For Ken Lett, it was like reuniting with an old friend.
“It’s wonderful and so good to see it again … it always was a beautiful airplane,” the veteran aviator said as he looked down the nose of the CF-104 Starfighter at the B.C. Aviation Museum on Friday.
The supersonic jet was the first aircraft to hit Mach 2 — twice the speed of sound — and Lett was the first in the cockpit and at the controls for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1962.
He spent “thousands of hours” in the Starfighter and, as squadron leader, trained dozens of other pilots in the nuclear-capable jet during the Cold War.
“It’s always been one of my favourite airplanes,” said Lett, who flew Spitfires over the Normandy landings during D-Day.
”It wasn’t very gentle at low speeds,” he said. “As long as you kept it going fast, it was great. And it had lots of speed.”
Lett, who turns 100 on July 13, was able to run his hand over the fuselage and share stories with 17 other Starfighter pilots who gathered at the museum to see the jet’s arrival by land from CFB Comox.
The jet, which is no longer airworthy and had been a static display at Comox since 1991, is being restored as a new display at the aviation museum.
The sleek, 54-foot-long jet fighter was brought down the Island Highway by a tractor trailer unit over the previous two nights by Nickel Brothers movers.
The precarious journey with a convoy had some tight squeezes on bridges and around construction zones. Part of the Malahat around Goldstream had to be closed to bring the jet through early Friday morning.
But the Starfighter made it without incident and was cheered on by onlookers throughout the 245-kilometre trek, said Steve Nichol, president of the B.C. Aviation Museum. “People were stopping, taking pictures,” he said. “This isn’t something you see every day. At one point, some construction workers put down their tools, ran for their cameras and started cheering.”
The Starfighter, fondly called “a missile with a man in it,” was used by the Air Force until 1987, when it was replaced by the CF-18 Hornet and represented Canada’s commitment to NATO, warding off threats from Warsaw Pact countries.
It was capable of delivering a nuclear bomb that could obliterate airfields, communications and other targets. It was later fitted with wing bombs and other arms as nuclear threats eased.
Pilots like Willie Anderson, 81, of Victoria and Al Robertson, 82, of Ladner were trained in Cold Lake, Alta., and then served in Europe, where the Starfighter squadrons were stationed at bases in France and Germany.
“When we started using this, its high speed at low level was the advantage both in reconnaissance and nuclear strike,” said Anderson. “When Al and I were on a nuclear strike operation, there was virtually nothing that could catch you. The opposition had to be in the right place at the right time to be able to take you out. During the later portions of any mission, you’re moving about 1,000 feet per second.”
The pilots never delivered any nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but all squadrons were ready. “We had six nuclear strike squadrons, each of which had two aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons ready to go at 15 minutes’ notice,” said Anderson.
“We never actually flew with them, but we practised delivering the weapons using shakes that weighed about 2,000 pounds, same as the parent bomb, so we could prove competency.”
Robertson said he hit Mach 2 on his training runs, but felt no physical sensation after breaking the sound barrier. “Once you got to Mach 1.4 or 1.5, the machine started to accelerate. It was a very steady acceleration,” he said.
Anderson added: “Takeoff is a very different thing. You get a good kick in the ass.”
Robertson’s last run in the Starfighter was in 1970. He went on to become a commercial airline pilot. Anderson did two tours overseas with the Starfighter, last flying in the spring of 1983.
About 750 pilots were trained on the Starfighter.
Murray Thom, now 87 and living in Colwood, flew the jet from 1968 to 1971. He was also one of the few Starlight pilots who survived a crash in the jet.
He was flying in formation with a fellow Starfighter pilot from Quebec at about 2,000 feet when the two made contact.
“We went into some very dark cloud and he lost sight of me. The nose of his airplane hit my tail and knock it off. It pitched me over and I was totally out of control.”
The force of spinning left Thom pinned to the cockpit glass trying to reach the ejection ring below his legs to activate the rocket pack to blast the seat of the airplane. “It took me a couple of seconds to get a hold of it, but once I did … boom … to this day I don’t remember more than I was on my way out,” said Thom. “The next thing I knew I was hanging in my parachute coming out of the clouds.
“My thought was ‘my God, I’m alive.’ ”
The other pilot also bailed and survived, said Thom, who wore his “caterpillar” on his shirt Friday, a small gold pin given to pilots who survive an aircraft ejection with a parachute. The caterpillar represents silk worms that produced the material in early parachutes.
Over the history of the CF-104, there were 110 crashes attributed to everything from bird strikes and engine failures to in- flight collisions. Thirty-seven pilots lost their lives.
Bob Saunders, a former Starfighter pilot who brought his grandson Braxton, 3, to see the plane, flew a number of fighters during his career. “But this one was the Maserati … fast and delightful to fly, but you had to follow the rules,” he said. “You could get yourself into big trouble really quickly. And we lost pilots over the years.”
Saunders said the plan is to fix corrosion issues on the plane and get it painted in the Cold Lake livery, a shiny aluminum body with red tail and white wings.
Former Starfighter pilot Dan Dempsey, the main force in getting the fighter jet to the museum, said the jet switched from nuclear strike and reconnaissance in 1971 to a conventional ground attack role with guns, rockets and bombs.
“One of our best weapons was a Canadian-designed CRV-7 rocket. It had a great standoff range. We carried four pods and could salvo fire 76 rockets in about 1.5 seconds. It was a formidable conventional weapon. ”
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