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
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
