This is the not well known or publicized CF-104N Sea Starfighter. In 1967 Canada voted in a loony leftist who decided to pretty much decimate the Canadian Military with cost cuts to provide money to stuff that (for the most part) was of benefit to Canadians. The Royal Canadian Navy was told to scrap its one remaining aircraft carrier, CV-22 Bonneventure.

Now, admittedly we had not flown fighters off it for some time. Well unless of course we remember the 2 nuclear 120,000 tonne vessels Canada secretly owned and operated our ultra secret squadrons of Tomcats, Skyhawks, Hawkeyes and other stuff from. But, I did not tell you about that. Truth be told, our looney leftist Prime Minister at the time, famous for wearing roses in his lapel while "secretly" doing pirouette's behind the Queens back during social functions was actually a closet dictator with delusions of grandeurs. 

His two secret carrier battle groups did all kinds of things to bug the Americans. Cuban missile crises, burning down the white house in the war of 1812 (they used time travel like in the Final countdown), Berlin block aids, all that cold war with Russia stuff.......It was all due to Pierre's secretive navy. 

Now, 120,000 tonne carriers and associated carrier battle groups are hard to hide. But we did it well for some 40 years. You Yanks never did hear about them did ya?

 DID YA!!!!!???????

 Well, sometimes, a full carrier battle group was too big so Pierre sent in the ULTRA secret weapon, the CF-104N SeaStarfighter. Number one, it was one pilot and one plane.  The 40,000 crew on the carrier battle groups were becoming hard to keep quiet so once in a while we had to resort to our version of ultra secret warfare.

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The best thing about the SeaStarFighter was its ability to park anywhere. These were highly used in coastal regions of the country as we figured the yanks must have found our dozens of secret ICBM sites with their 4 squadrons (each) of defending F-15s and Tornados in the central part of Canada. But ya never did. DID YA???????

 The two squadrons of CF-104Ns used around 30 planes each, one ultra secret battle group on each coast. VF-870 was one of the disbanded Banshee squadrons that where given the SeaStarfighter mission. Truth be told, they also  were a CF-14 squadron on the HMCS Lestor B Pearson but we just had SO many squadrons of fighters some squadron names had to be used two or three times.

One thing really neat about the Seastarfighter was the rear "deck" at the back of the pontoons.  Handy for a  rest  after a hard days flight.

Put out a couple Muskoka chairs and a case of beer and you got yourself a mobile weekend cottage.

The model itself is a combination of a Hasegawa F-104S Starfighter, Hobby Craft Otter floats and a Hasegawa F-16B for support beams and other stuff like the fuel tanks. The main part of the F-16B was given to Elmo for his own major conversion project. The decals came from a combination of IPMS Canada Navy decals and Belcher Bits spares.

Shawn "phantom" Weiler

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