My guard unit is trying to do a 9 ship this morning, everything on the ramp. We are taking bets for how many break. I say 2. Any C-130 guys care to guess?

I would say a 33% break rate for a Sunday launch is not a bad guess.

I was a Loadsmasher on E's until '70.
2 years RVN.
I would be surprised back then if all 9 didn't make it, but we flew some pretty ragged planes!!

10,000 pounder's...
We were at 12,000 feet and the concussion would catch up to the plane and shake the hell out of it.
We dropped these out of a "B" model. I was flying on it because I was the Duty Loadmaster at CRB at the time.
Right after the drop, #3 engine caught on fire (tailpipe fire), and never went out until the firemen put it out back at home base... !!







Gotta love the 130's !!

9 left the ramp, 8 took off. Pretty good for 30 year old planes. Maintence guys were lined up "dabbing" in honor of the Panthers win tonight. North Carolina air national guard out of Charlotte.

Beats the rate for F22's and 35's, no?

Love me some Daisy Cutters I do.

We have C-130s flyover here (Hot Springs on the French Broad) sometimes. Are those yours?

Also, do you guys fly those chinooks with the refueling tubes on the front? I see those with some regularity here and wonder where they're from.

Thanks for those videos...

66 thru 68 the old man was stationed at Pope...

we use to be able to go out to the drop zones and watch the Air Force and Army test doing those drops and low level " kick it out the back" drills....

using old equipment, but boy did a lot of that stuff get messed up big time...

sure was entertaining for a 14 to 16 year old kid...

old man also worked with the TAC Airlift Center, on development of the HC 130....for picking up pilots out of the jungle downed in Vietnam... they went thru a batch of those C 130s doing that testing down at Eglin in the Gulf....

During Vietnam, the 464th there at Pope had 5 squadrons to support the 82nd and all the stuff on Ft Bragg... plus all the National Guard units that rotated thru there...got to where I could tell what kind of plane was overhead, just by the engine noise....

I was totally amazed at those 130s, that had come back from Vietnam on TDY.... they were so patched up you couldn't tell what their original camo was...they'd re camo them back at Pope, and they were off somewhere else...

at least one if not two of the squadrons on base were always TDY somewhere...

Those days Pope was a real busy place and was a 365 day a year air show, with everything under the sun flying in and out of the base... especially C 130s, C 119s, C123s, even C 124s and C 133s plus the new C 141s....T 28s, T 37s, A1 Skyraiders...plus the assortment of other stuff depending on what was going on..

plenty of F100s, 101s, 104s, F 4s, F 5s...many of the older 50s stuff being National Guard units...

From Sept. '66 to May of '68 I was stationed with the 37th, at Langley in Va.
We would go down to Pope, raise hell at the Prince Charles hotel in Fayetteville, and do air drops the next day. Sometimes we weren't in great shape!!!
You may have been watching us at times...

You guys flew by my house, low.

Got my dogs barking.

I counted all 9

They had a few names for us...
Loadsmashers
Trash haulers
Monkey killers
Mortar Magnets

Nobody Loved Us !!!

I had a lot of one-way rides in C-130s and -141s (82nd Abn.)

I really liked the C-130s, nice and stable, easy to jump out of.

Got no use for a C-123, though.

I was the goofy looking kid with glasses you might have seen in the distance....off one of the drop zones...with a pair of binocs...

after the ops were over, we use to like to go out there and check out all the destroyed equipment from those drops....

the Old Man use to fly up to Langley All the time...during those days before finally getting sent to Vietnam.. he spent 49 months total, flying 130s in Vietnam...

Funny thing, after all that practice we almost never did any personal troop drops in RVN.
Just bombs, and once I had a drop of 35,000 pounds of asphalt for building a runway...

I once had a load of 8 water-buffalo that ended up giving me the worse case of ringworm you could ever imagine !!
The plane was water-buffalo crap and piss from one end to the other.
Had to wash out the plane with a firetruck !!

Some days were better than others...





Worst thing to me was bringing in a plane full of leaking body bags from the bush.
My only really bad memories.
They were almost all somebody's teenage son, just out of high school, like myself....

Had the same experience, they had been bagged up and lying in the jungle in the A Shau valley for 10 days or so before they were deposited in my Caribou, rats had eaten the bags open, got down to Da Nang with them and got the fire truck to bring me a hose to wash the plane out with, still stunk two weeks later. I think about it every so often, still gives me a case of the sad.