F-104 Starfighter

Hardback edition, 112 pages. First US Edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1981, Copyright Ian Allen Ltd. 1981. Taken from inside front dust jacket “F-104 Starfighter, Arthur Reed, The F-104 Starfighter has rightly been described as one of the most controversial aircraft in history. To the Americans it was, as its appearance proclaims, ‘a missile with a man in it’. It was undoubtedly a hot and unforgiving aircraft as the pilots of many NATO and other Western world air forces were to discover. Nonetheless, handling it was well within the capability of the frontline pilot who had mastered the earlier generations of jet fighters but to those who hadn’t had experience with earlier jets, either in the air or on the ground—the newly revived Luftwaffe for example—the F104G which the Germans had bought with such enthusiasm and built under license in vast numbers, became a national scandal and very nearly a national disaster.