West Germany: Learning to Handle The Flying Coffin

The pattern of disaster was all too familiar. An F-104G Starfighter, bearing the black formee cross of West Germany’s Luftwaffe on its fuselage, was hurtling over the South German foothills toward the Alps last week when it spun out of control. The pilot managed to eject at about 1,000 ft. and landed unhurt in a tree, but his plane plummeted into the black Bavarian soil south of Augsburg. It was the 100th Luftwaffe Starfighter to crash since the Bundeswehr adopted the hot but unforgiving aircraft in 1961.

A few years ago, a series of similar crashes shook the entire German military establishment. In 1965 alone, 26 of the Lockheed-designed interceptors, built under license by Messerschmitt, fell out of the sky. The wreck rate was a disastrous 83.6 crashes per 100,000 hours of flying time; the international norm is between 15 and 20 crashes per 100,000 flying hours. One problem was that the Germans turned what had been designed as a fairweather, high-altitude interceptor into a low-altitude, multipurpose fighter-bomber and tried to fly it in the tricky weather of Central Europe. Another difficulty was that the Luftwaffe’s pilots and maintenance men lacked the training and experience to handle the complicated, equipment-crammed plane. Before long, the Starfighter came to be known as the “flying coffin.”

When the 100th crash occurred last week, however, there was hardly a murmur in the German press. The reason is that the crash rate in Germany is down to 10.8 per 100,000 flying hours.

Much of the credit goes to Lieut. General Johannes Steinhoff, 56, a hardened World War II ace who shot down 176 planes over Britain, Africa, Italy and Russia and had his face badly mangled in the last of his twelve crack-ups less than a month before the German surrender. Steinhoff took over the Luftwaffe in 1966 with a mandate to “pick up the pieces” of the Starfighter scandal. He tightened organizational control, farmed out some Starfighter maintenance to private industry, which was better equipped to handle it than the Luftwaffe, and introduced more than 2,000 design and safety changes. He also urged his Starfighter pilots to “fly, fly, fly.” Today, his men average 500 to 1,000 hours in the air instead of fewer than 200, the figure when he took over. As a result, Steinhoff now has enough confidence in the Starfighter and his pilots’ skills to have ordered 50 more of the planes to carry the Luftwaffe into the 1970s.