Spectre623

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

Good clips on u tube fer sure. I didn't find a rusty tank on google but there is a pic tag called Long beach that is at what I believe to be the lower corner of Herky Hill . Bill

Hey ken, don't remember Tennyson. There is a window that will open up when you click on the little photo tags and it asks do you want to up load your photos. You have to open an account it looks like before you can post the tag pics. Need somebody more computer savvy than me to get it started. I have tagged the Hill with pin markers but I think they only show up on my screen. As far as getting to the beach, it was a 5 minute feet scalding walk down the backside of the Hill to the beach. I remember a couple of old French concrete bunkers about 50 feet out in the water and bunches of jelly fish! Bill

It sure does Ken. I brought back 2 of those fans and and just 3-4 years ago tossed the last one in the trash. It was the quietest fan I ever owned. As far as taking a fan to CRB I just relied on the old metal fans in the barracks that sounded like a 130 running wnen I rotated in. Most of our inputs from Clark left early in the morn. Bill

It is kinda hard to figure it out Sam. The tag for the 22 Replacement Batt. shows about where the Hill is, as it was at the foot of Herky Hill where the sharp curve is/was. The new 4 lane passes right thru the curve. The tags when clicked on open up to show whatever pic is posted. Ken or some of the other guys with good pics from there would be great to tag the Hill and F/L with. UPDATE: Also just read a post attached to the 22 Replacement Batt and a guy who was over there a short time ago said the 22tag is too far to the north but should be where the rectangle bare field is. That jives with my memory of the 22nd being right at the 180 degree curve at the bottom of Herky Hill. Just look to the right and see the long curved road that leads to the hill. You can easily make out the outlines of the barracks as they are lined up 3 rows of 5 ea. then 2 on the very top. The chow hall is the square outline to the left of the row of barracks foundation outlines. Also if you look south west of CRB you will see Phan Rang airbase and they have tagged it with about a dozen great 70's pics. Bill

Sam you are our hero fer enduring all them dang old rocket and morter attacks while us maint. pukes sat safely back at CRB. (Thanks fer yer service Sam...I mean it!) Bill :)

That was a neat dis-cussin on the rocket attack on Herky Hill a couple of posts ago and I sure enjoyed it! I went to CRB on google earth and saw a lot of what I thought I remembered. There are all kinds of markers by the VN and ruskies but only one marker by a GI and it was the 22nd Replacement Batt. If someone with a still functioning brain could go there on google earth and mark the sites I know a lot of us would get a kick out of seeing it. Places such as the C-130 revetments, C-7 parking, Aerial port building, maint buildings and tire shop near the flightline, also the sharp curve at the 22nd Replacement Batt at the bottom of Herky Hill seems to have changed.(I was there when the open truck full of jungle boots flipped on that curve) Also would like to see the barracks marked and the chow hall...you know the one that was never hit and also the donut dolly shack behind it and of course the outdoor movie area and LUTHERS projection booth and the APC drive in movie parking area, along with any other sites around the base. With all of us on this board that visited that vacation spot, I think we could mark it up pretty good. Bill :)

Koen ,the 5th acft I have info on is 54-1628. You didn't ask about it so I did not include it. It was in UPHOLD DEMOCRACY but not ODS. It's name was "Exterminator" and retired with 4000 hrs. of combat and 15,100 total flying hours.

You didn't spend much time on Herky Hill did you Sam? Yes the chow hall was hit. I came in to the chow hall after the mess was cleaned up and as I was eating my powered green eggs and sandy toast and p-butter I was amused at all the holes in the light fixtures in the ceiling. They had replaced the tubes but the glare shields were riddled. You also were probably not there when the boot cook brought the 40 mm grenade up from the beach after the nightly firefight. He didn't know what it was. EOD took it outside and sand bagged it and blew it up with C4. Lot of funny little things happened to us maint. pukes on the "Hill" while you fly guys were out slipping the surly bonds. Bill

I have the history on 5 of the last AC-130A's to leave Duke field in the mid 90's. It says 129 participated in Uphold Democracy but not Desert Shield/ Storm. 623 participated in Uphold Democracy and Desert Storm. It don't say how many missions it flew, just total hours, 13,900 and 4,300 combat hours...the most of any AC-130A that I have data on. 630 was the last AC-130A to engage in combat and scored the final kills. It received small arms fire and AAA threats and the entire crew received the DFC. 0014 scored the highest number of kills for the 919th and the entire crew received the Air Medal for the mission. Bill

Well, might as well get this one posted too. Amarillo AFB, Tx, April 1963. Went to Sewart on A models. That's me about to fall off the leading edge next to the black dude.

You go Donwon. Keep those freaks from disin' our AF brother!!!

Well I see by the news where old Momar Gaddafi told Obama he wants his $70 million back or the planes that he paid for. I say give him the planes, ha ha. Our excellent state department is probably trying to figure out what he is talking about. I'm sure Lockwasher would love to get the storage money he will owe.

NC97, those numbers of the embargoed Herks of Libya are Lockheed serial numbers: 4515, 4518, 4523, 4525, 4536, 4538, 4540, 4541. They were set for delivery from Nov 1973 to Oct 1974...but never made it.