THE STARFIGHTER CASE
Thirty-three down and more to come?
From SARAH GAINHAM
BONN rr HE German Starfighter which crashed last I weekend brought the total losses .to thirty- three in fifteen months. The story could well be- come a familiar one, not just in Germany, for it is a case of a European country being obliged by heavy American pressure to buy an American plane unfitted for its own particular needs. The original design was a clear-weather supersonic interceptor aircraft. Its manufac- turer, Lockheed, sold it in a very tough politico- commercial campaign to NATO, several mem- bers of which, including Germany, were to make the plane under licence in their own factories. The sums involved were enormous, in Ger- many alone the 'firm and anticipated business' estimate made at the time of the contract in 1961 by Lockheed was $385 million, though the present cost of the project is several times that figure. This did not include the central device of the aircraft, a navigation platform costing $100,000 each, made by a sub-contractor, which co-ordinates the whole performance of the craft, including weapons firing.
This device is not licensed and the price does not include spares, testing machinery or trained personnel loaned at very high salaries as trainers; neither did it exist even in prototype when the Defence Ministry in Bonn ordered it. The technical expert of the procurement branch in fact refused to put his signature to the contract because of his doubts. Later in 1961 the aircraft's electronic system, as ordered for Germany, was tested by an American officer, who gave it a candidly negative report and was promptly trans- ferred; a second officer replaced him with a kinder judgment. The first report did reach the Bonn Ministry, however, through a German officer present at the tests. Needless to say, this inertia-corrector platform is of a .delicacy and complexity that makes it incomprehensible to the layman, who can have no opinion of it ex- cept by its results in action.
By the time the first sixty-six aircraft—made in America, the rest of the present strength of about 700 were made on licence—were delivered, the requirements of the German air force had added some complicated extra equipment which increased the total weight of the craft by 1.6 tons. This enabled it to carry bombs, cameras and the like, all of which are controlled by the plane's single oc.upant.
The pilots were meantime being trained in machines without the navigational platform. So the fair-weather plane was now an all-weather- interceptor-bomber-reconnaissance machine. In other words. the German air force did not want the F-104 G Starfighter at all (the G means the German variant), but three different types of plane, all of them to be flightworthy, not in the stable weather conditions of the American south- west, but in the worst flying conditions in the world in west and central Europe.
When the Litton navigational platform began to be used in the air, over a survey of 1,500 flights, it showed navigational errors of eight nautical miles in 70 per cent of flights and of more than sixteen sea miles in 14 per cent of flights. It is instructive to compare this level of accuracy with the standards prevailing during the last war. Then Pathfinder pilots, night-flying on instruments in war conditions, were questioned if their automatic camera-shot evaluation showed them more than two to three hundred yards off target. Even main-force bombers were allowed only a little more latitude.
The machines used in the Second World War were, of course, very much slower, but if the
Aeroplane used by air forces is meant to be a vv capon, and in the German case a weapon used- on its own people, the comparison is a fair one. The area in which the Starfighter may have to operate is a narrow and thickly-populated area of a land frontier several hundred miles in length. Bombing accuracy, for morale and humane reasons, needs always to be of the order of the Mosquito attack on the prison at Fresnes.
The Starfighter is simply a shell for carry- ing the electronic device, weapons and the pilot into the air, but the aircraft itself shows in action some disturbing qualities. The ejector seat quite often sticks; several times pilots have been forced down by nausea which may be caused by some- thing getting into the oxygen supply. Pilots also complain that landing approaches and touch- down can be made only with the throttle wide open. In 1965 alone there were twenty-six total losses of machines and fifteen dead pilots, and so far this year the pattern of losses has been uncontained.
Some German critics blame the selection chiefs, who wanted to adapt the F-104 into the F-104 G, as dilettantes. Some say the pilots are undertrained with two years, although a large proportion of all accidents concern pilots of considerable experience. (Training is now to be done entirely in Arizona, which may not be such a good idea as it seems, since flying conditions are so greatly different in the operational area.) Some say the ground-service personnel has too low standards of training and performance, but they are trained by seconded Lockheed men, and it is really absurd to suggest that German engineers are incompetent, since one of the main grouses of the world against the Germans is that they are only too technically competent. The present Defence Minister, who did not order the aircraft, has alleged that the German licensee manufacturers are at fault; to this there is the same objection as to the service engineers and mechanics, although it is probably true that a lack of recent research affected the German air- craft industry to some extent and for some time.
To a lay observer it seems that the fundamental trouble is quite simply that it is not the aircraft the air force needs for its special conditions and tasks. German designers in general dislike the adaptation of existing designs and in all weapons work on the principle that the task should be defined and a machine—not only aeroplanes— then designed for that purpose. But the present unhappy experiences of the German Luftwaffe are a reminder that with aircraft this does not always happen. Aircraft are sold not to do a certain thing in the most practical way possible, but to make the biggest possible sale.
The buying of aircraft, then, becomes a political question. The Federal government can- not refuse to buy weapons if the United States government backs a commercial, firm and piles on all the pressures it knows how. This is the constant hindrance to military co-operation with the French, much desired at one time by General de Gaulle. In turn, the enforced reliance on foreign designs inhibits German research, and the consequences of this ace felt in technical fields far outside the military. Not only for Germany— many people would perhaps misguidedly welcome that outcome—but for all Europe this becomes a central question of the future. In the end, the hard sell kills the goose that lays the golden inventions. The only way out of the situation for Germany, as for Britain and France, is genuine, wholehearted and widespread co-operation in Europe, which in a generation would benefit America as well.
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