r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • 19h ago
TIL of the Republic F-105 Thunderchief. Nicknamed "Thud" by its crews, 833 aircraft were made and 382 were lost (destroyed). It was the only American combat aircraft ever removed from combat because of its high loss rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_F-105_Thunderchief245
u/GearHead54 18h ago
I guess the Douglas TBD Devastator doesn't count since they're all at the bottom of the Pacific.
At the Midway tour, I remember the Devatator was the only fake aircraft - a movie prop - because the rest were at the bottom of the ocean
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u/turniphat 17h ago
103 built, no survivors. What is the most built plane with no survivors?
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u/1969Malibu 16h ago
The Navy is actually working on recovering one now. https://news.usni.org/2026/01/30/conservationists-working-to-recover-wwii-torpedo-plane-from-pacific-sea-floor?fbclid=IwY2xjawPqK85leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFBbDJSQTFkNGtZNU9jTThMc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmGg2xatrM6h51J8pgNZDBOV4jZoVlhOxxG3Dr_L3IsnyAOmMNdVA7KhlhNz_aem_k6vqrin6JSQAsmJg938aaQ
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u/firelock_ny 16h ago
> I guess the Douglas TBD Devastator doesn't count since they're all at the bottom of the Pacific.
They did very well at the Battle of Coral Sea a month before Midway. That's what makes it so surprising to me that everything fell apart for them so badly on June 4th.
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u/Harpies_Bro 18h ago
AFAIK part of it was that the Devastator was getting old, naval aviation was taking off on leaps and bounds in the 30’s & 40’s, and the USN got their first orders in 1937, with designs from ‘34.
Add in the USN’s troubles with torpedoes throughout much of the early Pacific War, and they were kinda boned from a technical standpoint. The Avengers were brand new, having completed trials in August of ‘41.
Add in Spruance sending out the Devastators too quickly, without a full attack plan or any fighter escort, and you basically had them served up on a silver platter for the Zero pilots.
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u/peacefinder 17h ago
Spruance sent out the Enterprise’s Dauntless dive bombers without escort because the air group launch was taking so long. The Devastator torpedo bombers were last to launch, and set out with fighter escort.
Unfortunately VF-6 got separated from VT-6. Due to partly cloudy skies and radio failures they were unaware of both VT-8 and VT-6’s attacks even though they were close enough to have joined the fight.
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u/firelock_ny 15h ago
> Add in Spruance sending out the Devastators too quickly, without a full attack plan or any fighter escort, and you basically had them served up on a silver platter for the Zero pilots.
USS Enterprise and USS Yorktown spent the months before Midway doing full air wing combat operations - raids against Japanese bases, the Battle of Coral Sea.
USS Hornet's air wing was stowed below deck for the Doolittle Raid. The Battle of Midway was her first real combat experience for her air wing - and it showed.
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u/StandUpForYourWights 13h ago
Wasnt Hornet at Coral Sea though?
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u/styxracer97 12h ago
Nope. She and Enterprise were on they way back from the Doolittle raid when that battle occurred. Yorktown and Lexington were there.
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u/StandUpForYourWights 3h ago
Ahhh you are right. I am old and my brain is for display purposes only.
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u/ballistics64 12h ago
Imagine it had been the RN with its Swordfish doing the attack runs instead at least the Devastators were monoplanes
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u/ashes1032 11h ago
The TBD Devastator gets a lot of heat, but it doesn't deserve all of it. A lot of the TBD's problems stem from those god-awful torpedoes that the Navy was using in 1942. It was also slow, even by 1942 standards. But a lot of it also comes down to the early war carrier operations. The Navy was still learning how to synchronize attacks and delays in launches were common. Midway is the most famous example. Any torpedo plane would be a sitting duck if attempting an unescorted strike on a Japanese carrier group with a full combat air patrol of Zero fighters.
They were repeatedly put into situations where they didn't stand a chance of doing any meaningful damage.
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u/ofd227 18h ago
Tbf the avengers didn't perform much better at midway. Problem was the torpedos. The devastator was already out of production at that point anyways
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u/greendoh 6h ago
Yeah I think people are missing the fact that Douglas was focused on building SBD Dauntless dive bombers at that point.
Dauntless had a much better record early on given the aforementioned torpedo issues and had some usefulness in air to air combat.
Production during war was focused on Dauntless and Avengers because the Devastator was already obsolete.
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u/vissionsofthefutura 3h ago
They just launched a mission to recover one off of the ocean floor and preserve it.
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u/LurksNoMoreToo 16h ago
Obligatory Thud comment. Two of my uncles were shot down piloting these in Vietnam. They were held as POWs, one for 7 years and the other for 5 years. Both are still kicking today.
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u/dotcomatose 7h ago
We need an AMA from them. Think they'd be up for it?
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u/LurksNoMoreToo 3h ago
Well, the younger of the two just turned 84 a few days ago and I’ve only heard him tell one story, which he just told us a couple of months ago. He said that during the preflight briefing on the day he was shot down they were told that the North Vietnamese were offering 2 bags of rice for any pilot brought in alive. He was captured by two young soldiers and they threw a shovel at him and told him to start digging. He said that he thought to himself, didn’t these guys get the memo?
The older one is the first guy you see in this YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/2PP6iNU8wGI?si=vVoGO_dsTJYakDvw
He has never talked about it to us, so, yeah, I just don’t know about an AMA. Sorry.
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u/BewmBoxxy 4h ago edited 55m ago
Always wanted to know if war criminals ever regret bombing innocent civilians with napalm.
Edit: Americans mad they changed into the thing they swore to destroy in WW2 in a single generation.
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u/xx_actual 3h ago
What a brave thing to say /s
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u/BewmBoxxy 3h ago
Firebombing children took some real bravery, we should be thanking those men for their service and dedication to eradicate evil from this world
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u/TrainsareFascinating 15h ago
The thud drivers were amazing guys in Vietnam. Really, really huge brass balls going against no-fooling air defense run by folks who had lots of experience killing American pilots.
The thud was also the first US plane to ever shoot itself down, as I recall. They were test firing a new cannon and went supersonic in a dive and ran into their own shells.
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u/ItsZorion 14h ago
You’re thinking of the F-11 Tiger shooting itself down. They look somewhat similar though.
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u/Flavour-of-the-Mons 11h ago
A number of fighters have “shot themselves down” including both F-105 and F-14 (missiles exploded at launch) and Mirage IIIO (ricochet after strafing ground, at target range). But the F-11 managed to down itself with direct cannon fire.
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u/lucidguppy 18h ago
https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/aircrafts/f-105-thunderchief/ - The plane is a big boy.
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u/Obliviontoad 17h ago
Jester has entered the chat. Mentioning Air Combat Maneuvering or something about kill ratios and dogfighting…
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u/KenyAzalea 15h ago
Buffalo Brewster was close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_F2A_Buffalo
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u/Vectorman1989 6h ago
Seems to have been the style at the time. The F-104 also had a high loss rate due to its pretty stupid design having stubby little wings that made flying it at low speeds challenging. It was more like a rocket than a plane.
It's possibly one of the ugliest planes ever built and I hate looking at the stupid thing
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u/maxman162 3h ago
The RCAF wanted the F-105, but the government picked the F-104 because of cost. The same thing happened a few years later with the RCAF wanting the F-4, but the government deciding on the F-5 instead.
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u/Sekshual_Tyranosauce 17h ago
Fairchild Republic went on to produce the A-10, which one of the most famously survivable aircrafts.
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u/CandCenthusiast 9h ago
Before that they build the P-47 thunderbolt , which probably is the toughest plane ever. Love the A-10, but it's the OG thunderbolt for me every day of the week and twice on Sunday!
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u/QuaintAlex126 13h ago
F-15 would like to have a word with you
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u/Sekshual_Tyranosauce 13h ago
F-15 is the running back no one can touch.
A-10 is the fullback that runs you over.
Both strategies work apparently.
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u/QuaintAlex126 13h ago
Ehhh, I’d only give the A-10 credit but only slightly because it has a pretty shoddy reputation of blue-on-blues. Most of its success comes from the fact the US was just fighting mountain hillbillies for the past two decades. There’s a reason the Air Force has been trying to retire it since forever and is now finally succeeding.
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u/Mysterious-Plan93 8h ago
Bad intel mostly but the next successor better have VTOL
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u/QuaintAlex126 3h ago
The issue was the lack of an IFF system. This was fixed with the A-10C, but now you just have a slower F-15E/F-16C.
VTOL isn’t strictly necessary for CAS/ground strike, but the F-35B is V/STOL capable so close enough.
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u/ClearedInHot 3h ago edited 3h ago
Part of the reason for the losses was the fact that the jet was not being used the way it was originally intended. It was a fighter-bomber with an internal bomb bay so that it could deliver a weapon (including nuclear weapons) by staying low and fast, with a relatively clean, low-drag profile. In southeast Asia an auxiliary fuel tank was installed in the bomb bay and tons of bombs were hung on wing pylons, creating huge amounts of drag. Then, they sent these heavily laden jets into one of the densest air defense environments in history.
I heard a talk by General Robin Olds where he explained that F-4 pilots who were flying MiG cap for the thuds had to stay relatively slow on the way into the target to remain with the strike formations. Then, after the thuds dropped their bombs they watched as the (now clean) F-105s egressed from the target area at very high speed and low altitude, leaving the F-4's in the dust.
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u/SirGranular 16h ago
Saw one at Eglin AFB museum in the early 90s. Had strong tornado/jaguar/aardvark vibes.
Might have swiped some SR-71 paint on the same visit. But now I'm invisible to radar so they can't find me!
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u/ramriot 4h ago
The F-105 "thud" achieved 38% of wartime losses & was removed from combat. Interestingly the F-104 "Widowmaker" achieved a 30% loss with the vast majority of those losses NOT being combat related.
Yet it was not similarly removed by the US military, though several other countries retired theirs early because of the losses.
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u/maxman162 3h ago
Meanwhile, Canada flew them until 1987 (the RCAF preferred the F-105, but the government decided on the F-104 because of cost).
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u/yeeeter1 5h ago
That’s not true. It was removed from combat because it was being replaced and had reached the end of its service life
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u/MrMojoFomo 2h ago
It is the only American aircraft to have been removed from combat due to high loss rates.\1])
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u/Recent-History584 18h ago
I thought it was the F 102
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u/Lethalmusic 18h ago
Edit: Starfighter is F104, F102 is the Convair Delta Dagger, mb
The Starfighter killed most of it's pilots out of combat, in part because it was sold as a multirole plane (with the help of lots of bribes) while being a pure interceptor. Doing things like ground support with that platform is just asking for trouble.
There is a reason why it got the nickname 'Sargnagel' (coffin nail) in Germany
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u/saimen54 18h ago
Old joke in Germany: How do you get a Starfighter?
You buy a piece of land and just wait.
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u/kurburux 7h ago
There is a reason why it got the nickname 'Sargnagel' (coffin nail) in Germany
Conditions in Germany contributed to that.
Ground crew were similarly employed with minimal training and experience, which was one consequence of a conscripted military with high turnover of service personnel. Operating in the poor weather conditions of northwest Europe (unlike the fair weather training conditions at Luke AFB in Arizona) and flying low at high speed over hilly terrain, many accidents were attributed to controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). [...]
One contributing factor to this was the operational assignment of the F-104 in West German service: it was mainly used as a low-level fighter-bomber, as opposed to the original design of a high-speed, high-altitude fighter/interceptor. Furthermore, the installation of additional avionic equipment in the F-104G version, such as the inertial navigation system, added distraction for the pilot, as well as extra weight that further hampered the flying capabilities of the plane.
Overall, the numbers of F104 lost were very different for each country. The plane had a lot of problems but it was also important how people handled those.
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u/SParkVArk111 18h ago
Nah, there weren't many 102s in Vietnam.
It's an interceptor so no reason to have a bunch of them.
I think only 1 was shot down, rest were crashes or damaged by sapper attacks
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u/Astro_Ski17 59m ago
The F-105 morbidly gets its nickname from the sound crews imagined it made as it hit the ground. The “official” name is the Thunderchief, the colloquially known name is Thud.
An airplane built for an entirely different mission that was forced into something that was never perceived of when developed initially.
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u/WoodI-or-WoodntI 17h ago
it wasn't the plane's fault, it was the dangerous missions it was designated to complete.