Luftwaffe F104 NCO PIlots
 

I picked up an excellent book in my local discount book store yesterday 'German Starfighters' by Klaus Kropf and was quite surprised to see that the Luftwaffe had NCO pilots flying F104 until at least 1973.
I'd be interested to learn a bit more about this if anyone knows anything? How many, when and why they stopped flying FJ etc....

Mods: Feel free to move to AHN if more appropriate.

I think that Denmark also used to have SNCO F104 pilots. I seem to recall seeing them at Aalborg once. I assumed they were not allowed to play with the F16s and were all retired along with the F104.

I guess thats probably the case, I assumed either rightly or wrongly that having a nuclear strike role may have had something to do with it like the RAF, although I'm not sure when the Luftwaffe picked up that role.

Judging by the book it appears the Marineflieger did not have NCO pilots, just the Luftwaffe.

I remember a grizzled old Warrant Officer equivalent turning up at Cottesmore once in a Do28 and assumed he was ex helicopters, maybe not?

Dutch F104 NCO pilots
 

I know the Royal Netherlands Air Force had at least one NCO F104 pilot. I think he was a sort of Master pilot equivalent and was also the Dutch 500cc motorbike champion. Quite a character.

From an historical perspective, the German armed forces made do with fewer commissioned officers and more senior NCO/WO ranks.

This was particularly so in their army of 1914-18, whereby the grotesque casualty rates of officers in the BEF were not replicated by their opponents .... there simply were not so many in the front line.

OT.

There was a cloggy WO F-16 pilot, who flew down the wire [fence] of the Northern HAS site at LEU, as an intro when their Sqdn arrived [in line abreast] for an mini-exchange.
OK at of below fence height, on past the COC[k] to the inevitable horror of the tower, the next recipients ....


:D

I can vaguely remember something that about a third of Luftwaffe F-104 pilots were NCO's.

Can't remember where from though :confused:
Might have even been part of a talk I attended given by Gunter Rall many years ago, when he was talking about the F-104 in Luftwaffe.

The German "Bundeswehr" was implemented 1955 from scratch. Only few offficers and NCO's had served before in Hitlers forces, but most were just newly recruited civilians. Payment was not very attractive in comparison to other civil jobs, but more money was not available. It was normal at the beginning of the Luftwafffe that most pilots were NCO's. About 10 years later a program was started to allow NCO's serving in specialized tasks to reach officer ranks, as it was getting more and more difficult to keep those highly qualified soldiers in the forces.

And when the Germans started again in 1955, a lot of their instructors were RAF.

Indeed. Among notable ex-Luftwaffe 'aces' that undertook refresher basic flight training with the RAF were 197 victory 'ace' Walter Kuprinski and 301 victory 'ace' Gerhard Barkorn. Both doing their courses at No.3 FTS, RAF Feltwell in 1956.

I was on QRA in 1969/70 at Wildenrath when a NCO piloting a F104 (on his first night solo in the FRG) got caught out by bad weather at Jever and diverted to Wildenrath. The weather was terrible and it was dark. He touched down at about 250 knots, half way up the wrong runway, made a neat hole in the barrier and subsequently punched out. The boys took him to the Officers' Mess and were bollocked for doing so by a senior officer from Handbrake House.

After all, he was only a NCO :ugh:

Fw Karl-Heinz Aschenberg.



He was very lucky he was flying a 104G equipped with the GQ-7A MB seat with 0-0 capability. The German 104 fleet had only started being retro-fitted with this seat in mid 68-ish, and by the time of this ejection, I don't think all the fleet had been completed, as there were later ejections from 104's that were not with a GQ-7A seat.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I assume they flew the full range of missions including nuclear strike- I assume the F104 had this mission from fairly early on? (One of the reasons the RAF got rid of NCO pilots was because it was not acceptable for an NCO to be in charge of an aircraft thus equipped).

What was the RAF rationale for not allowing NCO pilots as distinct from Officer pilots to fly nuclear armed aircraft?

It had nothing to do with the mission profile at all or with the aircraft type.
The nuclear strike amunition was not under control of the Luftwaffe. Whatever the command structures in charge of this special amunition would have decided concerning it's implementation we gladly never found out.

Karl-Heinz Aschenberg was course 69-03 at Sheppard and graduated T-38 30th october 1968. At the time of the crash 21.04.1970 he was assigned to 1. Staffel JG 71 Richthofen at Wittmund AFB and had his first solo flight done month before. When I met him 1977 he was flying F-4F in the rank of a captain. I lost track of him when he went to Sheppard AFB as instructor 1983.

Interesting stuff Gents, many thanks.

Pretty sure (stand to be corrected) that the reason pilots and navs had to be commissioned officers was that the nukes were American and their rules state that an aircraft captain with nukes on board had to be an officer.

I seem to remember there being Danish NCO F16 pilots when I was at Binbrook mid eighties.

There were certainly a lot of Master Pilots around when I joined up in '74 plus lots of other NCO single wingers still in from the war.

My Dad was in Hamburg just after the war when a lot of aircrew were awaiting demob. He ran an RAF motor pool and he always thought it was sad that he had decorated NCO aircrew doing menial jobs for him while they waited for civvy street. Don't know what officer aircrew awaiting demob got up to.

Edit: Just as an aside, Erich Hartmann, the top scoring ace of all time resigned from the Luftwaffe over his opposition to the F104.

The V force Valiants used to have Flt.Sgt. or Master Signallers acting as AEOs up to about 1963.

Thing - I was shown Erich Hartman's (and his wife's) grave in Weil im Schönbuch near Stuttgart. His house still stands in the same village.The headstone depicts a large bird sheltering a smaller bird under it's left wing.
All very appropriate but it also attracts hoards of 'spotters' during the summer months simply because of who he was and what he did.

in 1963, I recall my father, as a M/Pilot, was posted from Station Flight at Gutersloh to Wittering for Victor OCU and then had to return to Gutersloh unnacompanied and resume Station Flight duties on the T7. (I believe something happened with his original replacement in one of the T7s in a place called Marienfeld)
When he returned to Wittering I think the NCO pilot / Blue Steel thing had kicked off(if it hadn't already ) and having been on the strength once they kept him for a short while until he angled for something more up his own street.
He went to Lindholme on NBS ( we lived reasonably close to Lindholme in the Lincoln area) and I often used to hear him on the Wainfleet range when I was an airman in ATC at Marham. Then he jumped ship with a golden bowler and joined SOAF. By then I was crew on a 203 sqn Nimrod and he used bring a SOAF aeroplane down from Bait to Masirah and we could meet up over a bottle or two of Champers.