Thanks to the horrendous loss rate of the F104 Starfighter in crashes, there was a black joke going around in the 70s, it went:
How do you go about acquiring an F104 Starfighter?
You buy a field and wait.
There's a bit of local lore about the 104. A USAF plane got into difficulty and had to make an emergency landing at Cranfield. The high landing speed and long run-out meant it quickly ran out of runway and made an awful mess on the landscape.
Some days later an angry farmer type marched into Newport Pagnell nick, dumped a burlap sack on the counter and made a comment along the lines that he didn't appreciate the Americans dumping their rubbish in his fields.
An unsuspecting desk sergeant peered inside the sack to find the pilots head, complete with helmet, inside.
Very skittish aircraft with a relatively small lifting surface meant they were very difficult at low speed, and while stable at higher speed they then had the turning circle of a one legged cat burying a turd on a frozen pond. But make the wings bigger and the single engine wouldn't be able to provide the performance required from the design brief.
As I recall the Germans had the highest attrition rate, not helped by the all too common German foul weather and use in the ground attack role - it was not intended as an all weather fighter and was too unforgiving at low altitude - and lost about 22% of theirs.
However, even the Americans also realised that it was an unforgiving S.O.B, and while it was high performance it had limited range and armament so wasn't much cop at anything other than point defence interdiction. Around 14% of the US planes were lost to accident, which wasn't considered a woeful number at the time but still far worse than aircraft with comparable roles and performance, such as the British Lightning. More viable alternatives soon started to appear in the shape of the F4 (more reliable, stable, genuinely multi-role), and the 104 was retired from US service early than originally planned in 60's, and from air national guard service in the early 70's. The F4 went on to have a far better safety record, and consequently served over twice as long in US service (38 years, finally retiring from the ANG in 1996).
The sad footnote is that the F104 did see combat in Vietnam...and scored no kills, despite combat losses of its own. So apart from setting some altitude, speed, and time to altitude records, it actually was a pretty poor combat aircraft. Shame, because they look so futuriatic and awesome.
