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US Herk

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Everything posted by US Herk

  1. Although it only makes a brief appearance, here's an old A-model (N-466TM) doing what she was built to do:
  2. Don, it was indeed IAR's N119TG. What I know so far is it was coming back from Malaysia, stopped in Guam, Hilo, Santa Maria and it was after Santa Maria that it had issues enroute to Mesa, so diverted to Santa Barbara. From the pictures, it appears they departed the runway, but I'm hearing it was a very complex EP... Glad the crew all got out and are OK!
  3. I'd be interested in a copy as well
  4. I've done all 3 flap configuration takeoffs...other than 50%, not on purpose. The plane flies fine....but the 0% flap was a bit 'heavy' on the yoke. ? (thankfully, a very long runway too)
  5. US Herk

    AMP

    I will be very surprised if they make that deadline for MC-J to get TF. Nope. No TF. Latest I heard was the MC-130H is extended to 2025-28, but it all depends on the MC-J getting some form of operable TF radar.
  6. US Herk

    AMP

    No MC-130H ever did any AMP stuff to my knowledge. An MC-130E did quite a bit of the TF testing, however, but I don't believe it ever got much installed other than the AMP TF that Boeing was working on with Northrup/241.
  7. That's because of that huge nose...below 110KCAS or so, airspeed becomes unreliable...they should've moved the pitot tubes out to the wings or something!
  8. I beleive 404 is parked. If I recall correctly, it needed both inner and outer wings and at the time, they were a little slow, so it got parked at Kingman initially - no idea where it is now. As for the P4 registration, I heard they pulled out of P2 (Papau New Guinea) and reregistered in Aruba??
  9. Saw that being built a few years back. Who has this cockpit config other than foreign customers? Lynden & Tepper have Honeywell systems.
  10. Please don't make the mistake that I don't think the Air Force has a huge portion of blame here, but this isn't about who shares more blame. This is about getting the best system to the warfighter the quickest and cheapest way possible. Military acquisitions long ago became a tool of the military industrial complex only muddied by idealists in uniform... I've always said that the acquisition cycle is best described as: the military requests a galaxy, industry promises a solar system for IOC, and the military ends up accepting a planet with the promise of an extra moon in spiral development. All over cost and late. Yes, the military shoots themselves in the foot with changeover of personnel in key acquisitions programs. Yes, the military fails to put the right people in the right places (and not just in acquisitions). Yes, both sides view the others as necessary evils. But I'm in industry now - I've seen the sausage being made - I know how "corrupt" the industry can be. I witnessed industry BD guy tell industry supplier, "We now need to write the RFP for the customer, tell them what they want, and make it so it's sole source". Makes good business sense to me, but as an operator, it makes my skin crawl...so don't pretend that all the onus is on changing military desires; it's a combination of poor compromises made by industry in the first place - whomever agreed to AMP version 1.0 was an idiot. All of the change that was requested, not just by AFSOC, was to fix a poor agreed-upon design...I'm not saying the military didn't agree to it, simply that it didn't fit the bill. Slick salesmanship, corrupt AF officials, standard marketing/BD hype - whatever - it doesn't matter. AMP did start working in the end - great. How late? How over budget? Forget whose fault, set that aside because there's blame on both sides - where that blame starts/ends is largely irrelevant, but it colors our perspective. From your perspective, the change was what caused the problem and that falls squarely on AF acquisitions shoulders. From my perspective, the blame lies in the original contract, so the change the AF acquisitions guys pushed was a necessity caused by poor initial contracting. Regardless of who is right (we both are), the end result is we still don't have a system on the plane and the operators are the ones suffering - Boeing still got paid. The bottom line is, now AMP technology is another decade or two old. Do we really want to bolt on obsolete technology that will have to be updated again soon, or should we just start over. I vote start over...warts and all. Your example of the J-model not being able to fly a GPS approach actually proves my point - the certification standard the J-model was built to is now 30 years old and now requires updating. The HUD will be deemed obsolete and non-supported beginning in 2020 - even for planes rolling off the line in 2019. Technology, once cemented into a contract, is immediately dated and has a limited shelf life - so too is the AMP technology and we're over a decade into it...and it was old when we started. Let's move on. Believe me, I know how passionate things get when you're personally involved in a project - I had many that never came to fruition, but would answer several capabilities gaps - sometimes though, the best answer is to move on.
  11. Do the min RNP or bolt in the Honeywell system the civil operators are using and use PFPS moving map for software, 3.5 engines and 8-bladed props with EVH. 80% of a J for 60% of the cost. Done. Seriously, use a SMP to run tactical applications, but default to proven civilian software that's modern. Open architecture wouldn't hurt either. Yes, let a new contract. I don't care what it will cost or how long it takes - the attitude that we should stick with a proven losing program because we've already spent so much is why we're here in the first place - THIS is what's wrong with contracting. I'm not slamming the people working the issue, including yourself, rather, the lunacy that even allowed the Boeing win in the first place - 737 FMS for a tactical aircraft = dumb. But someone signed off on it - wait, wasn't that the general that got fired? Too bad, ink is dry. No, this isn't about the guys in the trenches who want to see a good product on the airplanes, but AMP is a failed experiment...sunk cost. Let's move on. Heck, we could almost put Garmin 1000 in and be so far further down the road than we are today, it's infuriating. Most modern displays are smart, so have their own processors. Database storage is cheap. The only "developmental" cost would be tactical employment stuff - airdrop, airland, low-level. Moving maps with synthetic terrain and color-coded heights are in GA now, so the technology is not only available, it's affordable. But we'll continue feeding the military industrial complex and our warfighters will get inadequate equipment, late, and overpriced....
  12. So we'll bolt 15 year old technology on to modernize our Herks? Geez...let a new contract already...or bring back C-130X!
  13. A big loss...spent nearly half my career there
  14. 4th Generation Monkey Theory Take four monkeys, put them in a small room with a bowl of bananas in the middle. Whenever any of them try to go for the bananas, you hose them down with a fire hose. You keep doing this until the monkeys take matters into their own hands and attack any of the other monkeys that try to go for the bananas. Once this behavior is established, you take out one monkey and replace him with another monkey. The new monkey doesn't know the rules, and quickly goes for the bananas. The other monkeys all attack him and beat him up. Pretty soon, he learns the behavior as well and will enforce it against any of the other monkeys. After the new monkey is socialized into the "proper" way to do things, you replace each of the original monkeys one at a time. Each time, you allow the monkeys to socialize the new monkey to the proper behavior. Eventually, you will have replaced all the monkeys. They will still each enforce the behavior; none of them will go for the bananas because the rest of them will attack them. They do this without any of them having ever even seen a fire hose, much less been sprayed down and "disciplined". They do this, because that's the way they've always done it. None of them knows why they do it that way, or if the original reason is still even valid, yet by the time you get to the 4th generation, the behavior is so well ingrained it is done without question. This explains 90% of military behavior...it also explains why we start #3 first. The A-model required a person (loadmaster, scanner, crew chief, etc) to physically close the GTC door. It's a good habit to maintain in case you do have ground power or if you have to get a blow-start from a huffer/palouste. But you can start any engine in any order...most dash-1s have a recommendation to alternate starts during desert operations or hot operations. This does reduce wear on starters and ultimately turbines...
  15. I believe that's WHY we still start in the sequence we do: 3,4,2,1 And it's a great example of 4th generation monkey theory!
  16. Is the other end of the runway foamed? Looks white - not that that alone means anything.
  17. Yup. I've even removed a few in flight to show people what they were...silly. Even if the systems engineers wanted to show you how to destroy things, these were just control heads and not the true boxes that did anything special for the most part...
  18. I've seen these on A, B, E, K, H, & J models. I had heard both tales: sacrificial anode and stand when removing more than one engine. The sacrificial anode story never washed with me, but the stand pad also seemed strange because its not on the centerline where you'd expect it to be...but it was still a more plausible answer than sacrificial anode. Funny how some stories get started and end up with a life of their own. I remember in the early-mid '90s when we started getting some more modern control heads/panels in the center pedestal and they had internal lighting instead of the external lights. These panels are easily identified by a "+" sign somewhere (sometimes more than one on a large panel) and there were stories floating around that that's where you were supposed to shoot the panel to destroy the equipment. As ridiculous as it sounds, I heard that over and over from people...must've made sense to somebody. ;)
  19. The memorial service at the Hurlburt Air Park yesterday was nice Many heroes there.
  20. I don't think Lynden's are for sale, but I could be mistaken.
  21. That's how you load big things though! ;)
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