Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire AC-119 Stinger

Dan, the civilian version (337?) was rated at 4,400 pounds maximum gross takeoff weight. With the same engines, but with added fuel tanks, a huge radio rack, and two pods of rockets, our everyday weight was 4,850. One night, in a combat emergency, I took off with all that, one extra pilot plus a little guy translator and two flare racks. Total 5,400 pounds.

Our field was at 4,650 MSL and it was hot. I rolled the entire 5,000 feet of runway and only got airborne because I hit a rock in the far overrun and bounced into the air.

Even on a good day at 4,850 pounds, we had to climb to at least 300 feet before we raised the gear, because opening the gear doors caused us to slow down and sink. Gear up, we barely made 300 feet per minute climb rate. We could not maintain level flight on one engine at any time. Lose one and you were going down. Period.

Sky Pig, indeed.

MJ,..As Rocky touched on losing an engine or even a cylinder on take off could have been a disaster and you would most likely end up as jungle fertilizer..Our typical mission load out was a gross payload just under 6,000 lbs consisting of a crew from 5-7 usually...7.62 ammo on board was about 30,000 rds which = a ton and some change..MK-24 flare numbers were 35-50 depending on mission requirements..Tack on a full nights fuel, three mini guns and you were maxed out. However the AC-47 was more forgiving and could get you home on one turning the main reason I'm glad I never crewed the 119's.

I hear ya Rocky, but look at it this way maybe. At least you helped get Cessna into the ranks of combat plane builders. For what it's worth I managed to get drunk a few times with some of your peers. That said, the one's I felt sympathy for was the O-1 drivers. The Bird Dog was a kite with OD paint.

No slight intended, but my favorite back then was the OV-10. Helluva plane 7 days a week.

Another favorite alluded to previously was the Spectre. We used to do a lot of post strike BDA recons out in the hills of I Corps. Sometime late winter/early spring of '70 they put us onto one that cracked me up big time. West of the A Shau one of Uncle Ho's trails was carrying a convoy southbound. Spectre popped the first with the tailgate gun, then the last, pinning them on a razor back ridge. Was a turkey shoot after that and they destroyed something like 50 vehicles.

Not associated with them, but us Navy guys in Da Nang called that Puff the Magic Dragon. Tracer rounds fired at night suggested one did not want to be the focal point.

When I went through fixed wing performance several of the flight engineer instructors had been engineers of planes in Nam. One was on Stingers and two flew on C-123s. One was a spray bird (Operation Ranch Hand) FE and one another Operation Ranch Hand FE was in my class. Interesting stories. The one that had flown on AC-119s said they flew the trail and 37mm anti aircraft was a big threat. The FE that flew on C-123 cargo birds was in and out of Khe Sanh several times getting shell the entire time they were on the ground plus getting peppered on approach and departure. Khe Sanh got so bad C-130s weren't sent on air land missions. C-130 CDS drops above 10,000 ft AGL was developed for Khe Sanh.

One day, I got sent out to verify a reported 37-mm gun placement on a rooftop on the then-abandoned city of Stung Treng, Cambodia. This is right on the Mekong River where the Se Kong River joins it. It's a stone's throw from Laos and was a major Ho Chi Minh Trail layover/supply dump. It was heavily defended. My boss clearly did not expect to see me ever again.

Knowing that the 37-mm gun could get me at altitudes up to 10,000 feet, but that it was supposedly on a rooftop, I reasoned that it probably could not shoot at angles near horizontal, and certainly not below that. So, I approached Stung Treng down the Se Kong River - twisting and turning between the jungled banks at ripple height. When I got to Stung Treng, I pulled up and over in a climbing left turn right over the city, looking quickly at every rooftop I could pick out from 100 feet up. Then boogied out of town at 10 feet altitude.

I got a warm reception from small arms, but saw no 37-mm gun. No, I did not make a second pass to make sure.

“This book is completely fictional. Any resemblence to people, places or events is purely coincidental”. I always kind of thought there was more fact than fiction in that book.

Yup. But that disclaimer gets me off the hook from anybody upset with the way they were portrayed. The people (names at least) are fictional. The events are accurate.

Just because it's of the same era of this conversation here's a herd of Caribou that were at Cape May NJ Airport last weekend (buddy and I flew over to visit the museum, have lunch and pick up some beer at Cape May brewery). Apparently they belong to these folks - https://www.penturbo.com - who convert them to turboprops.

There would be NO better airplane to supply remote Alaskan villages - or hunting camps - than a fleet of turbo Cariboos. Ya think I could get credit for naming them TurBoos?

Sure, but you have to come up with a logo for the coffee cups. I've never been involved in any real program that didn't have a coffee cup with a logo.

I got yer logo. Satan in the right seat screaming in horror as they do a short field combat approach. More an image I guess.

The image of a caribou jumping over the moon with flames shooting out of its as$ just won't leave my head.

The Caribou is an amazing plane. While doing a last chance check on a fighter near the end of the runway I watched one land with a strong constant headwind . The Caribou crossed the runway threshold and landed much like a helicopter. The plane had little forward flight and came down in an arc and touched down in less than three plane lengths.

They have leading edge slats, plus nearly 200 sq ft of flaps, which are designed to take advantage of the Coanda Effect. With everything extended, they had an approach angle that must have seemed vertical from inside the cockpit. And just hung there like being under a parachute. Amazing. DeHaviland builds some truly remarkable planes with tundra ops in mind.

If you've ever landed a Cessna 150 with full flaps, you know the feeling.

Not too far from the truth. One day we picked up a hitchhiking F-100 pilot at Da Nang who had to leave his damaged aircraft there . We were on our way home to Phu Cat, and were tasked to drop off some pallets of 105mm ammo at a little 1300 foot dirt strip to the South, cant recall the name of it now. Keep in mind this pilot had never flown in a radial engine aircraft or landed on anything but 10,000 feet of concrete. This guy had his head up in the cockpit watching the proceedings when we started our approach. On the downwind, over the intercom I heard a strained, shakey voice ask "You aren't seriously going to land this thing on THAT, are you". "Yup, just watch" came the reply. After the dust had cleared , as we taxied to the ramp to unload, the fighter jock took a seat in the cargo compartment, his face somewhat ashen and with a grim expression . He never said much if anything for the rest of the mission, I often wondered in later years if he crapped his pants and was trying to hide it.

I've been following this thread with interest due to a family connection.

I had three older cousins who enlisted in the AF in the 50's/early 60's (one was in for 26 years, another 20). At one of Mom's birthday parties the three of them started swapping stories and lies. Turned out one of them had flown gunships out of Thailand and his comment went something like: "We loaded them with all the ammunition we could take off with, went out and shot it all up, then came home...but I don't like to talk about those days." It came as a bit of a shock as the family had thought he was a mechanic and "safe" since he was in Thailand rather than VN.

Don't know where in Thailand or which plane he flew, always figured it was an AC-47 but could be wrong.

Could have been Ubon, Udorn, or Nakom Phenon (known by all AF types as Naked Fanny). Depending on when, he could have been in AC-47, AC-119, or AC-130s. In that order of time.

Thanks Rocky. I think it must have been about 1970.

Need to talk to him again, it's been a while.

We frequently poured mass quantities of 7.62 on the bad guys but never shot all we had on board except for one engagement in the An Lao valley which was our second fight of that same evening. Lots of ammo shortages in those days that had us flying many missions on the thin side of being fully armed..Several times are ammo allocation had to be divided between three tail numbers so our alert aircraft could defend the base should it come under attack..

Nothing worse than to leave a fight out of ammo knowing you could no longer provide close air support for the troops on the ground in harms way.