The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter was a product of the Korean War. Kelly Johnson, chief of Lockheed's famous "Skunk Works", interviewed pilots in Korea in December 1951 and discovered that what they wanted was a small, simple fighter with excellent performance.

He and his design team created a fighter built around the GE J79 jet engine, and the prototype was accepted in November 1955, with the first Starfighters being deployed to the 83rd Fighter Interceptor Wing in January 1958. F-104s would remain in service with the US Air Force until being retired from active duty units in 1969, and from the Puerto Rico Air National Guard in 1975, when they were replaced by the A-7 Corsair. The Air Force was not terribly happy with the F-104; it suffered a number of engine problems, and while it could accelerate to speeds in excess of Mach 2, its turn radius was terrible and it burned through fuel very quickly. Its ideal role was as a short-range interceptor, but this was not a role the Air Force particularly needed filled, and after disappointing performances in Vietnam where they were deployed in 1965 and replaced by the F-4 Phantom II in 1967, they were relegated to the reserves and National Guard.

The F-104 also served with the Pakistani Air Force, where they were outfought by Indian MiG-21s and subsequently grounded due to a lack of parts resulting from postwar sanctions. Starfighters also saw action in the 1967 Taiwan Strait Conflict, when Taiwanese pilots bagged two Mig-19s of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force.

F-104s also went to various NATO nations such as Belgium, Italy, Spain, and West Germany, although their service with the Luftwaffe was marred by controversy over the "Deal of the Century". Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss was alleged to have taken a $10 million bribe to choose the plane, and worse yet, a combination of poor conscript training in ground crews, additional avionics in the cockpit which was alleged to lethally confuse pilots, and the inexplicable decision to use the F-104G as a ground attack aircraft led to losses of over 100 Luftwaffe pilots. World War II fighter ace Erich Hartmann, who commanded the first all-jet fighter wing in the postwar Luftwaffe, condemned the Starfighter as an unsafe aircraft with poor handling characteristics even before the plane was adopted. The Starfighter came to be called "Die Witwenmacher"(The Widowmaker) by the Germans, and a macabre joke had it that if you wanted to acquire an F-104G, you only needed to buy a plot of farmland and wait. Canada lost as many F-104s (110 out of 35) but Spain lost none at all.

Italian F-104S models were optimized for missile combat, discarding the 20mm Gatling cannon in favor of more fuel, an improved radar suite to enable the use of radar-homing air-to-air missiles, and additional pylons for more vespene gasadditional missiles. The F-104S continued in service with the Italian Air Force until 2004.

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