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The Great, Constantly Changing Picture Gallery, Troisième partie: la vengeance!
- Thread starter SynixMan
- Start date
What happened to the dorsal avionics hump?
My old man was a maintainer in a couple of Marine OV-10 Squadrons. He was able to ride in the back seat during a Zuni shoot and said that it felt like the plane stopped in mid air. Makes sense now, seeing how huge they are compared to the plane. Jesus!
I think that was an A-4F configuration.
Had a flight school classmate that had done time as a Marine Recon type and he did a couple drops out of OV-10's with 4 of his closest friends. They would stuff themselves in the cargo section in the back while the guy at the very back sat with his legs dangling out of the open back-end of the fuselage. He claimed the pilots would sometimes put the plane in a climb to literately drop them out the back. This classy vintage video actually shows it at 8+00 mins.
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F's, & M's came with the humps as standard configuration. E's were retro-fitted to accomodate the added avionics. The adversary squadrons generally removed them to lighten the weight of the air frame. Our avionics consisted of a radio, TACAN, and IFF, so we didn't need the hump. We had M's at NAS Dallas and initially removed the humps but found that the "bubble" canopy of the Mike without the hump increased the drag enough to counter any advantage of decreased weight, so we put them back on.
One year for the squadron Christmas party, Santa dropped out of the ass-end of one. It was awesome. I was 7 I think and I still remember it to this day!
When I was in college, I worked part time for Rudy Frasca, owner of Frasca Aviation (Google it if you don't know about him or the company). At that time it was a small company with 13 total employees which included the 3 of us part time college guys. Rudy owned 5 aircraft at the time and one was an FM-2 Wildcat (it was used to film some of the deck scenes in the original Midway movie), and he was a member of the Warbirds of America. When I was a LTJG in VA-86, I approached my CO and said it would be fun to get a formation pic of an F4U Corsair with an A-7E Corsair II, and I had the connections to Rudy who could recommend someone with an F4U. My CO told me to start working on it and he would get permission from COMLATWINGONE to do it. A day later he told me he'd rather go by the old Navy axiom of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" and to go ahead and do it. Rudy put me in contact with Pete Parish and the guys at Kalamazoo and we set it up. We needed a photo plane so I contacted VA-45, the Instrument RAG at NAS Cecil, and we had a guy due for his annual instrument check, so they would go up to Ft. Wayne with us and act as a photo platform while Boris got his instrument check. We had to go into Ft. Wayne because they had an Air Guard F-4 unit and plenty of runway whereas Kalamazoo, at the time, had less than the 8K' we were required to have for the A-7. We landed at Ft. Wayne on a Saturday that the Guard was having drill weekend and a big inspection. They weren't pleased at our intruding on their important day, especially since I hadn't bothered to get a PPR. We even had a one-star demanding to see our orders. He couldn't understand when I told him that my skipper said it was OK. The Kalamazoo guys were there and they brought their own photo plane, a T-28 with a photographer. The Guard guys finally relinquished and gave us a space so we could brief what we wanted to do. It turned out to be a crappy day weather-wise, so the Kalamazoo guys knew the ATC guys in the area pretty well and they ended up helping us find a hole that we orbited in to get the shots that we did. We took turns flying formation and taking pics and this turned out to be the best. I took an A-4 from Dallas up to an airshow in Kalamazoo in the early '90's and this pic had been blown up and was mounted above the entrance to the museum bookstore and souvenir shop.
Did it myself back in my Corps days. You loaded up, your static line was hooked to the right. Often an antenna bag was dropped with the team. The OV-10 would fly nap-of-the-earth and at target pop up and dump the team. It was called LALO (low altitude, low opening). I have never done an OV-10 exit that wasn’t on a static line mostly because it would take the two guys furthest back too long to drag their butts to exit the aircraft for an effective drop. I was never trained for HALO but I don’t think the Bronco was used for that mission.
Demoed that for us at OCS. Wild!
The mil side of FWA is an A-10 base these days but the field itself has a small variety of airplanes up on sticks that you can see on the drive to the passenger terminal. The terminal has a really great, but compact (maybe 400 sq.ft. of floorspace at the most), and free museum on the upper level. There's enough on display that if you look at everything in detail and read truly everything then you could probably spend an hour or two in there. There's also a Curtis biplane hanging right where you first clear security.
Sounds cool but I’m not sold on the idea of going to Fort Wayne...