The reason for the gloss SM/67 on the wings were, that they were new. From 1979 RDAF began to equip its Starfighters with reinforced wings.
Ten pair of reinforced wings was delivered by VFW-Fokker, seven were bought from the german Luftwaffe and the workshops of RDAF converted 25 wing sets to the new standard. That made a total of 42 wing sets. But at time RDAF had 45 F-104s in service.
The reason for the missing wing sets were, that the staff of RDAF had come to the conclusion, that the statitics showed, that three planes would be lost before the end of the conversion programme. But in reality only one was lost! So for the rest of the F-104s service time in RDAF, wings were shifted between the planes according to the individual planes flying hours.
Flyvevåbnet had a very low loss rate on its Starfighters. Only 0.68 plane was lost for every 10,000 flying hours. The loss rate for Luftwaffe was 1.65 and for the Canadian Air Force it was 1.96. The explanation for the big difference was the way the planes were used. The german and canadian forces used them for low-level air-to-ground operations. Flyvevåbnet used the almost exclusively for high speed, high level interceptions. The air-to-ground job was done by the F-100 Super Sabres and the F-35 Drakens.
Until 1974 this was often done in a teamwork with the Hawker Hunters of Esk 724. The Starfighters would try to hit the intruders at higher levels with their Sidewinders. To counter that, the intruders would often drop to low level. But there the dogfigting Hunters were waiting for them.
