Don't know if I would want the dubious job of flying the Witwenmacher ("widowmaker"), fliegender Sarg ("flying coffin") or Erdnagel ("ground nail", the official military term for a tent peg)...Doesnt sound that safe!
Looks great but not that safe to fly!:o
From here:
"In Luftwaffe service, the F-104G got a bad reputation because of the large number of accidents, many of them resulting in fatalities. Intensive flying operations with the Starfighter did not start in Germany until 1961, when only two crashes took place. There were seven crashes in 1962, 12 in 1964, and 28 in 1965, or more than two a month. By mid-1966, 61 German Starfighters had crashed, with a loss of 35 pilots. At the height of the crisis, the Starfighter accident rate peaked at 139 per 100,000 flying hours. As a result, the German press went into a feeding frenzy and the F-104G was given derogatory nicknames such as the "Flying Coffin" or the "Widowmaker", which brings to mind all of the flak that surrounded the Martin B-26 Marauder during World War 2. One running joke at the time was that if you waited long enough, just about every square mile of Germany would have a Starfighter crash onto it. The press left many people with the impression that there was something intrinsically wrong with the F-104G, that it was just too difficult an airplane to fly for the new and relatively inexperienced Luftwaffe pilots. The high loss rate generated a flurry of criticism of the Bonn government, some critics claiming that the entire Starfighter program had been politically-motivated and should be cancelled outright."