The F-104 Starfighter was a type of American interceptor jet used by the United States Air Force in the late 1960s.
Captain John Christopher piloted an F-104, code-named Bluejay 4, in 1969 when he made visual contact with the USS Enterprise, which was perceived as a UFO. (TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday")
List of Starfighters[]
- Serial #70914, Registry FG-914 ("Bluejay 4")
- Serial #70915, Registry FG-915
- Serial #70926, Registry FG-926
- Serial #70969, Registry FG-969
Appendices[]
Background information[]
This aircraft type, the Lockheed F-104, was not identified by name on screen, but is derived from visual identification from its appearance in "Tomorrow is Yesterday". It was also identified as this type of craft in the Star Trek Concordance [page number? • edit]. The footage used on screen and the still shown here are from George AFB, California. By the time the Star Trek episode premiered on television in January 1967, the Starfighter had been in service for almost a decade.
Graves' Starfighter FG-926 in the iconic scene
Starfighter FG-926 – originally the registry for "Bluejay 4", before it was changed in the remastered version – was prominently featured in CGI by Douglas E. Graves on the November spread of the 2012 Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar, pictured on the left. The same scene had already been featured previously in two earlier outings of the same calendar series; by Robert Bonchune for his December spread in the 2003 edition – though it could not be discerned which F-104 was seen – whereas Aurore DeBlois depicted the disintegration of Bluejay 4 in the February spread for the 2007 edition.
Starfighter inducted into the AMT Star Trek modelkit line
On the occasion of Star Trek's 50th anniversary in 2016, model kit company AMT issued a "Tomorrow is Yesterday" edition (no. AMT953) in its Star Trek line. The 1/48 scaled model of Starfighter FG-914 came with a smaller, forced perspective, scaled USS Enterprise model, so that modelers were able to recreate the iconic scene from the episode with physical representations for themselves.
External links[]
- F-104 Starfighter at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
- F-104 Starfighter at Wikipedia