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130's at Khe Sanh


Sonny
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The Marine C130 that crashed on Feb 10, 1968 was next after us. We landed, offloaded, onloaded a few passengers and a pallet of empty pallets and departed -- as we were headed out, the Marine 130 (Basketball?) called he was inbound to land. When we got to DaNang, we heard he had been shot down and crashed on the runway. My AC said they used us to get the range (we had taken a hit). I wasn't unhappy when they said we wouldn't be going back. I had been at CCK for a week and this was my first trip in-country - interesting introduction to what we were doing over there!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Good website. Regular hot bed for trying bad methods that seemed to work. Lots of rapid off-loads where you would land, release the aft rail tension and then the A/C would give it power to use gravity to offload skid pallets. Sort of like touch and goes. LAPES was used but it took a lot of gear and rigging time so it was easier to just push the stuff out the back or use the rapid offload method to get in and out quickly. I remember they used the bulldozer to push the pallets off the runway to clear it for the next flight coming in. Real adrenalin rush doing the rapid offloads. Don't know if anyone ever hung a pallet because of slop in the rails, but I sure thought about what I would do if it happened ( bend over, put ........ and kiss it goodbye).

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