A Model

[jflimbach]

We did the test and evaluation of the weight & balance indicator system when I was with USAF TALC at Pope in the late 1960's - early 70's.

It worked really well, until you landed the airplane and then it was totally out of whack. Reason was that the sensors were on the main landing gear struts and as soon as you slammed the airplane onto the ground, they went out of calibration. That wouldn't have been too bad since normally you'd just say, "nice try but it didn't work". In this case, they'd already been contracted for and installed on a lot of the fleet before being tested. Ready, Shoot, Aim. Can't blame this on my favorite target, mother MAC, because we were still in TAC at the time.

The angle of attack indicator was the greatest thing since sliced bread..........on the C-123. Worth its weight in gold when I was with the 19th ACS in Vietnam. A slight digression. The C-123 was derived from an assault glider and so had a very clean, high lift wing. When configured for approach it gave no aerodynamic indication of an impending stall. One minute it was flying, and the next minute the wing just gave up. At this point, as the Wright-Pat test pilot said, "it just rolled lazily over on its back, like a cat sunning its belly on the front porch." So, on a short field landing you wanted to be as slow as possible but not a knot slower. Thus the angle of attack indicator. Oh yeah, because of this the C-123 also had a stick shaker. Not sure where they got it from, but if it went off it shook the airplane so bad that the pilots couldn't read the instruments and were yelling at the LM to pull the circuit breaker, but that's another story for a different forum.

At any rate, the angle of attack system worked great on the C-123. We tested it for a longish time at TAWC in the early 70's and never could get it to work reliably on the C-130. Don't remember why not but I'm sure the test report is somewhere online, probably in the DTIC files if anybody is interested.