11 April 1975: “The only time the five ship fleet of NASA Dryden’s F-104 Starfighters was ever airborne at the same time. Pilots were: F-104N #811-Bill Dana; F-104N #812-Tom McMurtry; F-104A #818-Einar Enevoldson; F-104A #820-Gary Krier; and F-104B #819-Fitz Fulton and Ray Young. Photo taken from T-38 #821 flown by Don Mallick.”
Was Tom McMurtry at the Air Force Academy a few years before this?
Thomas C. McMurtry was a graduate of University of Notre Dame, 1957, and a U.S. Navy test pilot. He died 3 January 2015 at the age of 79 years.
More on 818 here: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/lockheed-f-104a-starfighter/nasm_A19761017000
and My God…. even more impressive than the once in a lifetime collection of Starfighters is the collection of pilots and flight engineers flying them and also captured in the photo … you could fill a book, just on them….
I believe 826 was the last government Starfighter to fly. Now a gate guard at NASA Armstrong. The last experiment to fly was a Flight Test Fixture UCLA supersonic jet injector. I was the NASA POC. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.24153
Thank you, Al.
Sean Smith, I was think the same about the pilots. Hall of Famers one and all.
I don’t know anything about Einar Enevoldson. It jumps out at me because I love the name Einar; it was my grandfather’s.
(Just to keep this post airborne— he was a mechanic in the Air Corps during WW11.)
Here’s the Einar E bio from NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/about/biographies/pilots/einar-enevoldson.html