Condition: very good, with shelf wear.Includes a bundle of press cuttings and inserts from the original owner
1st Edition.
First, this was a phenomenal performer. It flew at as much as Mach 2.2 (over twice the speed of sound); it reached over 100,000 feet in some test flights. Lockheed's "skunk works" worked on this plane, beginning design work in 1952--with the fighter becoming operational in 1958. It was smallish for a fighter, but its performance was outsized. Flying the plane was a challenge. While it had some amazing performance potential, it could be hard to handle in certain situations. In another work, it was noted that Germans referred to the F-104 as the "widowmaker," because of the number of crashes. This book addresses that and observes that that was not the norm--although if a pilot was not careful in certain situations, the plane could "misbehave."
