU) of this virtual one-party state.

The CSU, thank God, hasn't been ruling alone since 2018 and it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to do so again. They will be in government for a long time though, mostly because the SPD in Bavaria is an ongoing clusterfuck and won't rise high enough to form a red-green coalition.

> The Munich airport is named after him, and AFAIK the current state prime minister still has a bust of him on his desk.

It's even worse. When normal young people had posters of semi-naked stars and starlets, Söder's bed was adorned by a FJS poster [1].

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/markus-soeder-spo...

Oh yeah, the CSU woreships this guy... And after all certain CSU poloticians, including, allegedly, Strauss own daughter, did during the pandemic with mask deliveries, the CSU really learned well from him.

You don't get driven from town so for calling him out anymore. That moved to villages a while ago, otherwise I would have had some serious issues back at school.

Let's see... they already had a coalition government once (2008-20013) with the FDP, with the result that during the next elections the FDP lost so many votes that they weren't represented in the next parliament. Then they ruled alone for 5 more years, and since 2018 they have a coalition with the "Freie Wähler", which is a loose grouping of ex-CSU members. Let's see how well they will fare in the next elections. So far the only remarkable thing about them that the press reported is that their boss and now deputy prime minister Hubert Aiwanger is a vaccine skeptic...

Aiwanger is also a general weirdo, profited heavily from increased wood prices (he is after all a not to small farmer and owns considerably sized forests). I loved his comment about good Bavarians carrying a knife. Good thing about the FW is that the AfD has some serious, and arguably less critical, competition.

> Good thing about the FW is that the AfD has some serious, and arguably less critical, competition.

I'd prefer the FDP to take up that role like they do in federal government. While I in no way like or support the populist bullshit that the FDP pulls (e.g. their questionable appeasement towards COVID deniers), they're at least somewhat grounded in democracy. The FW are dangerous because of their structure - grab up enough support locally to run under their banner and you can talk whatever shit you want, including cuddling up with the far right [1].

[1] https://www.endstation-rechts.de/news/freie-wahler-sachsen-z...

> a common joke was that if you wanted a Starfighter all you had to do was to buy an acre of land and wait for a while …

Which gave it the nickname ”The Lawn Dart”, I believe.

They called it the lawn dart too.

In Holland it also had a very bad name due to Lockheed's bribery of the royal family, which shouldn't even have had any influence on such matters anyway.

Me too. It just looks awesome. A cockpit bolted on to a ginormous engine. It's a totally bad-ass airplane.

Still not quite as cool as a Lightning, though.

I suppose you could compare the Starfighter to the Gee-Bee as they are the same concept, but the Gee-Bee always looked like something out of a pulp magazine rather than a mean mo-fo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Supe...

The P-38 is cool, too :-)

I was referring to the English Electric variety

Ok :-)

Love how there’s a gauge for airspeed in raw mach numbers, up to mach 4!

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