Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

Airborne Warfare: The Air Force Legacy

Within the U.S. Air Force (USAF), there is a class structure not unlike that of the other services. Ever since President Harry Truman signed the enabling legislation back in 1947, the USAF’s “kings of the skies” have come from the fighter and bomber communities. The internal USAF bias against those who do not kill people with their aircraft has meant that the careers of non-fighter and bomber aircrews rarely reach beyond the rank of brigadier general. Perhaps the armed flying jobs seem sexier or more powerful than the jobs of those who fly the supporting missions. Whatever the reasons, wearing the Air Force uniform and not shooting down enemy planes or nuking America’s enemies has usually meant never rising to the top jobs within the USAF.

This is not to say that these other missions are not vitally important. They are. So much so that precedent was recently broken when the head of the USAF’s Air Mobility Command, General Ronald Fogelman, was elevated to the job of Air Force Chief of Staff. In a way, it was a reward for the unprecedented job that AMC had done in supporting (and in some cases rescuing) the foreign policy initiatives of the Clinton Administration. I would like to believe, though, that it was a recognition that there are other things of importance that airpower can deliver besides killing power on enemy aircraft and cities. AMC and the support communities within the USAF’s Air Combat Command (ACC) deliver a huge boost to the missions of services other than the Air Force. From hauling Army paratroops, to refueling Navy and Marine tactical aircraft, and providing close air support for Allied ground troops, these aircraft and their crews are perhaps the most powerful part of America’s empire of airpower.

Back in the first chapter, I spent a considerable amount of space and time explaining the development of transport aircraft and their importance to airborne warfare. This is a vital introduction, for without the cargo aircraft to fly them off to war, airborne units would not even exist. While these statements are patently obvious, their real significance to the concept of strategic mobility goes far beyond the single act of letting paratroops jump out to do battle. Transport and support aircraft are the trucks of the sky for the U.S. Air Force. This mission alone would justify the significant part of the federal budget that has been spent on transport aircraft. Still, as USAF leaders have often pointed out to me, without the Air Force, airborne units are just well-trained infantry with a bad attitude. Even Army airborne troopers would concede that this is true.

Inter-service rivalries aside, the history of Air Force support for Army airborne and ground operations is both long and distinguished. Historically, it has primarily centered on transporting airborne units to their drop zones (DZs), and then resupplying them until follow-on forces arrive to relieve them.

This simple description is fraught with risk and danger, though. By their very nature, anything that does not help get transport aircraft into the air is a waste of potential payload. Adding armor and self-sealing gas tanks to a cargo airplane would only take away from its primary mission: moving people and stuff by air. So when transport aircraft go into harm’s way, they do so with very few of the survival features that would allow them to stand up to surface-to-air missile (SAM) or antiaircraft artillery (AAA) fire.

The history of airborne operations is replete with stories of transport crews piloting their burning aircraft and sacrificing themselves so that they could deliver their loads of troops and supplies onto their DZs. The British drop on Arnheim during Operation Market Garden in September of 1944 resulted in a fistful of Victoria’s Crosses for transport crews. Similar decorations have been the norm for U.S. transport crews in operations from Sicily in 1943 to Khe Sahn in 1968. While some fighter and bomber general might see transport crews as just glorified airline personnel, they do a vital, unloved, and sometimes downright dangerous job.

Another group of Air Force personnel looking for a little respect are those that fly close-air-support (CAS) and forward-air-control (FAC) aircraft. From the point of view of the 82nd’s paratroopers, you could not want a more important group of people over your head in a fight. The men and women who fly FAC/CAS planes are the flying eyes and artillery of the airborne task force. Ever since the Marine Corps first came up with the idea of dedicated front-line air support, ground troops have turned their eyes skyward, and prayed that the planes overhead would be theirs. Today, the airborne troopers of the 82nd have to depend on CAS/FAC aircraft if they are to succeed in their mission.

In this chapter, we’ll try and show you some of the machines flown by the U.S. Air Force to support the troopers of the 82nd: the C-17 Globemaster III and C-130 Hercules, which haul the people and cargo; the KC-10 Extender deployment tanker; and the A/OA-10 Thunderbolt/Warthog, which provides the airborne with FAC and CAS services. In doing so, I hope that you will gain some insight into why they are both necessary and essential to our national interests, and to the brave men and women of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Warthog: The Fairchild-Republic A/OA-10 Thunderbolt II

Officially, it’s called Thunderbolt II, recalling the heritage of one of the great American propeller-driven fighters of World War II, the powerful Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. But in the Air Force everyone calls it the Warthog, recalling a mean-tempered and extraordinarily ugly African relative of the pig. With perverse pride, A-10 pilots and ground crews shorten this to “Hog,” a name and attitude that they love. Like the similarly named offensive line of the Washington Redskins, they and their airplanes are the “bad boys” of the USAF. Hog drivers and their steeds take the abuse and compliments that result with their own special attitude. Few aircraft in aviation history have been subject to so much ridicule as the Warthog. You often hear jokes like: “The only Air Force jet vulnerable to bird strikes from the rear.” “The airspeed indicator is a calendar.” “Above five hundred feet the pilots think they need oxygen.” “It’s got the radar cross section of Mount Rushmore.” For all of these put-downs, the A-10 is one of the finest CAS aircraft ever built, perhaps the best of all time.

A quick review of 20th century warfare shows that close air support (CAS) has been one of the most decisive and direct uses of airpower. Perhaps not as sexy as shooting down enemy fighters or dropping laser-guided bombs, but to ground troops certainly the most personal and useful to them. Direct use of aircraft to support ground operations date back to the American Civil War (1862) observation balloon ascents of Professor Thaddeus Lowe during the Peninsula Campaign. Interestingly, the first use of CAS was by the United States Marine Corps (USMC) during their “Banana Wars” in Central America in the 1920s. In fact, it was the observation by Germans of early USMC CAS tactics that led to their adoption by the new Luftwaffe. By the outbreak of World War II, the Germans had made CAS into a virtual science, and the planes designed for this unglamorous mission became some of the stars of combat aviation history.

CAS was one of the keystones of the German Blitzkrieg (literally “Lightning War”) doctrine early in World War II. During the first year of the war, the famous JU 87 Stukas (from the German word Sturzkampfflugzeug or dive bomber) and other bombers operated as flying artillery for the early conquests of the Wermacht. By the summer of 1940, though, they were decimated by modern British fighters like the Hurricane and the Spit-fire. A year later, when the Germans faced the Red Army’s increasingly powerful tanks, they discovered the limitations of dive bombing. On the fourth day of the Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941), a force of thirty-six Stukas attacked a concentration of sixty Soviet tanks, scoring only a single kill against the armor. What had happened was that the blast/fragmentation bombs the Stukas were using needed a direct hit to destroy an armored vehicle. The technology of modern antiarmor cluster munitions was years in the future. Clearly, new tank-busting weapons were needed to penetrate the thick armored hides of Russian tanks and again make CAS aircraft a viable force for the Luftwaffe.

One of the most attractive options was mounting heavy, tank-busting cannons (with armor-penetrating shells) on tactical aircraft. By 1942, the Luftwaffe had deployed the new JU 87G-1 version of the Stuka, equipped with a pair of pod-mounted 37mm cannon slung beneath the wings. The centerline bomb rack of the JU 87G-1 was retained, but the dive brakes were deleted, since very steep dives were not required to hit and penetrate the vulnerable top, side, and rear armor of tanks like the Russian T-34. The new cannons proved highly effective, and some pilots began to rack up amazing scores. Stuka pilot Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel was credited with some 519 tank kills and destroying a 26,000-ton Russian battleship. When a single flyer can demolish a whole Soviet Guards Tank Army (and a battleship!), you’ve really got a “force multiplier.”

By the end of the war, the Luftwaffe had fitted antitank guns as large as 75mm in purpose-built CAS aircraft like the heavily armored, twin-engine Hs 129B. Only twelve of the big 26-1b/11.8-kg 75mm shells were carried by each Hs 129, but pilots were trained to fire four-round bursts at 500 meters/547 yards, where it was hard to miss. No tank of the era could take the pounding, and thousands of Soviet tank crews paid the price.

The Luftwaffe also paid a high price for their CAS efforts. One of the toughest lessons learned was that conducting CAS operations in airspace that you do not fully control results in heavy losses to enemy fighters and ground fire. Even the indomitable Colonel Rudel was shot down many times during the four-year war with the Russians, losing a leg, but still flying at the finish of hostilities in 1945!

The Russians developed their own tank-buster during the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet name for their battle with Germany), the legendary IL-2 Shturmovik. This was the toughest CAS aircraft of the entire war. The entire front section of the IL-2’s fuselage was a 1,500-1b/680-kg shell of 7mm/.275-in steel plate, with a 52mm/2.05-in-thick laminated bullet-resistant glass windscreen. The Russian designers had started with the premise that a proper CAS aircraft should be a direct extension of armored vehicles on the ground, and thus created a “flying tank” in the IL-2. Their assumptions paid huge dividends. The IL-2 was armed with two 20mm, 23mm, or 37mm cannon, plus bombs and/or rockets. This truly did make the Shturmovik a flying tank, and a direct precursor to the modern Mi 24 Hind helicopter gunships that are still in use today. A later model, the improved IL-2M, carried a tail gunner with a rear-firing defensive machine gun.

The IL-2 was easy to fly, and could be repaired under extreme field conditions, and the rugged landing gear could handle muddy or frozen dirt runways. There is even a story that a bent propeller on a Shturmovik was once straightened out with a sledgehammer! Over 35,000 of these amazing planes were built during the war.

There was more to the Shturmovik legend than just simple toughness, though. There was what we Americans might call a “warthog” spirit around the IL-2 crews, and it caused more than a little fear in their German opponents. A quarter century later, these qualities of the Shturmovik would influence the design and development of the A-10. Attacks by Shturmoviks were pressed at altitudes down to just 30 feet/10 meters, and gave the IL-2s devastating lethality against German armor. Near the town of Kursk on July 7th, 1943, a Shturmovik regiment knocked out seventy tanks of the 9th Panzer Division in just twenty minutes, the equivalent of an entire Panzer regiment destroyed![30]

One of the bits of conventional wisdom about World War II is that the United States and their allies drove to victory under a virtual umbrella of airpower. It is therefore ironic that the air forces of the Western Allies never developed a really successful CAS aircraft design during the Second World War. Despite efforts that resulted in marginal designs like the North American A-36 Apache (the precursor to the classic P-51 Mustang) and the British Fairey Battle, most Allied CAS operations were conducted by fighter aircraft. Equipped with rockets, bombs, and fuel tanks filled with napalm (jellied gasoline), these fighter bombers did devastating damage to Axis ground forces around the world.

What the Americans and British did contribute to the science of CAS in World War II was the matter of proper coordination with ground forces. Prior to America’s entry into the war, the USMC had done some pioneering work on developing compatible radio systems for aircraft and ground units, and integrating them into CAS operations. By the middle of the war, Allied ground forces could actually call air strikes onto targets just yards/meters in front of their own positions. The British called their on-call CAS missions “cab-rank” strikes, giving you some idea just how close the support could be. There were similar strikes by 8th and 9th Air Force P-48 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, as well as by the classic F4U Corsairs of the Marines in the Pacific. By the end of the conflict, the Allies had achieved a level of air-ground coordination that has been a benchmark ever since.

The U.S. did produce a first-rate CAS aircraft in the years just after World War II, though that was only one of the missions that it was designed to accomplish. Developed as a naval strike aircraft to replace the famous Grumman TBF torpedo bomber, this classic American piston-engined CAS plane was the Douglas AD (later redesignated A-1) Skyraider. Designed by the brilliant Ed Heinemann for the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, it first entered service in December of 1946, and improved models served as first-line carrier strike and support aircraft until 1968! Over three thousand were built, and some still serve in foreign air forces today.

The AD-6 version was a single-seat fighter, with an 18-cylinder Wright Cyclone radial engine delivering 2,700 horsepower to a four-bladed propeller. Armament was four 20mm cannon and up to 8,000 lb/3630 kg of bombs and rockets on up to fifteen weapon racks. Stable and reliable as an old plow horse, it was a favorite among flight crews. Despite its being replaced in the strike role by newer supersonic fighter-bombers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was still life in the A-1s.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, old Skyraiders were taken out of storage and rebuilt for service in Southeast Asia with the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Marines and the Republic of Vietnam. The newer jets did not have the ability to put ordnance on targets as well as the slower, old Skyraiders. Their weapons-delivery systems were designed to lob nuclear weapons, not deliver pinpoint bomb strikes. Also, the greater loiter time of the old ADs made it possible for harried ground units to keep CAS aircraft overhead longer. Finally, their ability to absorb battle damage meant that Skyraiders often came home missing big pieces, while the newer supersonic jets were often lost to a single “golden BB” fired from small-caliber weapons. All this meant that a surplus airplane older than some of its pilots was performing the CAS mission better than multi-million-dollar machines designed to deliver nuclear weapons. This had major repercussions when a new CAS airplane was needed in the late 1960s. That airplane would become the A-10.

By the late 1960s, it was clear that the Air Force would need to replace the Skyraider, though not many in the USAF leadership wanted the new bird. From the very beginning, the new CAS aircraft was a bastard child within the USAF. It was designed for a mission they didn’t want, in order to keep the Army and Marines from grabbing a bigger budget slice for CAS. A whole series of inter-service treaties dictated that CAS was a “blue” mission that would be handled for the Army by the USAF.[31] The truth was that the USAF leadership of the day could not have cared less about the CAS mission and the troops on the ground that it was supposed to support. They would have been much happier buying fighters and nuclear-armed bombers to accomplish what they saw as the “real” missions of airpower. Pilots of sleek, fast, pointy-nosed fighters (including those who become USAF generals) think of CAS as “air to mud” combat, and often consider it beneath the dignity of an officer and gentleman. So in reality, the USAF’s desire to control the CAS mission was really just a money and power grab, designed to deny the Army control of money and the airspace above the battlefields of the future.

Just one little problem, though, and that was that the Congress and U.S. Army expected (and forced) the USAF to build a “real” CAS airplane for use in the 1970s. Grudgingly, the USAF complied with the mandate and started the A-X (Attack Experimental) program to accomplish that task as cheaply and quickly as was possible. When the competition for a new A-X prototype was initiated, a number of aircraft companies submitted designs to the USAF for consideration. Two finalists were selected, and in 1972 a fly-off between Northrop’s YA-9A and Fairchild-Republic’s YA-10A was conducted. Northrop’s conventional design was more maneuverable, but Fairchild’s entry was judged to be more survivable in a “high-threat” environment (such as the European Central Front or Korea). Some design changes to accommodate USAF wishes were added, and the first production aircraft were delivered in the spring of 1976. Production ended in the 1980s after 650 had been delivered. In late 1996, some 231 remained in service with the U.S. Air Force, the remainder having been retired into storage or lost operationally. Hopes for foreign sales to the Republic of Korea and Turkey never materialized, as much due to the superb marketing of the F-16 (which was sold as a competitor) as anything else. However, the type will remain in service, mostly with National Guard and Reserve units, well into the 21st century, thanks to the brilliant performance of the A-10 community in Desert Storm.

With our history lesson done for now, let’s have a look at the Warthog. WEFT: Wings, Engines, Fuselage, Tail. These are the four key features you memorize when studying aircraft recognition, and it is a good way to start examining the A-10. For at certain angles, the Hog is almost a dead ringer for the World War II-vintage B-25 Mitchell medium bomber that was used by Jimmy Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders to bomb Japan. The Mitchell had a reputation for being one of the toughest, most survivable aircraft of the era, and those same qualities are at the core of the A-10’s design.

The A-10’s broad, thick, low-mounted wings are almost perfectly straight. The absence of wing sweep angle tells you right away that the A-10 is a subsonic design. The wingspan is 57 feet, 6 inches/17.53 meters, and the tips are rounded off with a graceful twist. This, by the way, is the last graceful thing you will see on the Warthog’s airframe. There is a stubby pod about mid-span on each wing, and the rubber tire sticking out in the airstream tells you that this is the fairing for the main landing gear. Each wing has five weapons stations: two inboard and three outboard of the main gear pods respectively. One of these, though, is usually removed to cut weight and drag. The big ailerons on the outboard trailing edge can split, above and below the wing, acting as dive brakes, or spoilers to shorten the landing roll. Unlike most aircraft, the A-10’s wings contain no internal fuel tankage where a stray AAA round or SAM fragment might set it off. To prevent explosions or fire, the armored and self-sealing fuel tanks are concentrated inside the fuselage, a compromise to the core design philosophy of the Warthog: survivability. Another concession in the A-10 design was that the plane would be designed with simplicity in mind. No “wiz-bang” avionics or systems would be carried, unless they supported the core mission of the Warthog: daylight CAS operations over the Forward Edge of Battle Area.

The twin engines are General Electric TF-34 turbofans mounted in cylindrical pods on short pylons extending up and outboard from the aft section of the fuselage. If one TF-34 is shot away, the A-10 can limp home on the other, as several Hogs did during Desert Storm. The TF-34 was chosen to save on development costs, since it was already in production for the Navy’s S-3 Viking, a carrier-based antisubmarine plane that needed long endurance and the ability to loiter at low-altitude.[32] Aircraft designers hate putting a brand-new engine design on a new aircraft type, since experience teaches that this is a common source of development trouble. Each engine is rated at 9,065 1b/4112 kg of thrust, pretty anemic for an aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight of almost 50,000 lb/22,680 kg. Generally, the TF-34 lacks acceleration as well as thrust, and the A-10’s maximum speed at sea level is a modest 439 kn/813.5 kph. Most engines have some design margin for increased thrust during their life cycle, but there was never any money to soup up the TF-34. Turbofans are very fuel-efficient engines, but an equally important consideration for the A-10 is high “bypass ratio,” which mixes a lot of cool air with the hot turbine exhaust, reducing the aircraft’s vulnerability to heat-seeking missiles. Another benefit of the TF-34 is reduced noise; on the ground you cannot hear an A-10 flying above 5,000 feet/1500 meters of altitude.

The purpose of any warplane is to place ordnance onto targets, and the A-10’s design is a classic example of this philosophy. Since the Warthog’s primary mission is CAS, with a special emphasis on destroying heavy armored vehicles (like main battle tanks), the A-10 drew a lot on the lessons of the German JU-87G1 and Russian IL-2 Shturmovik. The A-10’s narrow fuselage was designed around the huge armor-busting General Electric GAU-8 “Avenger” cannon. This is an externally powered seven-barrel rotary 30mm gun, almost 20 feet/6.1 meters long, weighing in at 4,029 1b/1831 kg. The GAU-8’s rotary gun mechanism is based on the 150-year-old Gatling design, but an ingenious “linkless” ammunition-conveyor system makes it possible to fire at a cyclic rate of fifty to seventy rounds per second! Each barrel is 7 feet six inches/2.3 meters long (or to put it in ordnance terms, 76.66 calibers), and the entire GAU-8 system is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle compact car![33] Viewed from the front, the gun muzzle appears offset slightly to port, giving the nose a peculiar asymmetry, but as the gun assembly rotates, the barrel exactly on the centerline is the one that fires.

The GAU-8 gives the Warthog awesome firepower against ground targets, unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. However, with a magazine capacity of only 1,350 rounds, A-10 pilots must fire short bursts. The standard combat load is a mix of armor-piercing (AP) and high-explosive-incendiary (HEI) shells. The AP round can pierce the top or side armor of most heavy tanks, and in wartime, the A-10 would use depleted-uranium AP projectiles. This is a very dense metal that ignites and burns violently when compressed and heated by a high-velocity impact. “Depleted” uranium has had most of its fissionable U-235 removed, and thus has only a tiny residual radioactivity, but like most other heavy metals it is quite toxic. So, in consideration of environmental concerns, it is being replaced by tungsten alloy projectiles. However you look at it, the GAU-8 “main battery” of the A-10 is an impressive weapon.[34]

Survivability was at the core of the original A-X specification, and was one of the reasons that Fairchild won the contract. Since most of the aircraft that were lost in Vietnam had been shot down by light AAA fire, the Warthog was specifically hardened against this threat. In the forward fuselage is a “titanium bathtub” surrounding the cockpit to protect the pilot and flight controls. Light as aluminum and stronger than steel, titanium is very difficult to cast or weld, which makes it an expensive luxury in aircraft structures. But the A-X specification required protecting the pilot from cannon shells up to 23mm in caliber, and steel armor would have been far too heavy. Other parts of the Warthog have also been heavily overbuilt, so that they are “ballistically tolerant” to all sorts of different ordnance. This means that they will still function if hit by, say, a 7.62mm machine-gun round, or a fragment from an exploding surface-to-air (SAM) warhead. Virtually every assembly on the A-10 went through some type of ballistic tolerance design and testing, and the results have been proven in combat. To appreciate the toughness of this A-10, consider the experience of one Desert Storm A-10 pilot:

“They counted 378 holes in it… All four shells from a four-round clip of 57mm hit me… the right engine… had forty-five holes in it — it wasn’t developing full power but it was still running when I landed… The right side below the cockpit had seventeen major holes in it and the bathtub had a lot of chinks in it… ” The aircraft was eventually patched up and flew home to Louisiana!

This pilot’s experience was hardly unique. Other Warthog drivers had their own battle damage experiences during Desert Storm, and usually their “Hogs” brought them safely home to fly and fight another day.

In addition to making the shell of the Warthog’s cockpit tough, the Fairchild-Republic designers made what is inside tolerant to the evils of the CAS environment. In addition to the standard ACES-series ejection seat, the A-10’s cockpit is packed with conventional round instrument dials (humorously called “steam gauges”) rather than the sleek multi-function displays (computer screens) found in contemporary pointy-nosed fast movers like the F-16. Mechanical instruments are far more resistant to shock and other unpleasant effects that the CAS environment commonly throws at your average Hog driver, and thus are the readouts of choice. The one exception to this rule is a small video display where the pilot can view the scene through the electro-optical or infrared seeker head of a selected AGM-65 Maverick missile.

Like everything else on the Hog, the controls on the A-10 are utterly conventional. A normal-looking control stick between the pilot’s legs and a twin throttle console on the left tell you that this is not one of the sexy “fly-by-wire” fighters like the F-16 or F-18. One unusual control is a lever that engages “manual reversion” of the flight controls, if both hydraulic systems are knocked out.[35] This allows the pilot to fly the aircraft with pure muscle power through cables and pulleys, which can be an exhausting struggle in rough weather. Perhaps the one modern feature of the Hog’s cockpit is the bubble canopy, which gives the pilot a superb view of the battlefield, a vital necessity for CAS/FAC operations.

The outside of the A-10 appears to be randomly festooned with all variety of lumps and bumps. Each item, though, is designed to add to the functionality of the A-10 in CAS operations. Above the gun and forward of the bubble canopy is a receptacle for in-flight refueling from USAF tankers. In combat, A-10 squadrons will usually be based as close to the front line as possible, but in-flight refueling makes it possible for units based in the United States to carry out grueling marathon flights (thirteen hours or more) to deploy nonstop to remote overseas trouble spots. There is no room inside the nose for any kind of radar, but there is a pylon on the starboard forward fuselage for a laser-spot target seeker, the AAS-35 Pave Penny pod. While unable to project a laser spot to designate targets for laser-guided weapons itself, the Pave Penny can detect the laser spots from other designators, providing a steering cue to the pilot. This allows the Warthog driver to attack a target marked by troops on the ground with a designator, or by an airborne designator from a helicopter (like the Army OH-58D or Marine AH-1W) or other aircraft (such as an F-15E or F-16C with LANTRIN pods). This is only done rarely, as the A-10’s weapons load is mostly made up of unguided iron and cluster bombs, as well as fire-and-forget AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missiles.

Although the numerous underwing hardpoints can accommodate almost any kind of ordnance owned by the USAF, you won’t find much hanging here that is guided. The sexier and more expensive Paveway-series laser-guided bombs (LGBs) or the GBU-15/AGM-130-series electro-optical guided bombs and missiles are reserved for the supersonic members of the USAF Air Combat Command (ACC). The Warthog community views its primary weapons as the mighty GAU-8 gun, unguided bombs (like the Mk 80-series “iron” bombs, and CBU-87/89/97ries cluster weapons), 2.75-in/ 70mm rockets, and the AGM-65 Maverick AGM. Currently, the Imaging Infrared (IIR) — D and — G versions are the favorites, given their excellent seeker heads (which use the thermal signature of a target to home in on) as well as their large warheads. In fact, because the Maverick’s seeker head is based upon a staring matrix array of infrared detectors, as opposed to a single detector element like the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile (AAM), it actually “sees” an image of the target. This image is fed onto the cockpit display screen we mentioned earlier, so that it can be used to “lock” the seeker head of the missile onto a target.

During Desert Storm, Warthog crews found that they could power up an IIR Maverick on the rail (A-10s usually carry two or three AGM-65s on each of a pair of three-rail launchers), and use the seeker as a “poor man’s” thermal imager or forward-looking infrared (FLIR) scanner. Given this rudimentary capability, Hog drivers were able to develop night intruder tactics for operations after dark.

The one other guided weapon carried by the A-10 is the AIM-9M Sidewinder AAM, which is carried for self-defense against fighters and for shooting down the odd helicopter that may get in the way.[36]

The tail of the A-10 consists of a broad horizontal stabilizer with a huge slab-sided vertical stabilizer with a rudder at each end. It was here that the ballistic tolerance in the Warthog design was taken to extremes. Either side of the tailplane can be shot away, and the A-10 will still be able to fly home! Also, the arrangement of the tail surface tends to shield the hot engine exhaust ducts from the view of ground-based observers, making it harder for a heat-seeking SAM to track the aircraft. Another thing that helps keep the Hog flying is that as much as possible, components of the A-10 are designed to be interchangeable between left and right (and between different aircraft). This enables repair crews to patch together one flyable Warthog from two or more damaged ones. This is just more of the whole “toughness” mentality that permeates the whole A-10 design from nose to tail.

Toughness is not just a characteristic of the A-10 and their pilots, though. It shows in how those ground crews service and support the Warthogs. There once was an aircrew joke about the ground technicians spreading corn on the ramp to “bring the hogs in at night.” However, every A-10 driver will tell you that it is those same skilled maintenance technicians that keep the Warthog fleet flying in the forward field conditions that it was designed to work from. The original concept of operations (CONOPS) for the A-10 was to have them spread out from a central home base, and then operate from forward operating bases (FOBs) that could be anything from a dirt airstrip to a section of the Autobahn. Small detachments of maintenance personnel would then go forward to refuel and rearm the big jets, and support any rapid repairs of equipment or battle damage that might occur. To this end, the A-10 was designed to be easy to support in the field. The aircraft has its own auxiliary power unit (APU, a miniature turbine engine buried in the aft fuselage), so it requires no external starter cart. There is even a telescoping retractable ladder built into the side of the fuselage, so the pilot can mount his steed without outside assistance.

So just what is involved when an A-10 comes in to be serviced? Well, the crew chief goes to the portside main landing gear sponson fairing, and opens the hinged forward cone. Located here there is a small diagnostic panel, as well as a single-point refueling receptacle. The crew chief gives the aircraft systems a quick check, as well as starting the process of refueling and rearming. At this point, the rest of the ground crew jumps into action to rearm the big jet and get the pilot ready for the next sortie. This process greatly resembles a NASCAR racing crew servicing a stock car in the pits before returning it to the track. In the whole turnaround process, only one specialized piece of ground equipment is needed, a big machine called the “Dragon,” which automatically reloads the A-10’s internal 30mm ammunition drum. Each FOB ground crew has a Dragon and the other things necessary to do “bare-bones” maintenance and replenishment between missions. Very rapidly, fuel is pumped, bombs and other weapons are loaded onto rails and racks, and the pilot is given a chance to go to the bathroom, grab a bite to eat, and look over the maps and get briefed for the next mission.

Short turnaround times between sorties are the key to this process, so that a maximum number of missions can be flown every day by each aircraft and pilot. This is done with field-level equipment and lots of backbreaking effort on the part of the ground crews. It is an amazing thing to watch the young men and women, all of them enlisted personnel and NCOs, loading tons of weapons and thousands of gallons of fuel in a matter of minutes, no matter the time of day, the heat or cold, rain or shine. Once the service break is over, the pilot mounts up, and another CAS mission is underway.

CAS missions were the rationale for the entire A-X program, and wound up being both loved and hated by the USAF leadership. Loved because CAS missions showed the Air Force “supporting” their Army brethren on the ground. This was the “proper” role of airpower during the development of the AirLand Battle doctrine of the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, though, the USAF leadership hated the Warthogs, both for the money and personnel that they had to commit to the A-10s units and because their mission was heavily controlled by the Army. But whatever the USAF generals may have thought, the Warthog community has always loved their aircraft, and still see their mission as important, even in an age of PGMs. Their gypsy existence of operating out of FOBs harkens back to a simpler time when flying was fun and men flew the airplanes, not a bank of digital computers. To this day, the folks who fly the A-10 continue to be held in contempt by their supersonic brethren in the USAF, and they could care less! Perhaps the fast drivers just envy all the fun that their Hog-riding brethren seem to have. Whatever the case, the Warthog drivers have a diffi-cult and dangerous job to do, which has not gotten any easier since the original A-X requirement was written.

The basic mission that the A-10 was designed for was daylight low-altitude ground attack on the European Central Front during the Cold War. If World War III had ever broken out, squadrons home-based in England would have rotated to austere FOBs in Germany and other NATO partner countries, where the aircraft would then be dispersed and camouflaged in the woods. They could have even operated from straight sections of the Autobahn had that been necessary. While each FOB detachment would have been between four and eight A-10s, the basic A-10 tactical formation has always been the pair. This has an element lead and a wingman, operating within visual contact of each other for mutual support. In bad weather that can mean flying a tight formation, with wingtips only a few feet apart. Two pairs often operate as a “four-ship.” Don’t let the small numbers put you off, though. During just one day of operations during Desert Storm, a pair of particularly aggressive Hog drivers destroyed over two dozen Iraqi tanks in front of the Marine units advancing on Kuwait City.

Early on in the A-10’s operational history, the Hog drivers began to do joint training with Army AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters. The A-1Os flying as low as 100 feet/30 meters, would first take out enemy mobile antiaircraft guns (like the deadly ZSU-23-4) and mobile SAM launchers (such as the SA-8 Gecko and SA-9 Gaskin) with AGM-65 Maverick missiles, allowing the attack helicopters to safely “pop up” above ridgelines, village housetops, or tree lines to fire their own TOW antitank missiles. As the helicopters dropped back behind cover, the Warthogs would then wheel around in sharp low-altitude turns to strafe the immobilized enemy columns with cannon fire. If bad weather prevented using Mavericks, A-10s would rely on antiarmor cluster bombs. These tactics eventually evolved into an “intruder” philosophy of operations, which had the Warthogs operating over preplanned areas known as “kill boxes,” which were essentially free-fire zones. This was the basic operating philosophy that the A-10 community took with them to the Persian Gulf for Desert Storm.

Finding targets can be a real challenge in the Warthog. With no targeting aids other than their own eyeballs, one vitally important skill for every A-10 pilot is managing the unruly folded paper maps on his knee board, since the A-10 lacks one of the fancy moving-map displays common on aircraft like the F-15E Strike Eagle. A-10 pilots frequently have to depend on forward air controllers (FACs) on the ground and in other aircraft to locate the enemy formations and guide the Warthogs to the best attack position. This FAC “cuing” process has been refined down to a terse “nine-line brief” based on military map coordinates. Each run by the A-10s is laid out in detail, with the following data points being given to each pilot by the FAC just prior to the run-in:

1. Location of the initial point (IP) for starting an attack.

2. Heading from IP to targets.

3. Elevation of targets.

4. Distance from IP to the targets.

5. Target descriptions (artillery positions, tank columns, truck convoys, etc.).

6. Map coordinates of the targets.

7. Positions of nearby friendly forces.

8. Best direction to leave the target area.

9. Any other information that might help the pilot survive.

By formalizing the process of target designation and properly coordinating run-ins, the chances of a “blue-on-blue” or “friendly fire” incident are minimized.

These tactics did not develop overnight. On the contrary, from the time the 23rd Fighter Wing (the first overseas A-10 unit) stood up at RAF Bentwaters in the late 1970s, they were constantly refining their craft, always working to find new ways to better use their Hogs.

Throughout the 1980s, A-10 units were frequently deployed to trouble areas like Korea and the Caribbean, but always after the tensions were over. They helped hold the line during the final decade of the Cold War, and were almost out of business when a call to go to a real war arrived.

August of 1990 saw the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the A-10 community were quickly up to their snouts in the crisis. One quick note about this, though. There has always been an apocryphal story that General Chuck Horner, the commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force and the Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF), did not want the Warthogs in the Persian Gulf. Nothing could be further from the truth, though.[37] Deployment of A-10 units had always been part of the 9th Air Force/CENTAF deployment schedule, and they got their alert order to move only six days after the first USAF units had started deploying to the Gulf. As General Horner would tell you, he had to get aircraft capable of getting air superiority into the theater first, and the Warthogs just had to wait their turn.

This does not mean that everything was easy when they got there. The deployment to Saudi Arabia took almost twice as long as a comparable F-15 or F-16 unit because of the Warthogs’ slow cruising speed, and when they arrived, the conditions they encountered were decidedly austere. Living in tent cities with outdoor showers was the rule for the A-10 units. But like the other units assigned to CENTAF, they worked hard and made their main base at King Fahd International Airport (near Dhahran) a suitable home.

The real problem the Warthog community had was selling themselves and their capabilities to the CENTAF planning staff. The bulk of the early Desert Storm air campaign targets were of a “strategic” type, requiring the kind of all-weather targeting and precision-guided munitions capabilities that were inherent to aircraft like the F-111F Aardvark, F-117 Nighthawk, and A-6E Intruder.[38] On the surface, this would appear to leave little for other attack aircraft like the A-10s, F-16s, and AV-8B Harriers to do, though nothing could be further from the truth. From the very beginning of the Desert Storm air campaign planning process, it had been planned to keep a constant, twenty-four-hour-a-day pressure on the Iraqis, especially their fielded forces in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (KTO). When the advocates for the A-10 made their capabilities known to the CENTAF staff, the Warthogs quickly began to get mission tasking for operations in southern Iraq and Kuwait.

By the time Desert Shield turned into Desert Storm, a total of 144 A-10s had been deployed to Saudi Arabia, forming the 23rd and 354th Tactical Fighter Wings (Provisional). Despite the terrible weather and difficult operational conditions in the Gulf during the winter of 1991, overall A-10 mission availability during the Gulf War was rated at 95 percent, which was higher than peacetime levels at well-equipped home bases!

However, this was war and a price was paid when four A-10s were downed by enemy ground fire. Captain Stephen R. Phillis of the 354th TFW (P) was killed by a surface-to-air missile while escorting his battle-damaged wingman out of a target area in northern Kuwait on February 15th, 1991. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Two other battle-damaged A-10s were destroyed while attempting to land, and two other damaged aircraft were written off after they returned home (both became “gate guards” on static display at their Stateside home bases).

While operations in the air were dangerous for the A-10s, there also were problems on the ground. One of the realities of modern CAS operations is that they sometimes happen really close to friendly forces. Desert Storm was no exception, and there were several “friendly fire” incidents as a result. The first occurred during the Battle of Khafji, when an A-10 accidentally fired an AGM-65 IIR Maverick missile into the back of a USMC light armored vehicle. Seven Marines were killed, and another pair badly wounded. Later, in one of the most tragic incidents of the war, on February 25th, 1991, nine British troops died in a Warrior infantry combat vehicle struck by another Maverick mistakenly fired by an A-10. These were hardly the only “blue-on-blue” incidents to take place during Desert Storm, just the worst. In both cases there were questions about the Maverick missiles possibly going “stupid” (i.e., their seeker heads breaking lock on their intended targets) and going after the first target that came into view of the Maverick’s IIR seeker head.

On the plus side, A-10s flew 8,755 sorties, scoring confirmed kills on 1,106 trucks, 987 tanks, 926 artillery pieces, 501 armored personnel carriers, 249 command vehicles, 51 SCUD missile launchers, 96 Iraqi radars, SAM sites, and 10 parked aircraft, plus the 2 air-to-air kills against helicopters. The actual damage inflicted by the Warthogs was probably greater, because the rules for “confirmed” kills were very strict, but interpretation of the results is controversial since the Iraqis also made extensive use of decoy targets. A-10s delivered a large percentage of the total tonnage of ordnance delivered during the war, with a total of 5,013 AGM-65 Mavericks being launched, 14,184 500-lb/227-kg bombs dropped, and 940,254 30mm GAU-8 rounds fired. In the early days of the air campaign, A-10s often carried a pair of AIM-9M Sidewinder AAMs on the outermost weapon stations, but as the Iraqi air threat dissipated, these were usually left on the ground. A few were fired inadvertently, but no hits were scored.

Shooting wars always seem to bring out the ingenuity in Americans, and Desert Storm was no exception. No operational plan lasts beyond the first battle, and the A-10 squadrons had to improvise a variety of new tactics for the desert war. To avoid the heaviest Iraqi ground fire, they were ordered by the CENTAF staff to operate at medium altitudes (around 8,000 feet/2,438 meters) rather than the extremely low levels they had trained for.

More interestingly, several squadrons operated primarily as night intruders, using parachute flares and the IIR seeker heads of their AGM-65 Maverick missiles to pick out targets. With a field of view limited to only 3° and a fuzzy cockpit display screen, using the Maverick as a night sight was “like looking through a soda straw.” Nevertheless, it was an excellent alternative to a million-dollar stabilized FLIR system, which the A-10 was never going to get anyway. It was just another example of the Warthog spirit that you find in the men and women who operate this most ugly and functional of warplanes.

CAS missions were not the only important tasks given to the A-10. Certainly the most satisfying was the “Sandy” mission, which had Warthogs escorting combat search and rescue (CSAR) helicopters to pick up downed aircrews and other personnel behind enemy lines. On one such CSAR mission, a pair of Hog drivers, Captains Paul Johnson and Randy Goff, won an Air Force Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross respectively for their efforts. While supporting an MH-53J Pave Low III special operations helicopter which was picking up the radar intercept officer of a downed Navy F-14 Tomcat, they made numerous runs on Iraqi ground troops trying to capture the Airedale. Despite severe opposition, the two Hogs kept the Iraqis at bay long enough to get the Naval aviator out of harm’s way and on the way home.

Some of the other missions that Warthogs flew during the war were even more unusual. Because of their slow speed and long loiter time on station, the A-10s proved to be superb in the role of hunting down the launchers of the notorious SCUD surface-to-surface missiles that were such a thorn in the side of the Allied war effort. However, of these various peripheral missions being flown by the Hog, none was more important than of FAC.

For the CAS mission, you need FACs, either in the air or on the ground, to direct aircraft in to deliver their ordnance on target. In the years leading up to Desert Storm, the USAF had severely drawn down their force of FAC aircraft, and a new airframe was needed to replace the aging force of Vietnam-era “bird dogs.” Out of this requirement came the only significant Warthog variant, the OA-10A. The OA-10 is almost identical to the standard A-10 (except for the radio systems), but has a different mission and carries a different mix of weapons.

During Desert Storm, several Warthog squadrons operated OA-10s as forward observers and provided FAC services to the flyers of almost every service and nation fighting in the Coalition. The OA-10 pilots loitered over the battlefield to detect enemy forces, and directed other aircraft to attack them. The OA-10 drivers frequently relied on hand-held binoculars and instinct, and they often fired unguided white phosphorus rockets (which produce dense white smoke) to mark targets. Operating over the CENTAF-MANDATED “kill boxes” in Kuwait and Iraq, they controlled incoming flights of aircraft from every nation. Everything from USAF F-16s to French Mirages were guided onto their targets by the OA-10s, and they were a vital part of the 24-hour-a-day pressure that helped crack the Iraqi Army.

By the coming of the ground war, the Warthog force had done the bulk of the work that they would accomplish. Misunderstandings over the Fire Control Support Line (FCSL, a hypothetical line in front of friendly ground troops beyond which CAS and other aircraft must deliver their ordnance) as well as poor weather limited CAS operations during the so-called “Hundred-Hour War.” Nevertheless, the Hogs and their crews had an outstanding war, carving out a place in the post-Cold War military just as important as the stealthy F-117s and the laser-bombing F-15E Strike Eagles. Since that time, Warthogs have been highly active around the world, from supporting “no-fly” and relief operations in northern Iraq, to helping forge and protect the peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And the story is not over yet.

With the coming of the “New World Order,” national and USAF leaders have found a secure little niche in the USAF force structure for the Warthog community. Prior to Desert Storm, it had been planned that the A-10 would be replaced by a modified version of the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Equipped with an automated target-hand-off system and a pod-mounted version of the GAU-8, they were set to drive the “Hog” out of service in just a few years. Then came the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The USAF deployed a squadron of the CAS-equipped F-16s to Saudi Arabia, where they promptly fell flat on their collective faces.[39] Reportedly because of software problems with their mission computers, the CAS F-16s had trouble delivering their weapons accurately on target. In particular, the pod-mounted 30mm guns could not hit their targets with any sort of accuracy. Meanwhile, the “low-tech” A-10s were killing targets by the score. As might be imagined, the F-16 CAS idea died a quick and righteous death, and the USAF decided to keep the Warthogs. Forever! Today, if you look at the planning charts of the USAF Air Staff at the Pentagon, you see a line depicting the life of the A-10 fleet going as far right (into the future) as the chart goes! While nothing is planned to replace the Hog, there also are no plans for it to retire, and perhaps this is as it should be.

Today, the A-10 is being allocated modest (though significant by Warthog standards!) funds to upgrade its operational capabilities. The rudimentary night intruder tactics employed by the Hogs during Desert Storm really impressed the USAF leadership, and they have finally decided to invest a little money in the bird to make it more capable in the role. Once upon a time, there had been plans to equip the Hog with the LANTIRN navigation /targeting pod system that currently is found in other high-end fighter bombers like the F-14D Tomcat, the F-15E Strike Eagle, and the F-16C Fighting Falcon. In fact, this would probably be an excellent idea, even today, given the flight characteristics of the Warthog. Unfortunately, the high cost of the LANTIRN system (several million U.S. dollars per pod sets) makes this impossible, and other means have been found to enhance the A-10’s night fighting capabilities.

The most important of these have been the use of night-vision goggles (NVGs) by A-10 pilots. By carefully modifying the cockpit lighting for NVG operations (so as not to “dazzle” the NVG’s sensitive pickup element), the Hog drivers can actually fly and fight the aircraft rather well in all but the darkest nights. While the field of view and depth of field suffer somewhat by comparison with regular eyesight (as a result of the monochrome world seen through the NVGs), it is an operable solution to giving the Warthog (and several other USAF aircraft) a night-vision capability that costs thousands, not millions, of taxpayer dollars. Exterior lighting has also been improved, and like most other Air Force birds, the A-10s have finally received GPS receivers.

Another big change for the A-10 has been LASTE, the Low Altitude Safety and Targeting Enhancement. This includes a radar altimeter and ground-proximity voice warning system, a new weapons delivery computer based on the one used in the F-16, and a real autopilot, allowing the pilot to take his hands off the controls for the first time. This is important because it makes it possible for Hog drivers to relax a bit on long overwater deployments. These relatively minor improvements have produced big results for the Warthog community, and have made the A-10’s twentieth year of front-line service more of a rebirth than a sunset. Whatever their future, though, never count the A-10 and their pilots and crews out. Remember, they have the heart and soul of a Warthog.

The Labors of Hercules: The Lockheed Martin C-130

In Greek mythology, Hercules was a hero of superhuman strength who proved his merit by performing a series of impossible tasks. That’s a good description for the C-130, an aircraft affectionately known as the “Herky Bird.” This amazing airplane celebrated its fortieth anniversary of continuous production in 1995, with over 2,200 aircraft delivered, in scores of variants operated by dozens of air forces and civilian airlines. Designed as a simple troop carrier and freight hauler, the C-130 has served as a flying command post, electronic spy plane, airborne hospital, drone mother ship, gun platform, firefighter, search-and-rescue bird, and even a bomber! Perhaps most impressive, though, is that while it was built to serve in war, some of its greatest achievements have been humanitarian relief operations. The C-130 has probably wound up saving far more lives in peace than it ever took in combat. So read on, and read what I can only humbly call an abbreviated and inadequate story about one of the great machines of man’s history on earth.

The C-130 story began in the early 1950s when medium transport aircraft technology seemed to have peaked with the development of the pistonengined Flying Boxcars. The military airlift fleet at the time consisted mostly of twin-engine aircraft of limited capacity: war-weary C-47s and under-powered C-119s. Clearly a higher-performance medium transport was needed to support the moving of cargo and personnel within military the-aters of operation. One of the colonels assigned to allocate the money for transport aircraft suggested that the Air Force really needed a rugged medium transport that could carry about fifteen tons to a range of 1,500 nm/2,780 km, operating from improvised dirt runways. Thus, the start of the C-130 program was an emergency $105 million supplement to the Air Force research and development budget, granted a few days after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The idea was formalized as an operational requirement in February of 1951, with the following features being desired:

• The ability to carry ninety paratroopers for a range of 2,000 nm/3,706 km.

• The capacity to transport 30,000 pounds (13,636 kg) over a shorter distance.

• The ability to take off and land in short distances (2,500 feet/762 meters).

• The ability to fly safely and safely slow to 125 kt/232 kph for airdrops, and even less for assault landings.

Boeing, Douglas, Fairchild, and Lockheed submitted proposals, with Lockheed winning the contract to build two YC-130 prototypes on July 2nd, 1951. The aircraft was designed at Lockheed’s Advanced Design Department in Burbank, California, under the direction of Willis Hawkins, with Art Flock as the lead project engineer. When Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s legendary chief designer and builder of some of the most beautiful airplanes in history, first saw the mockup, he thought the plane was too ugly and went back to his Skunk Works.[40] Nevertheless, Lockheed was about to launch the longest-lived and most profitable aircraft in their history, making this one of Johnson’s rare misjudgments.

Kelly Johnson was right about one thing, though; the Hercules would never win any beauty contests. The lines of the stubby fuselage (97 feet 9 inches/29.8 meters in length) were spoiled by bulging landing gear fairings. The tail swept up sharply to an oversized vertical fin (30 feet/11.66 meters tall) and the spacious flight deck looked like a greenhouse, with no less than twenty-three windows to give outstanding visibility for the flight crew. The high-mounted wing was a barely tapered slab (spanning over 132 feet/40 meters) with four projecting engine pods, and was a conservative two-spar design with integral fuel tanks. However, in a daring departure from conventional manufacturing methods, the design called for enormous single-piece machined aluminum skin panels up to 48 feet/14.6 meters in length.

The engines were, at the time, the most radical feature of the new Hercules design. For the first time on an American transport they were “turboprops.” This British invention coupled a gas turbine engine to a constant-speed gearbox driving a variable-pitch propeller. This hybrid design seems, at first, to be needlessly complex, but in practice, the Allison T56 turboprops proved to be highly fuel-efficient, reliable, and easier to maintain than a piston engine or jet of equivalent power. They were also relatively compact, with a lower forward cross-sectional area, providing reduced drag. This is not to say the new turboprops were perfect. The original electrically operated three-bladed propellers never worked properly, and were quickly replaced by hydraulically powered Hamilton-Standard units. Later, the three-bladed propellers were replaced by four-bladed models, similar to those used on the Navy’s Lockheed P-3 maritime patrol aircraft.

Like most engines, the Allison turboprop family has evolved through a series of modifications with increasing power. The chart below shows how the engines for the Hercules have developed:

As you can see, the trend has been a gradual but upward growth in power for the engines on the -130. From the flight crew’s point of view, though, the real improvement has been the ability to deliver all that power more efficiently through the transmission, and to do so in the conditions that are always tough on turbine powerplants: high and hot. High temperatures and high altitude (i.e., low pressure) are the bugaboos for turbine engine designers. These sap engine power and directly effect the flight characteristics of an aircraft. The Hercules has always done well when upgraded. The longevity of the C-130H production line (over thirty years to date) is a testimony to just how well.

If there is truth in the statement that beauty is in the eye of the be-holder, then the C-130 must be gorgeous to everyone it comes into contact with. For example, consider the perspective of an aircraft crew chief or loadmaster. These are normally senior enlisted personnel who manage the aircraft systems and payload on a USAF transport aircraft. Anything that can make their job easier or shorter is “good” from their perspective, as well as anything that makes “their” airplane more capable or less dependent on other people and organizations.[41] One of these “good” features is a gas turbine auxiliary power unit (APU), located in the port-side landing gear fairing, that provides power to start the engine and operate the electrical and hydraulic systems on the aircraft, with no requirement for external support equipment to get under way. Another thing that keeps loadmasters and crew chiefs happy is how well things go into an aircraft. The C-130 designer gave a lot of thought to cargo handling, and this paid huge dividends over the next four decades. Previous airlifter designs had relied on large side-loading doors (which weaken the fuselage structure) or on an inefficient twin-boom tail, which allowed the entire aft end of the fuselage to hinge upward, or split into a pair of clamshell doors. The C-130 used an elegantly simple loading arrangement. The cargo deck was the same height as a truck bed. The lower surface of the upswept tail section was split, with the lightweight aft section retracting upward, and the strongly built forward section hinged downward to provide a cargo ramp. By lowering the ramp completely, a pair of 5-ton trucks could be driven right into the cargo compartment. So perfect was the concept behind the C-130’s rear ramp that it has become the standard method of designing aircraft cargo-loading ramps all over the world. These are some of the many things that Lockheed did to make the Hercules a “field” airplane, rather than one that needs a big base to keep going.

The cargo compartment itself is 10 feet 3 inches/3.12 meters wide, 9 feet/2.74 meters high, and 41 feet 5 inches/12.62 meters long, roughly the dimensions of a standard North American railroad boxcar. Some later models of the -130 added fuselage “plugs” (a structure that is dropped into a basic aircraft’s design) to extend the cargo compartment by some 15 feet/4.57 meters. In addition to the cargo door, there is a crew entry door forward on the port side that opens down to become a stairway. Aft, the paratrooper jump doors are located on either side, just in back of the trailing edge of the wing. These doors pull inward and then slide up and out of the way. When conducting paratrooper drop operations, the Hercules has an air deflector fitted to each door that protects jumpers from the sudden blast of air as they exit the aircraft. Along the top of each side of the cargo compartment runs a steel cable that can be reeled up and stowed out of the way, which is used by paratroops to hook their static lines prior to drop. There are also emergency exit hatches for the flight deck and the cargo compartment in the top of the fuselage. Along the sides and center of the cargo compartment are a series of fold-up, woven cloth seats which are surprisingly comfortable, in spite of their decidedly uncomfortable looks. The rated capacity of the C-130 is ninety-two soldiers or sixty-four paratroops with their equipment.

When the seats are folded up and the cargo compartment is clear, being inside gives one the impression of being inside a large aluminum shoebox. In the floor are various tie-down points, which allows almost every conceivable kind of cargo to be carried. Creature comforts in the Hercules are few and far between; this bird is built for function, not luxury. Still, life in the back of the C-130 is relatively comfortable. This is mainly due to a significant innovation in cargo aircraft design, being able to pressurize the entire cargo compartment. The whole compartment could be pressurized to maintain an equivalent cabin altitude of 8,000 feet/2,438 meters even at the aircraft’s operational ceiling of 33,000 feet/10,060 meters above sea level.

If the C-130 does have a vice, it is noise. C-130 crews like to joke that the pressurized cargo compartment was designed to keep the sound in, and ear protectors are essential equipment. Even this problem can be solved, though, if money is no object. The Royal Saudi Air Force operates a luxurious customized VC-130 VIP transport, with a barrier of thick sound insulation surrounding the passenger compartment. All this interior noise comes from the Herky’s four turboprop engines, which have a loud and distinctive roar. This means that planning a surprise assault landing, like the Israeli rescue mission at Entebbe, requires a keen awareness of the noise footprint at various speeds and descent angles. This is a minor tactical disadvantage, though, given all the other great features of the Hercules.

For all the noise in the cargo compartment, the crew chiefs love the fact that their standard equipment kit (carried on top of the rear ramp) includes virtually everything needed to configure the cargo compartment for almost any kind of load. This is vital, considering that a crew may be called upon in the middle of one trip to rapidly reconfigure their aircraft to go on another kind of mission. This is one of the reasons why the marriage of the Hercules and USAF Reserve/ANG has been such a resounding success. One of the best-kept secrets in the Air Force is that the majority of Hercules units belong to ANG and USAF Reserve units, being flown and operated by “Weekend Warriors.” Given the nature of the airlift mission, whether it is supporting a crisis combat situation like Desert Shield or Haiti, or a disaster relief scenario like Hurricane Hugo or the Los Angeles riots, the “total force” concept (Active, Reserve, and ANG working together) has proven to be tailor-made for the -130 force. More than one Army commander that I have talked to refers to the Hercules as “the packing crate for the American military”!

Over the years, the Hercules has carried probably every object that could possibly fit inside the cargo compartment. However, one of the most dramatic airdrop cargoes C-130 has ever delivered was the Army’s M-551 Sheridan light tank, which (until recently) was found in the lone armored battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, the 3rd of the 73rd Armored (3/73). The 36,300-1b/16,500-kg vehicle is strapped to a pallet, equipped with a huge “drogue” extraction parachute. In the Low Altitude Precision Extraction System (LAPES) mode, the C-130 skims slowly only a few feet/meters above the ground with the cargo ramp lowered. The extraction chute is deployed and the vehicle is pulled out of the aircraft. The four-man tank crew (landed separately) then runs up to the tank as soon as it bumps and grinds to a stop. The Sheridan’s delicate gun-missile fire-control system reportedly took a beating from the shock, but it made for a very impressive demonstration of the Hercules’ delivery capabilities.

Another of the C-130’s many virtues is the ability to operate off extremely short and rough airfields. The high wings and turboprop engines provide much of this capability, but the land gear is vital to this as well. The C-130’s landing gear retracts only a short distance, keeping the center of gravity low, allowing the plane to hug the ground. The main landing gear consists of two pairs of large-diameter tires arranged in tandem, giving it an extremely low ground pressure for such a large aircraft. The main gear has a relatively narrow track, only about fourteen feet between the port and starboard wheels, which facilitates operations on narrow taxiways. In fact, the aircraft can turn in a radius of only 85 feet/25.9 meters (measured from the wing tip). Also, with reverse thrust on the propellers (actually the pitch of the props is reversed), the C-130 can actually taxi backwards. Even the brakes have antiskid features similar to those on new-model automobiles. So good are the rough field characteristics of the Hercules that C-130s have safely landed on sand or mud so deep that the wheels sank over 20 inches/50 centimeters into the ground, and the planes were still able to take off!

Up front, the cockpit of the Hercules might best be described as “mature.” Very little of the computer age is evident on the flight deck of the C-130H, the standard model currently in service. The typical C-130 crew includes a pilot and copilot, navigator, and flight engineer (or “systems manager”) on the flight deck, and an enlisted loadmaster/crew chief in the cargo compartment. The avionics fit of the Hercules is limited, but functional, and has always been that way. Early C-130As had a distinctive “Roman” nose that dropped steeply away from the cockpit, but this was soon replaced by a roomy bulbous radome that has accommodated several successive generations of weather and ground-navigation radars. The standard electronics fit on USAF C-130Hs includes the AN/APN-218 doppler navigation radar, an AN/APN-232 radar altimeter, and a Westinghouse LPCR-130-1 weather radar with color display. A variety of HF, VHF, and UHF radio communications systems is fitted, and most C-130s are equipped so that they can have a satellite communications terminal added if mission requirements dictate such special gear. Of particular importance for airdrop missions is the AN/APN-169C “Station Keeping Equipment” (pronounced “ski”), which allows a group of transport aircraft to maintain precise formation even in the worst conditions of visibility and weather. Even mixed formations of different aircraft like C-130s, C-141s, and C-17s can be accommodated with the SKE gear. A radar-warning receiver is standard equipment, and there are provisions for fitting ALE-40 chaff and flare dispensers to counteract enemy missiles. Many C-130s operating into Sarajevo during the Bosnian Civil War (1992-96) were fitted with protective steel and Kevlar ballistic armor around the flight deck, and this proved so effective that it will be standard on the new-model C-130J.

For the C-130H, the maximum cruising speed is 386 kn/715 kph. Typical cruising altitude is about 35,000 feet/10,668 meters, but the aircraft can reach over 40,000 feet/12,192 meters. The top speed ever recorded for the type, with a stiff tail wind, was 541 kn/1,003 kph, by an RC-130A. A more important performance characteristic for an airlifter is the minimum flight, or stall, speed. The lower the stall speed, the shorter the takeoff and landing roll needs to be for a particular aircraft. For the Hercules, this is approximately 80 kn/148 kph, which is about the same as a Cessna 150! The airframe is designed to safely withstand a stress of +3 Gs in the positive direction, or -1 G in the negative direction. Also, the huge rudder gives the pilot tremendous control authority in yaw (turning horizontally). The aircraft can actually make a flat turn, without banking. All in all, the Hercules is quite easy to fly, with lots of power and lift, and all the control authority that a pilot could want of an aircraft this size. The fine qualities were evident from the early flights of the prototype, and have only gotten better with the years.

That first flight of the YC-130A prototype was a sixty-one-minute hop from Burbank, California, to Edwards AFB on August 23rd, 1954. After the initial prototypes, all the production C-130s were built at Marietta, Georgia, about twenty miles northwest of Atlanta. The first flight of a production model came on April 7th, 1955, and nearly ended in disaster when a quick-disconnect fuel line on the No. 2 engine broke loose and started a fire that caused the wing to break off after landing. Soon repaired, the aircraft had a long, adventurous career tracking missiles and spacecraft, and later as a gunship in Vietnam, remaining in service until the early 1990s! Deliveries to the Air Force began in 1955, and by 1958 the C-130A was found in six Troop Carrier Squadrons (later designated Tactical Airlift Squadrons [TASs]).

From the start, the Hercules had an unusual career within the U.S. military. The first operational employment of the C-130 came in 1957, when President Eisenhower dispatched troops of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas. This federal effort to enforce court-ordered school desegregation against the opposition of a defiant state governor started the tradition of the C-130 being used in non-combatant/civil/relief efforts. The Hercules’ major overseas deployment came in 1958 during the Lebanon Crisis, delivering supplies to Marines who landed at Beirut to support a friendly government threatened by civil war. The first combat airborne assault for USAF C-130s came in 1960 in the Congo (now known as Zaire), where they delivered a battalion of French paratroops. The French were headed to the remote town of Stanleyville (now Kisangani) to rescue civilians and diplomats threatened by a local uprising. Following this, when Chinese troops invaded disputed regions on the northern borders of India in 1962, President Kennedy quietly dispatched a squadron of C-130s to help the Indian Army reinforce its remote Himalayan outposts. The Herks flew thousands of troops and tons of supplies into Leh, where a mountain-ringed 5,000-foot /1,524-meter runway of pierced steel plate (PSP) at an altitude of 10,500 feet/3,200 meters was the only link to the outside world. Even more astounding feats were ahead for the C-130, though.

In 1963, the U.S. Navy actually conducted C-130 carrier landing and takeoff trials onboard USS Forrestal (CV-59). The Chief of Naval Operations wanted to know if the big transport could be used to deliver supplies to carriers operating far from friendly bases. The aircraft was a KC-130F tanker on loan from the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Naval aviator in command was Lieutenant (later Admiral) James H. Flatley III, with the assistance of a Lockheed engineering test pilot, Ted Limmer, Jr. At a weight of 85,000 lb/38,555 kg, the aircraft came to a complete stop in a mere 270 feet/82.3 meters, about twice the wing span of the Hercules! This required some fancy flying — the aircraft reversed thrust on the propellers 3 feet/1 meter above the deck. At maximum load, the plane required a takeoff roll of only 745 feet/227 meters of the carrier’s 1,039-foot/316.7-meter flight deck. On one occasion, the plane stopped just opposite the captain’s bridge with “LOOK MA, NO HOOK” painted in big letters on the side of the fuselage. The Navy never followed up on this promising experiment (they bought the Northrop Grumman C-2 Greyhound instead), but the Herk’s unique ability to take off and land on a carrier remains to challenge the imagination of Joint Special Operations planners down in Tampa.

The war in Southeast Asia tested the Hercules under the most difficult combat conditions imaginable. All told C-130s transported about two thirds of all the troops and cargo tonnage moved by air inside South Vietnam. Frequently, the Herks flew through mortar and rocket fire into narrow 2,500-foot strips carved out in the jungle, and when there were no airfields, they delivered cargo by parachute. The C-130 played an especially vital role supplying the Marines’ epic defense of the besieged mountain base of Khe Sanh in 1968. The Vietnamese Army’s airborne units even conducted a few classic parachute assaults (the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division fought exclusively as “leg” infantry) during the war. Eventually, one of the last aircraft to escape the fall of Saigon in April of 1975 was a South Vietnamese C-130 carrying a load of 452 people (this is as much as a fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jet!): soldiers, airmen, children, and dependents. Amazingly, all arrived safely in Thailand. Now, the Vietnamese are not large people by our standards, but this all-time Herk passenger record was an amazing overload, and a heroic feat of airmanship by Major Phuong, the pilot. At the end of the conflict, the North Vietnamese Air Force captured about thirty C-130s in various states of disrepair, and despite the lack of spares, managed to keep a few flying until the late 1980s, even using some of them as bombers in Cambodia. They now sit, stripped and forlorn, on the old runways at Ton Son Nhut and Bien Hoa, unless they have been sold for scrap.

For the Hercules, Vietnam was a chance to prove how versatile it was. So it is only natural that the C-130 had a part in one of the most significant innovations of the Vietnam War: the development of the gunship. The idea was to load up a large transport aircraft with heavy machine guns and even cannons, and use the weapons as an airborne firebase for supporting ground operations. Originally (from 1965 to 1967) the first gunships were vintage C-47s (known as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” after the popular song of the day), with a battery of side-firing machine guns. The concept was to fly a “pylon turn” around a fixed point on the ground, with the aircraft in a 30° bank circling the target. Operated by the 4th Air Commando Squadron, these first gunships proved highly effective in breaking up night attacks on remote outposts while using parachute flares to illuminate the battlefield. The sight of a great sheet of tracer fire pouring down from the sky had a dramatic psychological impact on friend and foe alike. So successful were the AC-47s that it was decided to build an even bigger gunship. The obvious choice for the airframes were elderly C-130As. A prototype AC-130 gunship arrived in South Vietnam on September 21st, 1967, and it was flown in combat until it practically fell apart. The prototype AC-130 had an improvised analog fire control computer, four 20mm M61 Vulcan cannon (similar to those fitted in modern fighter planes) firing through ports cut in the side of the fuselage, and four 7.62mm “miniguns” (a six-barrel rotary machine gun that fired up to six thousand rounds per minute). It also carried an early Texas Instruments Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) sensor, a night-image intensifier (“starlight scope”), and a side-looking radar that unfortunately proved to be ineffective against guerrilla bands in the jungle.

The Air Force was initially reluctant to divert C-130s from their vital airlift duties, preferring to convert obsolete twin-engine C-119 “Flying Boxcar” airframes for gunship duty. But the big Herky gunship proved so effective that commanders on the ground demanded more of the fire-spitting birds. More were ordered, and were quickly delivered for action in Vietnam. The AC-130 eventually evolved through a series of modifications, with increasingly heavy weapons and sophisticated sensors. Particularly important was the ASD-5 “Black Crow,” a radio-frequency direction finder developed in great secrecy to detect emissions from the old-fashioned ignition coils of Russian-made trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Twenty-nine C-130 gunships served in Vietnam, with the 14th Air Commando (later Special Operations) Wing; six were lost to hostile ground fire.

There were many other variants of the Hercules developed during this period. They ranged from airborne tanker versions to mother ships for the highly classified “Buffalo Hunter” reconnaissance drones that were used extensively over Southeast Asia and Communist China. All this success had an obvious influence on the commercial and military export markets, and the Hercules has been a consistent favorite. Dozens of nations have bought hundreds of models (mostly C-130Hs) of the Hercules for both military and commercial purposes. One of the oddest export sales was one to Libya, before the embargo against Colonel Quadaffi took effect in 1973. When that action took place, a number of C-130H models had yet to be delivered. As a result, over two dozen years later, those Libyan Herks still sit baking in the Georgia sun, on a corner of the ramp in Marietta.

The late 1970s were a time of high adventure for the C-130, as various nations used the stubby transport for a new mission: Hostage Rescue. On July 4th, 1976, three C-130Hs of the Israeli Air Force, along with other support aircraft, raided Entebbe Airport in Uganda, rescuing nearly two hundred hostages that had been taken by Palestinian terrorists while aboard an Air France Airbus. A strike force of crack Israeli paratroops combat-assaulted into the airfield, retook the hostages, and then returned to Israel after suffering just a single casualty — Jonathan Netanyahu, the brother of the current prime minister of that country. After Entebbe, several other nations gave hostage rescue a try using C-130s as the transportation. When an Egyptian airliner was taken by terrorists to Nicosia Airport in Cyprus, the Egyptian government sent in their own commando team. While the assault was a bloody mess, most of the hostages survived. Not all the rescue missions that the C-130 went out on were successful, though, and the U.S. wound up being the loser.

On April 24th, 1980, the U.S. tried to rescue fifty-nine hostages taken when the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, was overrun in 1979. The plan relied on the Herk’s ability to land on short, unprepared runways. Flying low to evade Iranian radar, a force of C-130 tankers joined up with a small force of helicopters at “Desert One,” an isolated landing zone in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, technical problems with the helicopters caused the mission to be scrubbed before the assault on the embassy compound could be mounted. Then, while refueling on the ground during the extraction, an MH-53D helicopter collided with one of the C-130 tankers, igniting an uncontrollable fire. Eight Americans died and five more were injured, and the humiliation destroyed the Administration of President Carter.

The ashes of Desert One, as well as command problems during Operation Urgent Fury (the 1983 invasion of Grenada), led to a re-evaluation of U.S. special operations and joint command arrangements that paid off handsomely in the 1989 invasion of Panama and in 1990 and 1991 in the Gulf War. In every one of these operations, the C-130 played a key role, from dropping and delivering troops in Grenada and Panama, to hauling the cargo and troops that sustained the air campaign and “Hail Mary Play” during Desert Storm. Of particular note were the dozens of C-130s from nations other than the U.S. that supported coalition operations during Desert Shield/Storm. By having chosen the C-130 as their standard airlifter, the nations of the coalition were able to contribute a valuable resource without stressing the spares or maintenance pipeline of CENTAF.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the C-130 has been the backbone of the USAF theater mobility force, and has done an outstanding job. Unfortunately, the basic 1950s technology of the Herk makes the aircraft increasingly expensive to operate and maintain. In particular, while aircrew and mechanics were readily available and easy to train when the Herk was designed, today they represent a major share of an aircraft’s total life-cycle cost. Also, the C-130 lugs around a lot of weight that would not be there if it were being designed from scratch today. Design features such as computer network backbones and composite aircraft structures technologies had not even been envisioned when the YC-130A was on the Lockheed drawing boards. So the way was clear for a new generation of Hercules: the C-130J.

As early as May 1988, the Commander of the Military Airlift Command (now the Air Mobility Command, AMC) outlined requirements for a next-generation C-130. Unfortunately, the projected development costs were more than the Air Force budget would bear, so in December 1991 Lockheed decided to fund the development of the new Hercules variant, known as the C-130J, with the company’s own money. Have no doubt, though, that Lockheed Martin is going to make a load of money on this bird! The British Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) were the launch customers, and the U.S. military has also rapidly jumped onboard as well. Most notable has been the rapid commitment by the USMC for a new force of over a dozen KC-130 tankers. Also, the USAF has firm orders for two prototypes, options for 5 development aircraft, and a requirement for at least 150 units to replace aging C-130Es as they reach the end of their life cycle.

Lockheed Martin is in the enviable position of having something in the C-130J that people badly want, and will pay good money to get. Interest in this new bird resembles nothing so much as a runaway freight train, as the Lockheed Martin sales team is working hard to keep up with the inquiries from around the world. Already the RAF, RAAF, and Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) have firm orders or options for a total of 65 aircraft. This is a lot for an airplane that has not even competed testing and certification!

You might be wondering just why all this excitement is being generated over a modified version of an already forty-year-old transport aircraft. It’s a good question, actually, and deserves an answer. The most obvious one is that this is an airplane that needs to be built. As early as the 1970s, the USAF was considering the possibility of building a jet-powered replacement for the C-130. Under the Advanced Medium Short Takeoff and Landing Transport (AMST) program, two pairs of prototype aircraft were produced (the Boeing YC-14 and the McDonnell Douglas YC-15), but they never went into production. Both pairs of aircraft did great and wonderful things in testing, but not enough to justify producing them instead of additional C-130Hs. In fact, the H-model Hercules has been in production for over thirty years and the only thing that will replace it now is another C-130! It will be a greatly improved Herky, though, and amazingly, will not cost any more than the C-130H model that it will replace. The core philosophy behind the new design is something that a Lockheed Martin engineer told me on a visit to the Marietta, Georgia, plant. He said, “The only reason we touched anything on the C-130J was if it improved performance and reduced cost!”

Externally, the most noticeable differences in the C-130J are the propellers. In place of the four-bladed props, with flat blades and squared-off tips, there are six-bladed props with graceful compound curvature that tells an engineer that the most advanced computer-aided design went into their shaping. Actually, they look a lot like the blades of a modern submarine propeller. Made of advanced composite materials, these blades not only are more efficient than those on the — H, but also have a greatly reduced radar signature.

The new Allison AE2100D3 engines (the same basic engine that will power the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor transport) have digital electronic controls, and provide 29 percent more power than the engines on the C-130H with an 18 percent improvement in fuel efficiency. Since fuel is one of the biggest costs of operating an aircraft, that 18 percent is a whopping number to cash-starved air forces around the world. Economy aside, though, the real improvement of the new engines is their ability to sustain their power in high altitude and temperature conditions. For aircrews, this means shorter takeoffs with larger payloads, which is the name of the game in the theater air transport business. Also, the new engines are virtually smokeless, though the noise footprint is about the same. Finally, the plumbing of the fuel system has been simplified, with provisions being provided for quick modification to a tanker configuration with the addition of fuel bladders.

Most of the improvements to the C-130J are on the inside, beginning with a new two-man flight deck. In effect, the navigator and flight engineer have been replaced by software and electronics. The pilot and copilot sit in front of four multi-function color flat-panel screens, which replace dozens of “steam-gauge” instruments. These screens are programmable displays that present the specific information needed for any phase of flight or emergency. These can include primary flight displays, weather radar data, digital ground maps, navigation and SKE displays, or malfunction warnings. Like fighter pilots, the C-130 flight crew also have “heads-up displays” that project key information into the field of view, allowing the pilots to focus their attention on the flight path outside the window. There is provision for a third seat on the flight deck, with space, weight, and power allocated for a systems operator workstation, which might be required on special-mission aircraft.

The basic flight control systems of the Hercules, though, have not been altered. The old-style control yoke has been left unchanged, and even the classic nose gear steering wheel has been left untouched. What has changed are some of the supporting systems, especially those having to do with the new engines and display systems. In the C-130J, the throttles are no longer connected directly to the engines. Instead, a system called FADEC (Full Authority Digital Engine Control) takes the throttle and control inputs from the crew, as well as environmental inputs from air data sensors, and uses a computer to control the engines and props. This system, as much as any other part of the — J design, is responsible for the improved economy and performance of the new bird.

All of these systems are tied together into a single network that allows the data generated by one system to be used by another. There are two independent mission computers, and the data bus uses redundant channels routed by different paths, providing increased damage resistance. For example, the GPS receiver, which is built into the inertial navigation system, can generate data which can be used by a variety of other onboard equipment ranging from the SKE to the autopilot. This scheme of tying everything together on a single digital data bus also has other advantages. The hundreds of analog control signals, each of which used to require an individual pair of copper wires on the C-130H, have been replaced by a couple of strands of data bus cable running the length of the aircraft. This eliminates miles of wiring, saves tons of weight, and greatly reduces the amount of hand labor needed to assemble the aircraft.

Lockheed Martin estimates that the prototype J-model aircraft took something between 20 and 25 percent fewer man-hours to produce than the fully mature C-130H. This factor alone guarantees that the new Hercules will cost no more than the older H-model. It also has a humorous (and practical) side as well. The removal of all that wiring resulted in a lightening of over 600 lb/272 kg in the — J’s cockpit area alone, and this created a problem. There was no way to balance the new aircraft in flight without it carrying some kind of ballast in the nose, so the previously optional cockpit ballistic armor has now become standard, even on the commercial models!

Back in the 1950s, the original YC-130A prototype was one of the first aircraft designed with input from the infant science of human factors engineering. Today, the new C-130J incorporates all the lessons that the Lockheed Martin human factors engineers have learned in the intervening forty years, and the results show. The two-man cockpit has been laid out to allow either crew member to fully operate the aircraft from either seat. In addition, the crew chief/loadmaster has been given a whole host of improvements to make his/her life easier. This is vital since there are only the three crew members to operate all the systems on this new Hercules. Other improvements have also been made in cargo handling. For example, the attachment points on the cargo ramp have been strengthened to allow opening the ramp during flight at speeds up to 250 kn/463 kph.

Another improvement is the idea of reducing the amount of maintenance time required to get the C-130J into the air. One goal of the C-130J program is a 50 percent reduction in maintenance man-hours per flight hour (compared to the C-130E). Combined with the reduced aircrew requirement, this translates to a 38 percent reduction in squadron personnel requirements (from 661 to 406). When you consider that the most junior enlisted personnel in the U.S. cost over $100,000 per year to pay, clothe, and feed, that means a personnel savings of at least $25.5 million a year per squadron, which is a lot! Combine it with savings from fuel and other areas, and you can understand why air forces everywhere are lining up to buy this new aircraft.

As of late 1996, the C-130J program is going well, with all four prototype aircraft flying actively in the test and certification program. The first flight of the C-130J was successfully completed on June 4th, 1996, and Lockheed plans to deliver two aircraft a month for many years to come. Thus far, Lockheed Martin can see sales and requirements for over three hundred of the new birds, with more orders coming in every day. Perhaps the only criticism of the new Herky Bird is the one that comes from some aviation visionaries who think that something even better than the — J is needed. They speak of an aircraft with a C-130 payload, but with the vertical takeoff and flight performance characteristics of the V-22 Osprey.[42] While this is a far-reaching concept, it is clearly beyond the current state of the art, as well as the experience base with tilt-rotor aircraft. For now, the C-130J is the finest medium transport in the world, and will probably stay that way for another generation. Who knows, there may even be another version of Hercules someday.

Deployment Tanker: The McDonnell Douglas KC-10A Extender

Notwithstanding the above comment, the purpose of aerial refueling is to extend the range of tactical, bomber, or transport aircraft beyond the limits of their own fuel capacity. A secondary, but vital and lifesaving, mission is to assist battle-damaged aircraft, which may be leaking fuel heavily, to return safely to base. One retired USAF officer I know once told me that aerial refueling of battle-damaged aircraft over the last four decades has probably saved more money than has been spent on all the tankers ever built! However you view it, refueling tankers have proved their worth in war and peace. It is hardly simple or easy, though. Aerial refueling, especially at night and in bad weather, is an ultimate test of a pilot’s nerve and skill. Only a night carrier landing can compare with it for sheer difficulty. The aircraft receiving fuel must hold a precise, tight formation in the turbulent wake of a (usually) much larger aircraft, for several minutes. Pilot error or bad luck can result in severe damage to the receiving aircraft, or even a fiery collision. Also, tanker operations are intensely mathematical planning exercises, requiring the ability to manage rates of fuel consumption, range and speed calculations, and precise navigation. There is no room for error. A miscalculation can easily lead to the loss of costly aircraft and irreplaceable flight crews.

There are two basic approaches to aerial refueling. The first, which was largely an invention of the Air Force, involves specialized tanker aircraft equipped with a rigid telescoping “flying boom.” The boom is extended to fit into a special receptacle on top of the receiving aircraft. The kind of tankers using this system were largely an invention of the USAF. The boom is equipped with steering fins controlled by an enlisted airman in a compartment at the tail of the aircraft. There he or she works with a view aft through a large window. This window, by the way, is a favorite vantage point for the handful of aerial photographers allowed to fly on tanker missions. The second method is the simpler “probe and drogue” method favored by the U.S. Navy, the USMC, the RAF, NATO, and the rest of the world’s leading air forces (at least those that can afford the formidable cost of aerial refueling). The tanker reels out a hose with a cone-shaped basket (the “drogue”) at the end, and the receiving aircraft spears the drogue with a fixed or retractable refueling probe. This adds weight and possibly drag to the receiving aircraft, but requires no specialist operator onboard the tanker, and allows a greater separation between the aircraft.

The first operational tankers (the KB-29, KB-50, and KC-97) were developed from the four-engine Boeing B-29 bomber. By the mid 1950s, though, it was clear that piston-powered tankers did not have the speed to refuel jet-powered bombers and fighters efficiently. The old tankers lacked the speed to keep up with the jets, which had to slow down, nearly to their stall speed, to refuel. The answer was the KC-135 Stratotanker, which closely resembled the four-engined Boeing 707 commercial transport.[43] Between 1956 and 1966, some 732 of these aircraft were built specifically as tankers, with dozens of other C-135 airframes completed or modified as transports, flying command posts, intelligence collectors, VIP passenger carriers, and for other specialized roles. About 560 remain in service with the aerial refueling squadrons of the USAF, USAF Reserve, and ANG. Many have been reengined as KC-135Qs and — Ts, with the fuel-efficient CFM-56 turbofan replacing the original noisy, smoky, gas-guzzling J-57 turbojets. With a top speed of 521 kn/966 kph and a fuel payload of 31,200 gallons/118,000 liters, the KC-135 was an excellent tanker. It could fly out 2,000 nm/3700 km and off-load as much as 74,000 lb/33,500 kg of fuel to waiting customers.

The most serious limitation of the Stratotanker emerged during the long-range emergency airlifts to South Vietnam in 1972 and Israel in 1973. During these operations, many U.S. allies refused landing rights to aircraft bound for Israel and Vietnam, fearing economic retaliation (or worse) from various interested powers. This greatly limited the tonnage of cargo that could be rushed to resupply the desperate Israeli and Vietnamese forces, which began the war with only a one- or two-week reserve of ammunition. The problem was that KC-135 could either deploy to a distant overseas base, or refuel other aircraft; it could not do both on the same mission. In particular, the basic KC-135 could not be itself refueled in the air. Truly strategic air refueling and deployment missions would require a tanker of much greater capacity and endurance than the -135.

By the mid-1970s the USAF knew what they needed, and an Air Force program office started the process of developing a new deployment tanker. Known as the Advanced Tanker/Cargo Aircraft (ATCA), it was envisioned by the program managers as an aircraft that could support the overseas deployment of entire tactical fighter squadrons, carrying spares, munitions, ground equipment, and personnel while refueling the squadron’s aircraft on the way. An added requirement was that the ATCA itself had to be able to refuel in flight as well. As planned, a force of only seventeen ATCAs could support the deployment of a complete fighter squadron from the eastern United States to Europe, a mission that would require forty KC-135s, plus additional C-141 cargo aircraft.

In the interests of reducing cost, the natural ATCA choice was a modified version of one of the (then) new wide-body commercial transports. The first of this new generation of jet transports began with the first flight of the four-engined Boeing 747 on February 9th, 1969. Another contender, the Douglas Aircraft Company (part of McDonnell Douglas) in Long Beach, California, entered the wide-body competition in 1970 with a version of their three-engined DC-10. Most of the DC-10’s fuselage length is a perfect cylinder, which made modifying the interior extremely easy. The DC-10 had made its first flight on August 29th, 1970, and an extended-range variant, the DC-10-30, with uprated engines appeared in 1972.

In 1977, McDonnell Douglas successfully entered a tanker version of the DC-10-30 in the ATCA competition, and a contract for sixteen aircraft was awarded. Initially, the production rate was only two per year, but in 1982 the total buy was increased to sixty, allowing Douglas to keep the production line open for years at a more favorable (and profitable) production rate. When it entered service in March 1981, the new aircraft was dubbed the KC-10A Extender. At the time, the KC-10s belonged to the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC). In 1991, however, when SAC was absorbed into the new Air Combat Command (ACC) and Air Mobility Command (AMC), most of the tankers were transferred to AMC. Except for one aircraft destroyed on the ground by a fire, the entire force remains in service with four active and two Reserve squadrons, split between MacGuire AFB, New Jersey, and Travis AFB, California.

It’s important to know that it is not practical to build a tanker that has the entire fuselage filled with fuel tanks. Such an aircraft would be too heavy to take off. The KC-10 carries most of its fuel in seven “bladder” tanks located under the floor of the spacious pressurized cargo compartment. This is the space where passenger baggage and freight would be stowed on a commercial DC-10. Additional fuel is carried in the wings, and all the tanks are interconnected so that the KC-10 can “give away” almost all the fuel it carries, beyond even a minimum safety margin needed to return to base, since the KC-10 can itself be refueled by another tanker sent out to retrieve it. A typical “strategic” refueling mission would be the transfer of 200,000 pounds of fuel at a distance of 2,200 miles/3540 km from a base — for example in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In a pure airlift role, the KC-10 can fly almost 7,000 miles/over 11,000 km carrying 100,000 lb/45,400 kg of cargo. With in-flight refueling and a spare flight crew (pilot, copilot, and flight engineer) the KC-10’s range and endurance are practically unlimited, subject only to the need to replenish engine oil. The KC-10’s engines are highly efficient General Electric CF6-5 °C2 turbofans (military designation F103) each rated at 52,500 pounds (23,810 kg) of thrust. Maximum takeoff weight of the KC-10 is 590,000 lb/267,620 kg, while the empty weight is only about 240,000 lb/109,000 kg.

Inside the KC-10, the cockpit is about what you would expect of a mid- 1970’s jumbo jet. The electronics suite is relatively simple: a weather radar in the nose, standard UHF and VHF radios, a triple-redundant inertial navigation system supplemented with GPS, and an IFF transponder to tell friendly aircraft, ships, and SAMs not to shoot. No defensive systems (chaff, flares, or ECM jammers) are normally fitted. As a very high-value asset, the KC-10 would normally be escorted by at least a pair of fighters in any environment that presented the slightest threat.

The reason for the KC-10’s existence is to be found at the rear of the aircraft. The refueling boom, measuring 43 feet/13.1 meters when fully extended, has its own digital flight control system, and can deliver up to 1,500 gallons/5,678 liters of fuel per minute. It is normally retracted up against the tail, but still contributes a certain amount of excess drag. Every KC-10 also carries one drogue-and-hose reel unit mounted under the tail, allowing it to refuel the many Navy, Marine, and other allied tactical aircraft. A few KC-10s have been fitted with additional drogue-and-hose reel pods on each wing, making it possible to refuel up to three aircraft simultaneously.

One of the original ATCA requirements was to support worldwide deployment of USAF units, and this means carrying cargo and people in addition to fuel. Appropriately, the Douglas designers made provisions to carry a sizable load of both in the mostly empty fuselage. The forward end of the cargo compartment can be fitted with pallets loaded with comfortable seats for up to sixty people. Cargo on pallets can be loaded through an upward-hinged door 11 feet 8 inches/3.56 meters wide and 8 feet 6 inches/2.6 meters high. Up to twenty-seven standard cargo pallets (the Air Force calls them 463Ls) can be carried, and there are retractable rollers built into the floor, as well as tie-down points, and a cargo handling winch. There are passenger doors on both sides of the fuselage — these were already designed into the DC-10-30, and it would have taken extra engineering effort to delete them — but most of these doors are “deactivated” or sealed. There is also a fourth seat for an observer on the flight deck. The crew has a small galley area and lavatory, but no rest bunks are fitted.

During Desert Shield/Desert Storm, 46 KC-10s deployed to the Gulf along with 256 KC-135s.[44] The CENTAF flyers used every drop of fuel that they carried. During the air war the tankers loitered at an economical cruising speed in “racetrack” orbits just inside Saudi airspace, at an altitude of about 25,000 feet/7,620 meters to refuel inbound and outbound strike packages. The 46 KC-10’s flew 15,434 sorties, for a total of almost 60,000 flight hours, delivering a total of 110 million gallons/416 million liters of jet fuel! The large number of good airfields in the theater, and the almost limitless supply of jet fuel provided by the gracious Saudi hosts, made the Gulf War an ideal environment for tanker operations.

Though the USAF is the only operator of the KC-10, the outstanding operational success of the type inspired the Royal Netherlands Air Force to purchase two used commercial DC-10-30 freighters for conversion into “KDC-10” tankers, with technical assistance from McDonnell Douglas. These aircraft, operated by the 334 Squadron at Eindhoven, are potential NATO assets of great value. They also allow the Netherlands to deploy its F-16 fighters from Europe all over the world in the event of a regional crisis. Other KDC-10 customers are being courted by McDonnell Douglas, and given the availability of older DC-10 airframes, you may be seeing more such conversions.

Whatever the foreign interest in tanker aircraft, it is likely that the KC-10 fleet will remain in service until well beyond 2020. The aircraft are being gently used and carefully maintained, and the large number of DC-10s in service ensures the availability of spare parts and experienced reserve pilots. No requirement for a next-generation tanker has been formally defined by the USAF, but McDonnell Douglas has drawings of a modular drogue-and-hose-reel refueling kit for the C-17 transport. It would not be surprising if Boeing proposes a tanker variant of its high-tech twin-engine wide body, the 777. Until that time, though, the KC-10 is going to continue to be the finest, most versatile airborne tanker aircraft in the world today.

Heavy Iron: The McDonnell Douglas C-17A Globemaster III

This is the story of an airplane program that would not die, despite the efforts, incompetence, and intentions of both friends and enemies. It is also the story of a requirement that was so visionary that it allowed this same aircraft to rise from the ashes time and time again. Lastly, this is a tale of the finest, most capable airlift aircraft ever built. This is the story of the McDonnell Douglas C-17 Globemaster III. The C-17 embodies everything the U.S. Air Force and the aerospace industry has learned about airlift in the past fifty years. The cost of the Globemaster is fearsome. You could build a good regional hospital or a small university for the current (1996) $175 million-dollar unit price of just one C-17A. Partly because of the high cost, the program has been dogged by bitter political, technical, and contractual problems and controversy. You would not even call it a pretty aircraft. However, to the military logistics planner, the airborne division commander, or the famine victim in a remote corner of the Third World, nothing could be more beautiful.

The C-17 was designed to combine the intercontinental range and heavy-lift capability of the C-5 Galaxy or C-141 Starlifter with the short- /rough-field performance of the C-130 Hercules. The original Air Force specification for the C–X (“Cargo-Experimental”) ran to hundreds of pages, but the key requirement was brutally simple: take off carrying a 70-ton M1 Abrams main battle tank and land on an unimproved runway no more than 3,000 feet/915 meters long and 60 feet/18 meters wide. It was a big order, and when the C–X program started, nobody was entirely certain that such an aircraft could be created. Read on, and I’ll try and tell you one hell of a story about this amazing bird.

The C-17’s official nickname, “Globemaster,” recalls the Douglas C-124, the USAF’s last piston-engined heavy transport, which served from 1949 to 1961, with a total of 447 airframes being built. But the true ancestry of the C-17 can be traced directly from an experimental cargo jet, the Douglas YC-15, of which only two were built in the 1970s to an Air Force requirement called the Advanced Medium Short Takeoff and Landing Transport (AMST). The original intention was to develop a replacement for the C-130, but the program was never funded due to post-Vietnam budget cuts, as well as the excellent cost and performance of the Hercules. Like the C-17, the YC-15 had four-turbofan engines carried in pylons on a high-mounted wing, and a massive slab of T-tail, but the wings were not swept and the aircraft was considerably smaller than the Globemaster.[45] The YC-15 utilized a set of special externally blown flaps to generate tremendous lift for short takeoffs. The engine exhaust nozzles were close to the underside of the wing, which was equipped with large two-segment slotted flaps along most of the trailing edge. When the flaps were fully extended, much of the thrust was deflected downward, causing an equal and opposite upward lift force (thank you, Mr. Newton). The flaps had to be made of titanium, to withstand the heat, but this was a small price to pay for a significant performance improvement.

The competing YC-14 prototype developed by Boeing used a somewhat different principle called “upper surface blowing” in which the engines were mounted well forward and above the wing. The engine exhaust created a low-pressure region across the wing’s upper surface, and the relatively higher pressure below the wing translated into increased lift.[46] It was this extra lift that made the short-field requirement of the C–X aircraft even possible, though it takes a bit more looking to understand why it was even needed.

One of the many unpleasant effects of the Vietnam War was to greatly increase the wear and tear on the Air Force’s fleet of Lockheed C-141 and C-5 long-range airlifters. By the late 1970s it was clear that sometime in the not too distant future, these aircraft would have to be replaced before their wings fell off from sheer metal fatigue.

However, the C–X program managers had a concept for the new airlifter strategic airlift overseas that was very different from the way it had been done previously. The concept of operations for military airlifts until the 1980s was a “hub and spoke” model, in which heavy (strategic) airlifters would deliver masses of troops, equipment, and supplies from the continental United States to large regional airports (like the great Rhein-Main complex near Frankfurt, Germany, or the magnificent airports and bases of Saudi Arabia), where they would be split out into smaller “tactical” packets that would be shuttled to small forward airfields by medium transport aircraft (C-130s). This was (and is) an efficient model, and is the basis for the current American civil air transport system. However, if you had to operate into an area where big airfields didn’t exist, or where the runways and supporting facilities had just been cratered by an enemy airstrike or “slimed” by a chemical warhead from a SCUD missile, then you were going to be out of luck.

This was how the idea was born of the C–X flying a cargo/equipment /personnel load directly to where it was going to be needed, without the need to stop at an intermediate hub. This was, and is, a great idea, though one that would cause the USAF and McDonnell Douglas no end of pain, and the taxpayers a good-sized mountain of money.

The start of the C–X program came at a time of crisis for the U.S., with the taking of our embassy in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan still fresh in the minds of Department of Defense leaders. The shortage of heavy airlift aircraft was enough to make some folks wish they had bought more C-5s. For others, it was the impetus to build an even better airlifter. The original C–X requirement envisioned production of a total of 210 airframes: 120 to replace the fleet of C-141 B Starlifters, and the remaining 90 to replace the force of C-5s when they wore out. All three large airframe manufacturers in the U.S. (Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas) submitted proposals based, as you might expect, upon their most recent military transport experience. Of the three, the McDonnell Douglas design based on the YC-15 scored the highest, and they were awarded a contract for what became known as the C-17 in August of 1981. Unfortunately, this would be the last good thing that would happen in the C–X program for a very long time. Almost immediately, politics and necessity began to exert a strong influence on the C-17.

The political element arrived with the coming of President Ronald W Reagan in 1981. His Administration began an almost immediate program of increasing military spending to reverse the decline in our forces that had occurred after Vietnam and during the Administration of President Jimmy Carter. While the Carter Administration had increased military spending at the end of their tenure as a result of the Iran crisis, the Reagan Administration ramped up the money machine even further. One of their first areas of increased spending was for increased strategic airlift capacity.

While the C-17 contract had been awarded the previous year, it would do nothing to increase the number of tankers and transports for some years to come. In addition, the awarding of the C-17 contract to McDonnell Douglas had angered the powerful senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, who was the protector of Lockheed down in Marietta. So in one of those moves that defines politics as “the art of the possible,” the Reagan Administration came up with a clever compromise. The funding for C-17 was reduced and the program schedule stretched out into the late 1980s. Then, a huge buy of tanker/transports was authorized, based upon existing designs.

In January of 1982, Lockheed, Senator Nunn, and the state of Georgia got an order for a second production run of the Galaxy, designated the C-5B. Along with this came the sixty-aircraft buy of KC-10A Extenders, which would be built by McDonnell Douglas. This left the folks at Long Beach in a strange position. Their new transport aircraft program had just been drained of funds and stretched out, but they now had a huge multi-year contract to build tankers on an existing production line. One senior Douglas official described it like finding out the beautiful, rich girl you are dating is a blood relative. She will probably share the wealth eventually, but that will be the extent of the relationship!

For Jim Worshem, the legendary president of the Douglas Aircraft Company, these events forced him to make a number of pragmatic and common-sense moves. He shifted almost all the skilled engineers and technicians he had hired to work on the C-17 over to KC-10A tanker and commercial transport work, and adjusted the program schedule to reflect the new, stretched-out funding profile dictated by the USAF and Reagan Administration. In the short term, it was a good thing for Douglas, which was able to hire even more production and support personnel to deal with the existing workload.

Meanwhile, design work on the C-17 continued for some years to come, gradually transforming the old YC-15 prototype design into a larger, more powerful production design. The actual design process went well and generally on schedule and budget, but a chill was beginning to come over the C-17 program, and it almost killed the new airlifter. The change came as a result of something completely unrelated to the Globemaster program: a Justice Department/DoD investigation of contractor insider-information trading known as Operation III Wind. Ill Wind was a wide-ranging probe of Administration/contractor relationships in which government personnel would sell “insider” programmatic and technical information to contractors for a price. By the time the probe was completed, a number of DoD officials and senior contractor executives, including Undersecretary of the Navy Melvin Pasily, had been sent to jail, and huge fines had been exacted from a number of contractors.

Ill Wind had one other unpleasant effect, in that it caused almost all the military and civilian personnel assigned to manage procurement programs to take on a hostile, even adversarial, relationship against the “money-grubbing” defense contractors and their perceived “obscene” profits. Now, anyone who thinks that an 8 to 12 percent profit margin on a program as risky as the C-17 is obscene clearly is lacking some knowledge of the business world, but that was the atmosphere in the late 1980s. Then, in 1989, the wheels really fell off.

The year started in a promising fashion, with fabrication of the prototype C-17A going along, albeit with some problems. Part of these difficulties were due to the business realities of the aerospace industry at that time. Finding qualified technicians and engineers in Southern California in the late 1980s was tough, and this led to some poorly qualified personnel being brought onto the Douglas payroll at higher salaries than had been planned. This led to cost escalations which caused future acrimony between the USAF program offices and Douglas. There were problems with weight growth on the Globemaster, which is not unusual in today’s military aircraft programs. The difficulty here was that the USAF program managers were completely inflexible on any modifications to the C-17 contract on either technical or financial grounds.

On top of all of this, those same program managers failed to inform the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Dick Cheney at the time) of the cost and engineering difficulties when his staff did a review of major aircraft programs (F-22, F-18, C-17, V-22, A-12, etc.). Only after Cheney had presented his report to the Congress, and canceled the V-22 as a cost-cutting measure, did the problems on the other programs come out. It turned out that Navy’s A-12 managers had actually lied to OSD about critical problems, and their program was canceled outright.

The difficulties on C-17 took a bit longer to come out, but when they did, a firestorm erupted. Initially these took the form of financial claims by Douglas against the USAF about mandated changes that had cost them money. The Air Force came back with claims against Douglas for shortfalls in contract progress and performance, and design shortcomings. What resulted was a virtual war between the management at Douglas and the C-17 program office which just got worse and worse.

The final straw came over a required structural test of the wing. As part of the USAF-mandated weight reduction program, Douglas designers had removed several structural members from the wing to help make the goal. Unfortunately, when the engineers went back and ran their computer structural models, they discovered that the software was predicting a wing failure during a coming overload test of the wing. The test was designed to verify that the wing could sustain a 150 percent stress overload over the design requirement. Unfortunately, the engineers knew that the wing would fail at one of the “thinned out” spots at 129 percent. When Douglas reported this to the Air Force program office, they were refused permission to fix the problem prior to the test. In particular, the government program manager felt that allowing them to make the change would somehow show USAF “weakness” towards the contractor. He ordered that the test go forward, whatever the results. It did, and the wing broke precisely where the engineers had predicted, at exactly the 129 percent load. This was a patently stupid act, and it was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

By this time, the OSD had enough of the problems and decided to act. For starters, they fired the USAF program management team, and then called the executives of McDonnell Douglas in for a talk. To this day nobody on either side will say exactly what happened, but when the meetings were done, there was a completely new management team running the C-17 program at Douglas. Both sides withdrew their claims against each other, and got to work to solve the problems of the C-17. They also let the Douglas engineers fix the wing!

Now, nothing goes wrong overnight, and neither are engineering and financial problems as bad as those faced by the C-17 team solved quickly. Nevertheless, by early 1993, things were beginning to turn around for the Globemaster, though you would have been hard pressed to know it. A new Democratic Administration had taken over in Washington, and all parties involved knew that the C-17 would come under a new and uncomfortable scrutiny.

The man who drew the duty of deciding life or death for the Globemaster program was John Deutch, the Undersecretary of Defense for Procurement.[47] His decision for the future of the C-17 was anything but easy, though. When he took over the OSD procurement office, there was immense pressure to cut the defense budget so that the money could be applied to other priorities of the Clinton Administration. On the other hand, you did not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the need for the C-17 was greater than ever. If any event had validated the vision of the original C–X program specification and requirement, the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been it. Desert Storm had used up over half of the C-141 fleet’s remaining fatigue life in less than six months of operations, and airframes were already being flown to the boneyard in Arizona.

There were reasons for optimism about the Globemaster, though, because the new government/contractor management team had taken hold and was getting results that were frankly amazing. By utilizing a concept known as Independent Product Teams (IPTs, “rainbow” groups of military and contractor personnel assigned to accomplish specific sub-tasks of a project), the engineering problems on the C-17 were rapidly being solved. Also, by this time there had been a number of significant milestones and achievements in the program. First flight of the prototype came on September 15th, 1991, and the first production aircraft was delivered to the Air Force on June 14th, 1992. The first paratroop drop, with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, had even taken place on July 9th, 1993. The first lot of production aircraft was under contract, and would be delivered whatever Deutch decided. But there also was immense pressure from critics in Congress to kill the program, as well as from competitors like Lockheed and Boeing who wanted to take a crack at the airlifter problem. In the end, Deutch came up with an inspired decision.

He decided to saddle the C-17 program with a production cap of only forty aircraft for a two-year “probationary” period. Only after the two years, and a thorough examination of the aircraft system in actual operations, would a decision be made to purchase additional airframes. Also, to show everyone in the Air Force and at McDonnell Douglas he was serious, he ordered the USAF to initiate the Non-Developmental Airlift Aircraft (NDAA) program, which was designed to procure off-the-shelf heavy transport aircraft in the event that the C-17 did not make the grade. Properly warned, everyone involved in the Globemaster program, from the Pentagon program office to the Long Beach production line to the flight line at Charleston AFB, South Carolina (the first operational C-17 base), sucked it in, knowing that this was their last chance to prove that the new bird was a winner. Amazingly, it was all uphill from that moment on.

Some folks will say that Douglas and the Air Force were lucky. I would tell you that they were ready for the opportunities that came their way in the next few years. However you view the situation, the C-17 team has met or exceeded every challenge that was thrown at them since the new management team took over. Whether it was a no-notice deployment to Rwanda to support relief operations, or disaster relief after a hurricane, the new bird came through and delivered the loads with flying colors, doing things that other airlifters would not even have tried. Amazingly, though, it was the hauling of a single person for a twenty-minute flight that sealed the future for the C-17. That person was President William Jefferson Clinton, and the ride was to the short, bumpy airfield at Tuzula in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The President had wanted to visit the troops of Task Force Eagle (the American peacekeeping force) as a show of support for the troops and for his policy in the region. Now, you do not fly a jumbo jet (like the President’s VC-25A) painted up like a billboard into such a place as Tuzula without drawing unwanted attention. So another way had to be found to get the Chief Executive, his entourage, and all the media personnel into Tuzula. In the end, the only transport with the necessary short-field and all-weather performance, as well as the necessary defensive countermeasures against SAMs and radar-directed AAA fire, was — you guessed it — the Globemaster. So, when the President showed up wearing his favorite flight jacket, along with the entire White House press corps, the C-17 program was saved. The feeling around DoD was that if this bird was good enough for the Boss, it was okay to buy more.

Quickly, the NDAA program was allowed to die, and the USAF decided that the C-17 would be the only heavy airlifter the USAF would buy for the foreseeable future. It was therefore with more than a little pride that the C-17 team managers accepted personally from President Clinton the largest multi-year military procurement order in U.S. history, in mid-1996, for eighty additional Globemasters. Even better, there is talk of buying more. But first, let’s take you on a little tour of this incredible bird before we talk about the distant future.

For this we will take a quick trip down to Charleston AFB, to visit the 437th Airlift Wing. In late 1996 the C-17A was operational with the 14th and 17th Airlift Squadrons (AS) of the 437th, with the 15th AS getting ready to transition from the C-141 to the new bird. For our tour, we’ll spend some time with aircraft 93-0600, which is also known as aircraft P-16 (the sixteenth production aircraft, which was funded in FY-93). It was delivered to the Air Force in November of 1994, fully a month early. This matter of early delivery is getting to be more and more common on the C-17 program, and is now the rule rather than the exception. Early deliveries mean cheaper planes for the taxpayers and higher profits for the stockholders of McDonnell Douglas, so it is a “win-win” situation for all involved. Despite being heavily flown since delivery, P-16 is a clean and neat aircraft, without so much as a scratch or smear to mar the finish, inside or out. At something like $175 million a copy for the early-production C-17s, you’d better believe that the USAF crew chiefs take good care of them. The good news on this point is that Douglas is calculating that late-production C-17s will cost the taxpayers around $210 million.

One thing to keep in mind, though. The whole idea of an aircraft like the Globemaster is absurd unless, of course, you have the kind of overseas commitments that the United States has. In that case, the heavy airlifter fleet is more precious than its weight in diamonds, and that is the point. When you need to establish an “aluminum bridge” to someplace like the Persian Gulf, there is no value you can place on such a capability.

Much of the C-17’s advanced technology is found in its wing, so let’s begin our examination of this remarkable aircraft there. The wing is mounted well forward, and very high; in fact it actually humps up above the top of the fuselage, to increase the headroom in the cargo compartment. The wings droop downward from root to tip, something engineers call an “anhedral.” The pointed wing tips bend up sharply to form “Whitcomb winglets,” named for the NASA aerodynamicist who invented them. These cute little bits of aerodynamic design improve the flow of air at the wing tips, where drag-increasing vortexes arise at certain speeds. The net effect of the winglets is to reduce drag by 4 to 6 percent (and therefore raise fuel efficiency), which more than compensates for the added weight. The engine pylons thrust aggressively forward, so much so that each engine extends right beyond the leading edge of the wing. But from below, the most striking features of the wing are four pods that extend past the trailing edge. These are called flap support fairings, and they contain the complex hydraulic actuators, levers, and linkages that give the C-17 control of its externally blown flaps. The wing is “wet,” with most of the aircraft’s 27, 108 gallons/102,614 liters stowed in self-sealing fuel tanks built into the thick wing structure. There are extensive fire detection and suppression provisions in the wing, including an onboard inert gas-generating system, which extracts nitrogen from engine bleed air and uses it to pressurize the empty space in the fuel tanks as fuel is consumed, to prevent the formation of potentially explosive vapors.

The engines on the production C-17s are Pratt and Whitney F-117 two-shaft, high-bypass turbofans rated at 40,700 lb/18,500 kg of thrust. The engine is based on the mature and reliable PW2000 series flying since 1984 on the Boeing 757. On the C-17, however, the engine core and the large fan section are both fitted with exceptionally powerful thrust reversers, which can be operated either in flight or on the ground. On the ground, thrust reversers work together with the wheel brakes and the spoilers on the upper surface of the wing, making it possible to land safely on short runways that previously would only have been used by a C-130. In fact, the C-17 is the only jet transport that can actually back up while taxiing. This is extremely important on small, crowded airfields, where there may be no space to turn around. As a point of reference, you can operate something like nine C-17s on a ramp where only three C-5s will fit.

Along each side of the fuselage is a large canoe-shaped fairing, which is where the main landing gear is located. Given the troubles that Lockheed had with the C-5 landing gear, you’d better believe that Douglas made sure that they got the C-17’s landing gear system right. The shock absorbers are able to handle a sink rate upon landing of up to 15 feet/4.57 meters per second at full load. The steerable twin-wheel nose gear retracts aft, but the main gear on each side consists of two tandem three-wheel units, with big low-pressure tires for landing on soft ground. When raised, the main landing gear struts are rotated through 90 degrees by a clever arrangement of levers, pivots, and actuators before retracting into streamlined fairings. If hydraulic power is lost, the landing gear can still be deployed by gravity, free-falling and locking into place.

Like the C-130, the C-17 has an auxiliary power unit (APU) located in the landing gear fairing on the port one side. The Garrett GTCP331 is a compact gas turbine that can drive the aircraft’s electrical generators and hydraulic pumps on the ground without having to start the main engines. The APU can also provide power to start the engines, even under the worst arctic conditions, and there are powerful NiCad batteries to start the APU or provide emergency DC power to the aircraft’s systems.

The fuselage is 159 feet/48.5 meters long, measured from the nose to the tip of the tail cone, but the swept-back vertical stabilizer overhangs another 15 feet/4.57 meters. The tail of the C-17 incorporates a powerful two-section rudder. The top of the tail fin is just over 55 feet/16.8 meters above the ground, and there is a narrow internal passageway with a ladder so that maintenance crews can easily reach the hydraulic actuators and antennas, and even change the bulbs on the navigation lights. Empty weight of the C-17 is about 269,000 lb/122,000 kg. Overall, about 70 percent of the C-17’s structure, by weight, is aluminum alloy, 12 percent steel, 10 percent titanium, and 8 percent composites. There are two entry doors, the one on the left side with fold-down stairs, jump doors just aft of the wing on both sides, and the large loading ramp aft. Heading up one of the nose doors takes you directly into the cargo compartment. If you head forward, past the small galley and lavatory, and up a small staircase, you find yourself on the flight deck.

The flight deck provides side-by-side seating for the pilot and copilot, seats for two observers or a spare crew, two rear-facing courier seats, and two comfortable rest bunks. The seats are extremely comfortable (I love the sheepskin covers!), and the cockpit has the best layout I have ever seen. The flight controls are more like that of a fighter plane than a commercial airliner. The pilots control the C-17 with a stick-mounted handgrip (as opposed to a control wheel), heads-up display, and a console full of color multi-function display (MFD) panels, much like the new C-130J. The flight controls are based on a quad-redundant fly-by-wire system, with the same kind of FADEC engine controls that will soon appear on the C-130J. Between the two crew seats is a pedestal loaded with the flight management systems, as well as the controls for the radio systems. Further controls for the various flight systems are contained in a strip that runs across the top of the main instrument panel. There even is an electronic warfare suite, which includes a radar warning receiver, as well as controls for the onboard ALE- 40/47 decoy/flare/chaff launchers. Though all of this gives the C-17 cockpit a look like that of the Starship Enterprise, it is amazingly easy to understand and operate.

The nose radome holds an AN/APS-133 weather and ground-mapping radar, which displays the data on one of the MFD panels. Also like the C-130, the C-17 is equipped with “Station Keeping Equipment” (SKE) that allows a group of aircraft to maintain a precise formation in zero-visibility conditions. The C-17 is also equipped with two independent mission computers, and virtually all of the electronic systems are tied together by a redundant MIL-STD 1553 digital data bus. This includes everything from the radio systems to the electronic warfare self-protection suite. Technology has moved on since the first C-17 was first delivered, though, and new-model mission computers will be part of a near-term upgrade. Just above the flight deck is a standard aerial refueling receptacle. Around this are the array of large “picture window” transparencies, which make the view from the cockpit so breathtaking. Without question, it is the finest cockpit design I have ever seen.

Just down the ladder from the cockpit is the loadmaster’s station. While it may just look like a little cubbyhole, it is a special place for the loadmasters in the USAF. For the first time in any aircraft design, somebody finally cared about the enlisted personnel that make up the crews of a transport plane, and took their needs and desires into account. From here, with a single well-designed master panel, the loadmaster can control the cargo ramp, monitor the cargo compartment and all its systems, and activate a variety of cargo winch, roller, latching, and release mechanisms. Also located in the loadmaster’s station is a modified laptop computer, which provides direct access to the C-17’s data network. The crews use it for everything from loading flight plans to downloading maintenance data for the technicians back at the hangers. One of the most important of these tasks is load planning, which involves calculating the weight and balance of the aircraft and personnel /cargo load, so that the bird is safe to fly.

Aft of the flight deck is the fully pressurized cargo compartment. The “loadable volume” is 85.2 feet/25.9 meters long, 18 feet/5.5 meters wide, and 12.3 ft/3.75 m high at the lowest point under the wing carry-through box. The aft end of the fuselage is dominated by the cargo ramp and door, which is similar in design to that of the Hercules. The hydraulic-powered ramp is designed to handle the weight of a heavy tank, so there is no problem loading up to 40,000 lb/18,143 kg of cargo and vehicles on its broad surface. When the long cargo door pulls up inside the aircraft as the ramp is lowered, the cargo floor is approximately 5.3 feet/1.6 meters above the ground. This gives the ramp a gentle 9° slope when it is lowered, which makes loading of bulky cargo and vehicles much easier than on other heavy transports.

Just forward of the ramp are paratroops’ jump doors on each side of the fuselage. Like the C-130, the doors pull in and slide up, and at the same time a perforated deflector deploys outboard to reduce the blast of air experienced by exiting paratroops. A standard airdrop load is 102 paratroops with equipment, though up to twice that many can be accommodated if necessary.

There are countless load plans that detail various arrangements of vehicles and cargo, with specific data on tie-down points, and critical aircraft center-of-gravity calculations. For example, the C-17 can carry two rows of 5-ton trucks or HMMWVs, including two right on the ramp. Of course, there also is room in capacity for the heavy iron: things like M1A2 main battle tanks, 60-ton cargo loaders, and even small DSRV rescue submarines. Each cargo tie-down ring is stressed to hold 25,000 lb/11,340 kg, and the floor locks are automated so that they can be released from the loadmasters.

The C-17 is also equipped to be a flying ambulance. When rigged for medical evacuation, the cargo compartment can hold forty-eight litter patients plus medical attendants, and is fully plumbed with oxygen so that each patient has a mask if required.

Other load/personnel mixes include loading the center row with cargo pallets or vehicles to be dropped into a DZ first, then paratroopers along the sides. There also are three emergency escape hatches in the top of the cargo compartment, which can be used in the event of a water landing.

All of these features make the C-17A the most capable, versatile, and survivable cargo aircraft ever built. While the Globemaster has had a torturous and expensive gestation, it is rapidly maturing and, I personally believe, worth the high price that the American taxpayers have paid for it. Perhaps most important of all, though, it fills the strategic airlift shortfall that was first projected in the late 1970s at the start of the C–X program. If the full 12 °C-17’s that are currently contracted are ultimately built, they will replace retiring C-141s in all active airlift squadrons by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

By that time, there will likely be orders for further production lots of the Globemaster, though. Remember that the original C–X requirement projected an additional ninety aircraft to replace the C-5 fleet, which will be over three decades old by then. There also will be the matter of replacing other types of transport aircraft by that time. For example, the aging USAF force of KC-135s will be almost ready to retire by then, and there is strong support to decrease the number of different airframes within the transport force. A recent GAO study suggests that tanker and electronic support versions of the C-17 would be an excellent value, and are likely to be built after the initial run of cargo versions.

It would not be surprising if there are C-17s still flying in 2050 or even later in the next century, hauling the load in a world we can scarcely imagine. Douglas even is working on a commercial version of the Globemaster, the MD-17, which would be used to compete on the worldwide outsized cargo transport market that is currently dominated by the Russians. This is truly a bird that has come a long way from the dark days of 1989! However you view this big bird, though, it has survived battles that would have killed other aircraft long ago.