For aircraft enthusiasts: when a best selling plane is from a flawed design

[Blazer]

Well as I pointed out earlier in my 60 years of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter thread, having a good selling jet on your hands doesn't mean exactly that that said jet is a good plane in the first place.
For aircraft enthusiasts: 60 years of the most notorious Jet fighter of all time, the Lockheed F-104

The F-104, thousands were built but with a safety record which is far less enviable

But the Starfighter isn't the only flawed plane which went into mass production and was flown by a lot of nations who quickly found out that sales do not mean quality per-se, so let's discuss those.

First up, the first Swing wing fighter made on a large scale: the MiG-23 "Flogger"

The MiG 23 was an effort from the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau to show that they could make sophisticated fighter designs and what's more sophisticated then to built a swing wing fighter, since you'd need a lot of know-how to perfectly pull the synchronization off to really make it work out perfectly.

Meant as a replacement for the older MiG-21, the Flogger was meant to be as fast as its older sister but thanks to the swing-wing design to be more agile and to be on par with everything the West could make, that resulted in a very respectable 5041 units made, which served all over the world but not all was well.

This Flogger Crashed in Belgium when its pilot had ejected over what was then East Germany when encountering a technical issue. He had expected the jet to crash into the sea but instead it veered off to the west and after the fuel ran out crashed into a residential neighborhood in Belgium, killing one occupant.

So what was the problem?

First of all, in order to make customers of the Flogger reliable customers, the engine of the Flogger was derated to a limited hour of flight, so they had to be swapped out quite regularly and once you fell out of favor with the Soviet Union, tough luck keeping your squadrons flying Tobarish!

One air force who found out the repercussions of that policy was Egypt who had to retire hunderds of MiG-23's when the Soviet Union didn't agree with their decision to buy the American made F-4 Phantom.

Many accidents with the Flogger came from the engine just flaming out after the running hours were done. Another issue was the fact that the Head Up Display (HUD) was also the rolling map, meaning that pilots couldn't see straight ahead because they'd see the HUD and the Map, which are distracting when you're in a dogfight, just trying to take your plane into the air.

In addition it was painfully clear that if you took a squadron of Floggers to war, your best bet was that the opponent wasn't flying contemporary fighters because the MiG-23 performed very poorly against the Northrop F-5 Tiger, the Mirage F-1 and the F-4 Phantoms which it would certainly encounter.

Derelict Floggers.

Although there are several air forces still flying the Flogger, their active numbers are decreasing and there are no update programs to keep them serviceable, unlike the plane it was meant to replace: the MiG-21 is still going strong, the Flogger wasn't what it was designed to be and also didn't live up to what it was marketed to being.

But the story doesn't end there because the MiG 23 had a derivative, the MiG 27 which was meant as a ground attack version of the Flogger, the MiG 27 can be told apart from the MiG 23 by the fact that it has a flatter pointier nose that houses the terrain following radar.

It also doesn't have the MiG-23's variable air intake since it's not designed to fly interceptor missions and therefor doesn't need to go Mach 2 and the afterburner was thus also omitted.

Ironically, that made the MiG 27 a more successful plane since all of those changes meant that the problematic engine suddenly had a lot more operational hours on the clock.

The MiG 27 also was the only "Flogger" Variant which saw license production since India produced a respectable number of 165 of them.

Next up, the plane which got the Nickname "The Beast"

The Curtiss SB2C Helldiver came to be when the US Navy was searching for a replacement of the steadily aging Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber. But because those planes were needed Yesterday, they commissioned the Helldiver into full scale production, untested and unseen. The Navy had little doubt in the type's success, it was faster and could carry more ordinance than the Dauntless, Plus the fact that Curtiss-Wright was seen as a dependable manufacturer who knew what they were doing.

All in all 7140 units were made which saw heavy action in the Pacific Theatre and post-war they were used by Thailand, Greece and France for many years.

So what's the problem?

Well when a model of the Helldiver was brought to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology windtunnel in 1939, Professor of Aeronautical Engineering Otto J. Koppen was quoted as saying, "if they build more than one of these, they are crazy"

Because the Helldiver had stability issues, was an inherently top heavy plane with structural issues and bad stall characteristics.

This photograph shows to very good effect the short fuselage of the Helldiver, its wings were too big for its own good.

With this one the tail had snapped off completely.

Note with this one, the actual leg of the undercarriage being completely ripped out.

Landing a Helldiver was no job for a novice pilot but seeing as how many lost their lives steering one, Novice pilots were all who could actually take place in the cockpit and take the plane into the air.

This all made the SB2C a plane loathed by the Carrier Captains, Squadron leaders, flight deck crews and the pilots who flew it. who declared that "SB2C" really was an acronym for "Son of a ***** Second class"

 

[Michael Jewels]

Blazer, I didn't have time to read your thread thoroughly now, but will do so later.

Another plane that was not so good was the WW2 Messerschmitt 210.

It was redesigned, and was better as the ME-410.

As for the F-104, even as a kid I thought all it could do was go fast; good for a point of defense interceptor, but not much else.

I'll reply with more later.

I love aviation threads.

Mike

 

[Stewie26]

Thanks Blazer for another good aviation thread.
The F-104 is one of the scariest looking planes in my book. The only way those tiny little seven foot long wings can create enough lift to keep the plane in the air is by maintaining very high airspeed. This means the normal landing speed with with full landing flaps deployed was around 220mph. If your flaps were faulty, then your landing speed was around 270mph. No wonder that the pilots called the f-104 the widow maker. Others called it the flying missile with a man on board. Yep...I would say it was a flawed design.

 

[Funky Ghost]

Even my beloved P38 Lightning suffered through design flaws before they were finally eradicated ( props were changed so the torque wasn't an issue - dive breaks were added so it could assume it's massively effective L model role ( although my favorite plan of all time was the P38-J )

 

[Blazer]

Even my beloved P38 Lightning suffered through design flaws before they were finally eradicated ( props were changed so the torque wasn't an issue - dive breaks were added so it could assume it's massively effective L model role ( although my favorite plan of all time was the P38-J )

The grand reputation of the Fork Tail devil also owed much to propaganda. Because according to books written by Luftwaffe ace General Adolf Gallant, who not only fought against Lightnings but also flew captured examples, they weren't very maneuverable, nor were they very fast. Which meant they weren't much of a threat once you got on its six o clock.

He compared them to the Messerschmitt BF-110 which was a similar plane in many ways.

Both the Lightning and the BF-110 were designed to be flying cruisers, heavy guns in the nose, they'll shoot anything out of the skies. But absolutely useless in a dogfight as they both lacked the agility that single engined fighters have.

Did you know that the lightning had Dutch roots?

This is the Fokker G-1 "Figaro" which when it first emerged in the 1936 air salon in Paris was hailed as the most groundbreaking combat aircraft ever made. It is entirely possible that Kelly Johnson and his team were there and saw the Figaro up close and drew some conclusions of their own.

Sadly the Figaro never saw any combat, as the air frames save for three were all destroyed by strafing runs on the ground during the invasion of Holland. But those three did score 14 areal victories over Junkers 52s.

 

[Funky Ghost]

As a dog fighter it was good at the start of the war ( It was the only U.S. aircraft that was in it from beginning to end ) but soon was delegated to ground attack and dive bombing duty where it excelled.

A lot of the main complaint from a dog fight perspective was more to do with it's center line armament which made accuracy of utmost importance. In a ground attack roll it was this arrangement that made it's strafing run so devastating. The front mounted cannon was the icing on the destructive cake.

 

[Downunderwonder]

Thanks Blazer. There must be hundreds of piloted crash landings on airfields that look way worse than that Belgian ghost one in a residential area!

 

[Michael Jewels]

As for the Lockheed P-38, if I recall correctly, it was originally designed as a high altitude bomber interceptor. Perhaps this is why it wasn't so good as a dog fighter.

I also saw an aviation show, I believe it was, Wings of The Luftwaffe, in which Adolf Gallant said that P-38s were pretty easy to shoot down.

In another show, I remember both German and British veterans of The Battle of Britain saying that the ME-110s were originally sent as escorts for the German bombers, but quickly, needed protection from their own single seat, single engine fighters to survive. They maneuvered like trucks against the British Hurricanes and Spitfires. They were much better as night fighters, especially when the Germans installed the Schrage Musik (Jazz Music) guns, which fired upward from an ME-110 attacking from below a British bomber at night.

The beloved American P-51 Mustang wasn't such a great performer with its original Allison engine. Great up to about 15,000 feet, then it choked.
When they installed the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, it became a monster. Lucky for the allies.

The American P-39 Airacobra was another plane in the wrong role, thankfully not for long.

Designers thought it would blow anything out of the sky with its 37mm canon firing through the nose. It would, if it could maneuver fast enough.

It was much better suited for ground attack.

I'll try to think of some jets that weren't so good without referring to my books.

All this was from memory, so if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.

Mike

 

[Tegzsa]

But only the F104 has had an entire album based on its story -- "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters":

 

[bobba66]

The downward-firing ejection seat in the F-104 seems like a pretty bad idea in retrospect......

 

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