I wonder why so many people stick to this “high AOA thing”. Being capable of high AOA is no advantage in itself. Any aircraft produces excessive drag at high AOA, usually there is no point in going there, only if it yields a firing single solution for a missile.

This is very true, its not enough to look at AoA or rate of turn specs to judge an aircraft but rather be able to read polars and graphs and other data like what Daisan provides.

Here is a video of the Viggen doing aerobatics which proves the Viggen is no slouch despite any AoA limitations it might have:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r898TV3XicU

So you have problem to verify that claim by some inst. turning data. 😎

There is nothing to verify because if you reduced the wing are of a Kfir/Mirage III down so that it was equal the wing loading of the F-104, it wouldnt be flyable. You would need to add a tailsurface to give pitch control because wing-only pitch control would no longer work with such small wing area.

So, that’s all it takes? One Cobra maneuver and the aircraft is immediately “much superior”?

Normally Delta Wing fighters are not very agile, take the huge difference that FBW makes the Mirage 2000 over the Mirage III series simply by shifting CoG to where its on AoL instead of ahead of it. The Draken uses the same trick that the mig-29/su-27 series of fighters do, to provide substantial wing area just ahead of CoG, in the case of the mig-29/su-27 this is provide with huge LERX (leading edge root extensions) and with the Draken it is the engine intakes which make a lot of forward wing area. So yes, this cobra maneuver you see in this video is not some kind of fluke destabilization but accurately demonstrates turning agility just as much as it does for the mig-29/su-27 fighters.

You seem confused. First you say the problem was that the F-104 lacked a
“non-moving horizontal tail surface”. Then you say that it would have been comparable to the F-1 if it had “fully rotating tail surfaces”.

Which is it?

That was a semantic typo, I was hoping no one would notice that. What I said was:
“its main fault being lack of non-moving horizontal tail surfaces that made it very difficult to control ”

I meant to say:
“its main fault being a non-moving horizontal tail surfaces that made it very difficult to control

Now, as for low speed/high AOA control, just what exactly does the F-104 tailplane lack? I’ve flown the jet at slow speeds and high AOA quite a bit and never noticed this problem. In your many hours of F-104 time, what problems did you notice?

I was guessing that the non-moving tailplane of the F-104 was the main factor in its lack of low speed handling, but now with the wing loading specs you provide I think that is the main factor.

You are entitled to your opinions…but you aren’t entitled to your own facts.

And the fact is that the F-8 had a wing loading in the high 70s, while the F-104 wing loading was up around 105 or so, depending on what weight is used. The F-4 had a wing loading around 80, the Mirage F-1 a little higher at 90 or so. The F-8 wing loading is much closer to the F-4 and F-1 than it is the F-104.

Well the wing loading is much higher than I would have guessed, I was just going by appearance, the size of the wing compared to the size of the aircraft with the Mirage F1. But now I see now the wing loading is much higher thanks to the specs you provide.

You seem to be hung up on tail plane design and low speed control. Why?

Again I will admit I could be wrong here, there are plenty of jets with fixed tailsurfaces that have excellent high AoA handling.

Much superior to the Viggen?

Why did the Swedes bother building the Viggen then?

Well this would require another thread to be started to debate the merrits of the Viggens aerodynamic configuration. Its my belief that there is too much weight put on the canards to give the jet safer stalling characteristics which negate the normal advantages you get with a canard. Like say with the HIMAT you have the CoG more squarely set on the wing which gives the canard much more leverage requiring much less control force to maneuver the a/c. If the Viggen were redesigned as a FBW jet, that would allow the wing area to be moved forward which would drastically improve the jets handling.

Do you have references for those statements?

Ive seen these casualty statistics a couple of times in books but I cant find them anywhere on the net. Maybe someone here would know where to find them: losses of german WW2 pilots vs total number who served.

Schorsch- Of course I could be wrong about german public opinion, Im only going by what I read.

That’s interesting. Its hard to imagine the word “German” and “minimally trained” in the same sentence but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

It took a long time for the german economy to recover from the devastation of WW2 so I would guess the political climate was sort of anti-military. Also ex-Luftwaffe personal were blamed by the public for losing the war, although only about 2000 out of 70,000 pilots survived so there were not a lot left to blame. Incidentally Erich Hartmann was against the idea of acquiring F-104s and his opposition caused damage to his military career.