Spectre623

In case they land gear up and the pilot faints then the CP can steer with the props.....Bill :D

Did the 550th at Kirkland decend from the 1550ATTW at Hill in the 70's? Just curious. Bill

Easy, steering cyl on back of nose strut on C-54, on the front on C-118. Bill

I still have a copy of that yellow handbook. Lockheed gave us a bunch when we got our "New" 1981 H models at Dobbins in 1982. They were good for the C-7 guys to thumb thru to get familar with the Herk. There is also a pale blue C-130 E/H handbook dated 1 Apr 1995 which is larger than the yellow book. They both say the handbook is not to be used as tech data and will not be used as such. Lots of good drawings and info. They are good Herk primers for people who were never on them. Bill

After your through hittem' with a mallet try kicking the tire to check the tire press and then raise the crew door waist high and shake it side to side. Just a few other usless tricks some people do to a 130. HA Ha. Larry is correct, use the T.O. to service the strut properly. Just remember press vs. x measurement. Bill

TOOOOO FUNNY HERCMAINT...good one ha ha ha . Bill

Visited the Marietta Avation Museum today and spoke with the curator and he showed me a metal model about 1 foot long of the YMC-130. The detail was fantastic. It had all the rockets and included the belly hook for catching the wire like on a carrier or the over run wire. It was complete with the DC-130 radome. He had gotten it from somewhere in Lockheed. It appears to have been built by the mockup shop at Lockheed. It was hand made but looked as good as any plastic model. I will take pics of it next time I go there to post here. He also mentioned the YMC-130 at Robins had been offered to them but their museum didn't have the bucks to move it the 80 some odd miles to Marietta. Too bad. Bill

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2466[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2469[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2465[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2467[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2468[/ATTACH]

Bob, you know that old AF saying" If they ain't bitchin',they ain't happy"...I think the Wright brothers might have started that when they landed after the first flight and headed to the club and left the crew chief on the plane to straighten the mess up and rerig it and with no transportation. Bill :)

Hey Mike you asked where the crew chiefs were hiding while you were rigging you bird at all those E model bases you were TDY to? They were hiding in the same place you were when we (maint) were rigging the bird at home base. You weren't required to come out from ops or while you were in crew rest to help the maint team rig, were you? Well we weren't required to come out and stop working on our own planes to help a TDY crew re-rig their plane . It just didn't work that way...wasn't designed to work like that. If you were TDY at a base that had en-route support you might get help rigging your bird if it was supporting that base or was a priority mission otherwise you and your crew was responsible for re-rigging your bird. Maint was given fuel load, configuration and take off time on the flying schedule and that was when maint rigged the bird, after take off it was your baby. As far as the CC flying with the bird from home station there were 10,000 reasons that ops and maint would or would not have a CC fly. As far as CC's flying with their bird in country,the CC and asst CC would fly into VN, usually ending at CRB or TSN (depending on what model you were on,) and split up into 12 hour shifts to keep their bird OR. If you flew with your bird in-country (which I did sometimes) you were flying on your off time. When the plane landed back at CRB you still had to pull your 12 hour shift. When your bird was OR (usually by 0200-0300hrs) you could stay and try to sleep on the bug infested plane till the flt crew arrived or go back to the CC shack next to maint control where you were subject to being put with a crew rigging or refueling other planes. Until a CC had put in 12 hours there was no consideration for him to rest. AF considered him a hazard after 12 hours and then he was supposed to get rest.....but who went by that rule? ha ha. Bill :)

Dave, the Have Auger program was the actual development of the lenses for the LLLTV system. That may be why that name is not tagged to the USAF T.O. Bill

Good one Frank. Nothin' in the star lizard's bar fer sure. MAC sho wasn't TAC or PACAF Bill

[it was the first pressurized passenger airliner and the first to have an FE.

Don R.

Hey Giz and Frank, not a 130 comment but as FE on 141's in the mid 70's we had a bar in each troop door and 2 flare guns mounted on it. One FE and one Load manned them on take off and landing as needed. Must have been very effective as we never lost a 141 to SAM's. Then again I never heard of anyone firing them. Sure miss those high tech days.....Bill:(

That would be your AN/ASQ-145LLLTV (low light level TV) located in the crew door on the AC-130A and AC-130H. Not so secret now. It's all on the web. Bill

Good pic Don, I do seem to remember your face. If you were Msgt Hayes asst. I know we worked together at some time or other. Oh and the ATM I was speaking of stood for Air Turbine Motor....but I think you really knew that anyway ha ha. Bill

HA HA HA Donwon what are you sippin on son...that post of yours cracked me up....still laughing !!! Fer some reason I never was able to open the GTC doors inflight either Ha Ha. Didn't have a long enough screwdriver I guess. Did you mean ATM instead of APU. Can you post a pic of yourself on your bio page when you were at Sewart...I can't place you but we had to have worked together in Delta flight for MSgt Wysocki. And Sam, there was a huge difference between the GTC and APU on the Herk. Apu had a 40KVA direct drive gen same as on the engines, where the GTC used an ATM driving a smaller amp gen. The APU was flight operable, the burner can was different i.e. the bulge on the w/w panel. Oil tank was on the APU where the GTC oil tank was in the cargo compartment, starters turned in opposite directions.....just saying. Bill

Not that Perry is retired, that had to be a misquote, but there ARE a lot of lower rank troops E3,4's, O1's,2's who are medically retired from the service, either from wounds recieved or service connected injurys while on active duty. Bill :)

Sounds like the typical news media. You tell them one thing as you know the facts and by the time it gets into print or edited for TV it don't even resemble the original story. Most reporters have no connection to the military nor know the jargon and most of them despise it. Have been misquoited more than once myself. Was an eye witness to a light plane crash in Utah and the story that appeared on the news sounded like it was from another world. Bill :)

OK Dutch here you go; A quote out of a Lockheed book called " Hercules ", " Although 'Pinocchio' noses were retrofitted to some of the first 28 aircraft and 4 bladed props were introduced from 1978, a handfull of C-130A's retained their Roman nose profile and 3 bladed props well into the 1980's". It also says the Tn. ANG had some as late as 1990's when the 118th went to C-130H and the 155th went to C-141's. As for the AC-130A's, the first ones known as "Plain Janes" had the AN/APS-42 radar if it had a Roman nose and if it had the Pinocchio nose it had a standard AN/APN-59 radar. When The AC-130A's were upgraded to the" Suprise Package" it was modded to the AN/APN-59B navigation radar with moving Target Indicator which would have the Pinocchio nose added if it didnt already have one. Dec. 1970 was when the last Plain Jane was sent to be modded to an even newer configuration called Pave Pronto which included all the Suprise Package 40MM guns and electronic mods but now included The Black Crow sensor which as we all know picked up the signal off the spark plugs and ign. system on the trucks that were on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As for exact dates on the nose mod on each aircraft it would take a month at Maxwell AFB looking up each aircrafts history to know all the answers Dutch. This is all I got on the nose. -- P.S. As I was writing this about the 118Th out of Nashville I seem to remember meeting the maint. team at Dobbins that came with the flt crew to pick up their first H model and I THINK they came down on a Roman nose bird. It was in Jan 1990 as per Lars book. Any old 118th troops out there that can confirm this was a Roman nose....Jim Watkins maybe? Bill

Hey Giz, yes we did have bacteria in the fuel tanks in the P.I. at Clark sometime during 69-70. The fix was to fuel up the affected tank or tanks with 115-145 avgas. We let it stay in the tanks x number of days or hours...I ferget... and then we defueled that tank and refueled with JP-4. After a few weeks they stopped making us defuel the avgas before flight and we just flew and burned it out. Funny thing was the inside of the tailpipe was white as cotton after flight. We never popped any tanks from it though. They did that when they left the vent lines plugged after tank maint. and refueled the bird, usually at depot PDM (aka IRAN). The pencil thing is a no no on the hot section of a turbine engine. Bill

Donwon and Sonny those forms for taking time was the AFTO Form 210, 211, and 212. The 210 was used on a daily basis to show job completion and how long it took to do it. 211 and 212 was for other stuff such as TCTO's. They had how mal code, ie 070 broke,( my favorite), number of units etc. then the form was turned in and a key punch operator input this into the system. Later they changed them to a 349 form and even later we went to a system called CAMS where each person input his info into the computer then later we went to another blah blah blah system and now we spend more time on the computer inputing the job than the actual job takes, plus you still have to fill out the paper 781's. Really sucks for the mechanic. And for you Giz the weight and bal forms, 365F, slip stick etc were kept to the right at F.S.245 just as you came into the crew door in a box. Bill

Hey no problem Jerry. I was FE on them at Charleston and my job was only to make sure they were up and stowed on my walkaround. I was probably taught they had fuel in them but that was in 1974 so a lot has gone south since then ha ha. But, they sure beat the old 130 milk stool. Bill :)

Hey Giz, those thingies on the C-141 were called tip-over struts and they were filled with Hyd. fluid. They were very simple to operate...simply open the door , pull out the safety pin pull out the strut and let it swing down. When it scoped out and touched the ground you just turned the little valve to trap the fluid in the extended strut and bingo!...the old star lizard was set to load. It had one on each side of the aft fusealage. A few were left down and went bye bye after takeoff. Bill

Excellent posts from US Herk and Fritz! There are points in both posts I agree with but do not have the background to say who is most right. As Fritz said it was a VERY good discussion without either of you going postal. Very refreshing in this day and time. Bill

Was on an agent orange site today and they showed how much and where it was sprayed and it showed that Cam Ranh Bay had 21,227 gallons of agent orange and 1,373 gallions of agent white sprayed over the area, but not the dates... now aren't we the luckey ones !!! Bill