CAS and the Rhino driver

[TurnandBurn55]

The Charlie won't out-accelerate the Rhino until you get into the transonic region...

 

[EODDave]

It was def a great weekend. Rockstar treatment is an understatement. The folks in G'ville were beyond awesome. Def a place to go and get some inst. training on a cross country.

 

[Obi Offiah]

A-6 Bomb Load

I'm not 100% sure, but I think I may have read somewhere that during Vietnam part or all of the A-6 main gear doors were removed to carry 30 500lb class bombs.

Its also quite strange from a civilian point of view to see the different configurations used when loading the MERs, e.g flat-4, slant-4, staggered-4 etc.

Obi

 

[A4sForever]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think I may have read somewhere that during Vietnam part or all of the A-6 main gear doors were removed to carry 30 500lb class bombs.

Its also quite strange from a civilian point of view to see the different configurations used when loading the MERs, e.g flat-4, slant-4, staggered-4 etc.

Obi

Nope .... they removed "part" of the MK82 theoretical bomb load (love them engineers) ... i.e., only 28 Mk82's were carried. Seldom employed, too heavy for a practical attack mission. 12 x Mk82's was the standard, any given day.

The "variation" in MER loading was usually a reflection of how many and what types of bombs/other stores were being carried at any one time.

 

[cr62]

"Rhino" was what the Air Force called their F-4's.

We (USN) did not.

Noticed the VF-111 avatar. I remember in the mid 70's walking out to CAG "Hollywood" Peterson's VF-111's F-4 on a sunny Whidbey morning. He had flown up from Miramar to visit with my dad who was the C.O. of VA-95 at the time. You didn't see many F-4's at Whidbey and I remember thinking how cool it was walking out to that sleek plane and the smell of jet fuel...
I also remember CDR Peterson talking about how he loved the afterburner and what a great machine. (My dad wasn't a big F-4 fan).

 

[Obi Offiah]

Nope .... they removed "part" of the MK82 theoretical bomb load (love them engineers) ... i.e., only 28 Mk82's were carried. Seldom employed, too heavy for a practical attack mission. 12 x Mk82's was the standard, any given day.

The "variation" in MER loading was usually a reflection of how many and what types of bombs/other stores were being carried at any one time.

A couple of A-6 MER configurations with two Rockeyes was the 'inline two' and the 'staggered two' (as I call them ). The inline two had both Rockeyes on the forward and aft middle/lower MER. The staggered two had one Rockeye on the forward outside station and one on the middle/lower rear station. I would have thought that the inline two would be the standard configuration of the two, to help minimize drag?.

I managed to find the article regarding the 30 MK-82s. You're right, the 30 MK-82s minus the main gear doors was only experimented with by the 533rd Squadron and even then it wasn't a common occurance.

Its a shame the website went down, they had some excellent stories there aswell. One in particular describing an attack on the Paul Dourmer Bridge sticks out.
It mentioned that the crew came under heavy continuous crossfire from triple A, over a 37 mile track across the bridge .
Also the amount of guns mentioned that were setup to defend the bridge simply doesn't make sense , its incredible and quite difficult to comprehend how there could be so many guns within such a small place, really unbelieveable. It must have been extremely sobering for the crew, very scary indeed.

Obi