Originally Posted by
Tankertrashnav
Indeed. I notice that on forums like this whenever anyone mentions the F104G Starfighter, someone inevitably comes in with the "widowmaker" comment, but for some reason the Meteor has escaped that reputation. In fact the Meteor statistics were truly dreadful, 890 were lost in service, resulting in the deaths of 450 pilots. Maybe the fact that many of those killed were young single National Service pilots meant that the "widowmaker" name was never applied to the Meteor
I believe Danny42c mentioned this in the "gaining a brevet" thread.
IIRC, the staggering Meteor loss rate was largely down to the insistence on single-engine training. It finally dawned on the powers-that-be that they were losing more aircraft and pilots/instructors in a month by training for engine failures than there were actual incidences of failure in 5 years.
Those figures are out of thin air because I don't know the actual ones, even if Danny stated them, but the basic principle's correct.