On April 28, 1961, Soviet pilot Giorgii Mosolov set a world altitude record of 113,891 feet in a Mikoyan-Gurevich Ye-66, an experimental MiG-21. This did not sit well with Darryl Greenamyer, and he started making plans to use an F-104 to take that record away from the Communists.
However, there were two problems, 1st was getting an F-104. In the 1960s it was impossible for a civilian to purchase a complete Starfighter, so in 1965 Darryl began collecting F-104 parts to build his own.
Another reason for Greenamyer's choice is that the airframe was a zero-hour, zero-defect condition, no fatigue at all anywhere. It is the kind of opportunity you don't find every day. A stock F-104 weighted 15,000 pounds empty; Greenamyer's weighted only 11,500. Armament was out and also the speed brakes, drag chute, boundary-layer-control system and the leading-edge device actuators. It received the G-model's antiskid system and brakes. Including some compensation weight inside the nose the total weight became 11,800 pounds.
The second problem was funding, because everything in aviation, especially world record attempts, takes money. Darryl says, “I thought if I used the airplane to break the 3km speed record held by the Navy, I could raise a sponsor for the altitude record.”
At the time the low-altitude 3km Closed Course Speed Record was 902.769mph, which was set on August 28, 1961, by USN Lieutenants Huntington Hardisty and Earl De Esch in a McDonnell Douglas F4H-1 Phantom during Project Sageburner.
Darryl’s hybrid F-104 was registered as N104RB and carried the Lockheed construction number of an F-104G. However, it had built from literally dozens of F-104s of all variants. The tail section, minus horizontal stabilizer, came from a crashed TF-104G that was found in an Ontario, California junkyard. The horizontal stabilizer came from a wrecked F-104G. He obtained the forward fuselage of a discarded F-104A that Lockheed used for static testing. The cockpit side panels came from the first production F-104A that crashed in 1956.
Greenamyer got his throttle quadrant from a Tennesse flying buff he met at the Reno National Air Races who had been using it as an office decoration. The trunnion-mounts for the nose-gear, some of the cooling-system valves and a few relays on the Red Baron were no doubt the most unusual parts of any interceptor plane with front-line capability. To get those items at Eglin AFB, Greenamyer had to pay $7,500 for a 25-ton piles of junk that included ammo-cans, missile cases, several segments of a helicopter, a Continental piston engine and a refrigerator!
What he got out of all this was a badly dented F-104 fuselage section that he hoped to patch up and smooth out.
Throughout the decade long construction Darryl searched for an engine, and it would eventually take him all the way to the Pentagon in the spring of 1976. I went to the Pentagon, walked into this room full of Air Force Generals and made my presentation. They said, ‘Are you kidding? Get out of here.’ So I went down the hall to the Navy with the same presentation. Not only did they agree to loan me an engine, they gave me a contact at NAS North Island in San Diego where they apparently overhauled the engines.
I called North Island, and they said they had five engines just out of overhaul and told me to come down, pick the one I wanted, and they’d put it on the engine stand and show me where and how to tweak it to get more power.”
As America’s Bicentennial approached, Ed Browning, owner of the Idaho-based Red Baron Flying Service, came on board to provide Darryl with much needed financial and logistical support. Browning’s sponsorship also gave the F-104 its name, “Red Baron.”
On October 1976, the Red Baron team flew over Mud Lake, a dry lakebed 30 miles south of Tonopah, Nevada to take on the Navy speed record.
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