FlightSim.Com Review: Captain Sim F-104 Starfighter

Starfighters in the Real World
By Mad Max Merlin
Combat Flight Simulation Editor

Click on the image below and watch the video. See Starfighters in action with the only fully operational, civilian owned Supersonic Jet Team on the U.S. Airshow Circuit.

Starfighters is the world's fastest air show team. Flying two beautifully restored CF-104 and CF-104D aircraft, pilots Rick "Comrade" Svetkoff and Wolfgang Czaia thrill thousands of air show visitors every season. The video clip above gives you a taste of what the Starfighter can do in the real world.

Zipper vs. Fishbed:
Starfighters See Combat Action

The F-104 saw combat with the USAF in Vietnam. It also saw combat action while serving with the Pakistani Air Force in battle against the Indian Air Force MiG-21.

In 1961, F-104A/B aircraft were transferred to the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) in response to Indian Air Force (IAF) acquiring Soviet MiG-21 supersonic fighters. During the 1965 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan, the Starfighters proved to be awesome weapons in the hands of Pakistani pilots.

Zipper kills included a PAF F-104A flying at 600 knots that shot down an IAF Mystere IVA with a Sidewinder missile and another guns-hot encounter where an IAF Mystere was shot down by the Vulcan cannon of another F-104. This same PAF pilot made a near fatal blunder when he turned on a second Mystere. After the first kill, the F-104 pilot slowed down to dogfight and lost the Starfighter's speed advantage. The Mystere out-turned him and scored cannon hits on his F-104. The Zipper was badly damaged and the PAF pilot ejected.

The F-104A was able to make at least one successful non-visual interception of a high-flying IAF Canberra bomber.

The first encounter in history between Mach 2 fighters took place on September 11, 1965. A single PAF F-104A encountered four IAF MiG-21s from Halwara. The F-104 managed to escape by exiting the combat at tree-top height and Mach 1.1, which the MiG-21s were unable to match. No blood was drawn during this encounter. But, I'll bet that Zipper scorched a few treetops!

When it found itself confronted with the Indian Air Force's diminutive Folland Gnats, the Pakistani F-104As often found themselves outmaneuvered. This was especially true if the Starfighter pilot chose not to use his Mach 2 speed advantage and decided instead to engage in low-speed dogfights with his opponents. In addition, since most of the air-to-air fighting occurred at low altitudes, the Starfighter's Sidewinder air-to-air missiles were often unable to distinguish between target aircraft and ground clutter and a lot of missiles missed their targets. The Starfighter's afterburner saved many pilot's lives when combat turned defensive. PAF pilots could just light the fire, break off combat at will and bug out of trouble in a hurry.

During the 1965 war with India, the PAF F-104s flew 246 sorties, including 42 at night and claimed four IAF aircraft destroyed for the loss of two F-104As.

War between Pakistan and India broke out again on December 7, 1971. For the second war, the Indian MiG force had grown into a formidable battle group with eight operational squadrons. To assist the Pakistanis, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan sent No 9 Squadron of the Royal Jordanian Air Force with about ten F-104As.

While the Indians and Pakistanis have published wildly differing figures for air victories and losses during this war, this time out the F-104 came off second-best in the few encounters that occurred with IAF MiG-21s. The PAF F-104s scored no confirmed victories and suffered at least two losses. Indian air historians claim that five PAF Starfighters were lost in combat. They also claim that two Jordanian Starfighters were shot down by MiG-21s on the last day of the 1971 war. The PAF has admitted that two PAF Starfighters were lost in combat with IAF MiG-21s during the 1971 war, plus another one lost to ground fire. According to Pakistani sources, nine IAF MiG-21s were shot down on the Western front, with two of them being shot down by PAF fighters, one by an Chinese-built F-6 and another by a F-86 Sabre. The PAF has admitted that the maneuverability of the F-104 was poor during close-in combat and that the F-6 and F-86 were far better in a dogfight.

Captain Sim F-104 Starfighter For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (31 March 2004)

ifty five years ago, as it was becoming painfully obvious that relations with the USSR were unlikely to improve, the USAF issued a requirement for a day air superiority fighter. At first glance, there was nothing unusual in the spec, but a detailed perusal revealed that the Air Force was calling for a machine in which everything was to be subordinated to performance - the new aircraft was a pure weapons delivery platform, and if maneuverability happened to be compromised by the emphasis on speed and altitude, well so be it.

Every designer that looked at the project came up with a different solution, the only thing all of them having in common being that they were extreme airplanes. Lockheed, more inventive than most, looked at everything from a rocket propelled plane to deltas of the sort favored by the British; but though their winning design looked like no other jet built before or since, and was dubbed a widow maker in its time, it played a powerful part in shaping the future of manned flight. The F-104 flew barely two years after the specification was issued and came to immediate notice, breaking the world speed and altitude records in 1958 and capturing a clutch of timed climb records.

The trouble was that the aerodynamic compromises that went into achieving such speed did not make for forgiving characteristics at the opposite end of the flight envelope. The F-104 had a virtually unswept wing which was relatively efficient in supersonic flight only because it was razor thin; the corollary being that the plane had a very high stall speed and what can only be described as vicious handling below 200 knots. This wouldn't have been a problem if training programs in NATO air forces had been ready, but the trouble was that by the time instructors had learned about the sting in the F-104's tail, many of their students were dead. Few planes can have had such vilification heaped upon them and for a time it seemed that the Starfighter would never be out of the news, with wives' and widows' associations campaigning against it (the German air force was losing one F-104 a week at one stage), but then, all of a sudden, the military got their heads around this new toy and the accidents ceased as suddenly as they had begun.

Despite its reputation, there was nothing inherently evil about the F-104; the problem being purely and simply that for many NATO air forces, the F-104 was nothing short of a revolution in technology and perfomance. Pilots went from planes like the F-86, which were navigated with watch, compass and chart and could barely reach mach 1.1 in a dive, to one that was equipped with inertial navigation, radar with terrain display and avoidance functions and which could reach mach 2.0 in a climb. To fly it was to find yourself on first name terms with Sir Isaac.

Sir who? Newton - Isaac Newton, remember him? Yeah, that's right, apples and all that stuff. He came down particularly hard on the F-104.

Sir Isaac made his entrance because once Starfighter pilots had conquered tropospheric flight, still other challenges faced them, particularly the phenomenon which came to be known as 'coffin corner', a particular danger of the high altitude interceptions which many F-104s were destined to carry out. The laws of physics dictate that at very high altitudes, the stall speed and never exceed speed of an airframe converge until they lie so uncomfortably close together that a small miscalculation can lead to disaster. In the case of the F-104, further practical considerations (such as the afterburner flame out boundary) also came into play and determined that it was usually best to stay below the 1.0 G stall line in order to be able to maintain altitude and be left with a small margin for manuevering, which meant that the plane had to be flown within incredibly tight limits at altitude.

It didn't end there. A peculiarity of the flight envelope was that steady state maximum thrust peaked just below Mach 1.0, following which it actually decreased before beginning a slow rise at around mach 1.2, thrust not reaching the Mach 1.0 level again before the plane was pulling Mach 1.3. In a nutshell, drag increased faster than the engine could overcome it shortly after the transonic speed segment, and in order to accelerate up to mach 2.0 some fancy tactics were needed. One fairly standard procedure was to accelerate with afterburner at Mach 0.9 up to 36000 feet and then to dive back to 20000 feet in order to accelerate up to Mach 1.4 - using Sir Isaac's help to beat the drag notch. After that speed was reached, the nose was pulled up and the plane would accelerate unaided up to Mach 2.0 and could climb much higher; zooms up to 70000 feet or or more being possible, although at that sort of altitude, the aircraft followed a largely ballistic trajectory and truly deserved the eptithet of 'a missile with a man in it.' The F-104 tested the boundaries of what was known and perhaps it wasn't too surprising that it brought problems in its wake; we wouldn't design planes like the Starfighter now, but fifty years ago, there wasn't any other choice.

Fortunately, there is no chance of killing yourself piloting the Captain Sim F-104, but despite some faults, it gets my vote as one of the most interesting add-ons released for Flight Simulator in a long while. Yeah, we have had some very high quality military jets in the past, notably the MiG-21 from the same developer, but what puts the Starfighter in a different class is its low speed handling, which is absolutely appallingly bad - which is exactly how it should be. If you want to try something that quits flying at beyond the Vne of the Cessna 172, look no further, this one is for you. Just don't try to land it.

The add-on is a 49 Mb download, which is going to raise a few eyebrows among readers who lack broadband, but it is also available on CD, which should ease the pain. You can download, buy and fly it in just a few minutes using a high-speed broadband connection. The kicker is that the download version costs $35.95 and the CD an extra $8.99, making this a relatively expensive buy by FS add-on standards. For some years, thirty dollars was the accepted ceiling on what packages should cost, but Captain Sim aren't the first to break it and surely won't be the last. Quite apart from the fact that inflation takes its toll, the small margins that developers make on add-ons definitely limit quality - you only get what you to pay for.

Captain Sim recommend a 2.0 GHz CPU, with 512 Mb of RAM, a 128 Mb 3D video card and Windows XP; though they say the F-104 can be run on a 900 MHz system with 128 Mb of RAM, a 16 Mb 3D video card and Windows 2000. This makes it one of the first add-ons I can recall which does not run on Windows ME, heralding the passing of an age. One potential trap is that your PC must have a C:\ hard drive partition. I installed it on a 3.0 GHz Pentium with 1 Gb of RAM, running XP SP1, my video card being an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and I had no problems. Just in passing, I occasionally get email from people who can't run packages on systems similar to my own and it almost always ends up boiling down to video card drivers or those programs that Windows just loves to load into the tray down there bottom left.

The package includes two different planes: a two seat TF-104 and an F-104G; each being available with various loadouts which can be specified using a neat little utility called the 'Texture and Configuration Editor' or F-104 TCE for short. Among other things, the TCE lets you alter the fuel load graphically, but be careful leaving it too light, as the full throttle endurance is less than one might wish and there is nothing more embarassing than flaming out on short final. Don't even think of glide approaches; the F-104 will glide, but only at 287 knots, so if the pony quits, eject (-: One key point about the TCE is that it must be used to launch the F-104, as loading the aircraft in the conventional fashion using the FS menus is liable to leave you with wrong entries for weight and fuel load, the results being unpredictible to say the least. For example, if you don't use the TCE, the TF-104 will load without any gauges in the VC, neither plane will have clickable gauges in the VC and the eyepoints will be wrong. This is a big departure from the normal way of doing things and the manual really ought to devote more space to describing how the F-104 should be run - the procedure is to start FS2004 with another plane loaded, then run the TCE, select the configuration, plane and livery you want, click save and wait for it to automatically load up in FS.

One might question the fact that the TCE has to be used to load the F-104, given that it is such a non-standard approach, but it has the benefit of being incredibly flexible - it is the work of an instant to fuel and load the plane in any one of five configurations. I assume that the TCE writes the .cfg file on the fly, which accounts for why the plane can end up with a faulty configuration if the TCE isn't used for loading it. Just in passing it might be worth noting that I occasionally got some graphical funnies in the TF-104 VC on loading, but these went away if I did a reload.

The visual model is pretty much beyond reproach, with detailed everything, but before you do even so much as take a peek at it, please read the manual. Failure to do this will lead to frustration beyond belief, because this add-on is not at all easy to fly and landing it is a real art. This is one case where users with flight yokes are going to have to plug in their joysticks again, because though you can fly the F-104 with a yoke, it is much easier with a stick and unless you are very experienced with FS, you are going to need all the help you can get.

Okay, so the hell with the manual, let's do just one circuit. The real F-104 used boundary layer control to improve its low speed flight characteristics and had the biggest, draggiest flaps they could mount on its stubby wings, which means that final should be long, flown at above 190 knots and with around 88% rpm; touchdown may be made at any speed between 155 to 185 knots and don't flare - just fly it on. As you have undoubtedly deduced, the combination of spool up time and a 12% reserve of power means that every approach is a potential go around; spiced up by the fact that you don't have enough fuel to keep doing it all day. Dragging in is just not an option, so careful planning is essential - this means developing a close personal relationship to the position and homing indicator and the FS GPS if you intend getting back in one piece. You did take off from a field with a TACAN, didn't you? You didn't?

Anyway, back to the visual model. Needless to say, this is executed in Gmax and I couldn't find any major deficiencies in it, though I didn't examine every inch of every one of the fifteen different liveries. One caution is that the F-104 really hammers the silicon and Captain Sim are not joking when they make that recommended system spec - I would be interested to hear how well it goes on a 900 MHz Pentium, but I suspect that you would only achieve good frame rates in clear skies or at really simple airports with all the sliders to the left. All the usual animations are included, plus spoilers, a drag chute, exhaust smoke and afterburner effects. For some reason the viewpoint is set unduly distant from the plane and I had to zoom a long way in to get most of the shots, but as you can see, the add-on definitely looks the part. Besides the USAF, you can fly with the Belgian, Canadian, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Turkish air forces; and for good measure there is a German Navy livery, a Soviet one and a machine from the Starfighters display team, these being the guys who advised on the flight modelling...

...which seems pretty much okay to me, though I must say I have never flown anything remotely like the F-104, but from what I read it seems about right, given that most of the subtle stuff is far beyond anything the FS2004 physics engine can be expected to deliver. The controls are pretty sloppy below 150 knots, then progressively develop more bite until simmers using yokes will find the high rate of roll problematic. Captain Sim have realised that many users are going to find the F-104 tough to handle, so they have taken the imaginative step of including a virtual flight instructor, the friendly voice of Andy Bush, who chimes in when you forget little details like raising the flaps and gear after takeoff. Much though I found Andy useful, his limited repertoire of advice meant that I was glad there is an option to turn him off so that I could practice my crashes in private. However, the good news is that Captain Sim have programmed this bit of the package really well and Andy never gave inappropriate advice.

The panel is pure sixties joy, with a selection of instruments such as few spam can drivers are privileged to see. The F-104 was created in the days when they put gauges in where they could find space for them and it was just kind of tough that the plane had a cramped cockpit to begin with. The upshot is that just about the only instrument in the 'right' place is the attitude indicator and even that is a military model. There isn't such a thing as a DI, its place being taken by the position and homing indicator (PHI), the rest of the instruments being squeezed in as and when. You get authentic doll's eyes for flap position, a thing called an 'automatic pitch control system indicator' which lets you know when things are about to go really pear shaped and apart from the radios, the rest of the panel is mostly devoted to telling you how the engine is doing.

Of all the radios, the Nav set is the most interesting, because it is a genuine Cold War TACAN transceiver and you don't see many of those around in FS. If you haven't come across one of these beauties before, it is likely to be something of a puzzle at first, because these sets assume that the first digit of the frequency to be set will always be 1. So if you wanted to tune 110.50, you would tune the four digits on the receiver to 1, 0, 5 and 0. Once the frequency is set, the DME can be read and the PHI can be used to show the bearing to the beacon, all you have to do is to line up the lubber line with the azimuth index and fly to it. Herein lies a gotcha, because FS2004 does not differentiate between TACANs and VORs but the Captain Sim F-104 transceiver does - and though it can be used to tune a VOR, it only returns DME information, just like a real TACAN transceiver. Fortunately TACANS all lie in the frequency range 108.00 to 117.95, so in theory, if you tune a beacon with a frequency of 117.95 or below, the PHI should point to it. Unfortunately, in practice, the PHI will tune some TACANs and not others, so for example, it wouldn't give me a bearing to either of the TACANS at Mildenhall, Lakenheath or Leuchars in the UK, though it will tune the Edwards AFB TACAN without a problem. Though the unit will also provide a QDM to an NDB, if you get really lost (the ADF is a treat), there also is the option of popping up the GPS295, which looks a little incongruous in the panel, but should get you back to base. In reality, most F-104 missions were flown largely under radar control, vectoring being the order of the day.

The autopilot is another refugee from the age of steam and has heading, altitude and Mach hold; basically, it is only intended to take the workload off the pilot once the F-104 is at operational flight, all other phases being flown under direct control. The add-on's radar shows targets within 90 degrees of arc and thirty degrees of azimuth from the Starfighter's heading - the real thing could be tilted to look up/down and on at least some models also showed terrain, but FS2004 doesn't allow tilt and none of the terrain functions are enabled in the package. I haven't asked how the radar detects targets, but I suspect it uses the standard FS TCAS function, so you should be able to perform practice intercepts on the AI planes - they certainly show up, as you can see in the screen shot above. Finally, you get a smart gunsight, with a thing called a 'true airspeed error indicator mode display' which shows a headup relay of roll and airspeed information; but in FS2004 it can do little more and I flew most of the time with it switched off.

The VC is all one can expect, with the added bonus of having clickable gauges, so it is possible to fly the plane using it without ever venturing into the 2D cockpit. Beware the fact that if you do not load the plane using the TCE utility you will end up with a passive VC and that the TF-104 won't have one at all.

The sound set duplicates the irritating sound that the F-104 was so well known for making, a sort of out of tune oboe noise that cuts in when the throttle is set at about 82%. This was such a standard feature of Starfighters on approach that residents near airbases could identify them returning at night without even looking up!

So that is it. With qualifications, another good effort from Captain Sim. The planes are excellent, though the sheer level of detail in them means that they will stress sub 2.0 Ghz systems and like any add-on of this level of complexity, there will be some users who will have troubles purely because of driver conflicts. Leaving aside the sound set, which would be fine without that one noise, the only real drawback of the sim is the manuals, while being adequate for experienced simmers, are a far too concise for most users. Though the takeoff, descent and go-around profiles are invaluable, someone really needs to sit down, bite the bullet and write up the boring detail of how the systems work - this is one of the few consistent faults of Captain Sim stuff, the developers seeming to lose interest once the software turns gold. In addition, I would definitely like to see the PHI/TACAN transceiver patched so that they could pick up the missing channels; TACAN frequencies are hardly a secret, even if Flight Simulator doesn't realise that the darned things exist. But despite these minor faults - and I think that at $35.95, the PHI should be fixed soon - I found it fun to fly and even more exciting to land - a test of my skills to the extent that I am still trying to get the hang of landing off a continuous turn from downwind onto short final. In a bumpy conditions, or a crosswind, the Starfighter is a real handful; given that a steep approach isn't an option, the only way to get down is to wind on more power and bleed it off as late as possible, which is why Lockheed stuck those airbrakes in back there.

In the final analysis, it stands out from the crowd, simply because there isn't another FS jet like it. It has kicked the Captain Sim MiG-21 off my top jet fighter spot, which is saying something.