These aircraft were work horses during my timeline as well as many of you and so often not given the credit they deserved ...Hats off to all that flew and crewed them like our own "jnyork"...salute !

Converted to turboprop, those planes would be worth their weight in gold up in Alaska today.

The Canadian rescue service is still using them, probably the only ones flying today. Someone did a special on TV about them, it was really interesting.

http://www.penturbo.com is up at Cape May NJ airport and they have bunch that they do just that with. African mining business is another place that gobbles them up. Flew up there for breakfast (good restaurant and nice aviation museum on the field) a while back and they had a bunch.

de Havilland built some pretty amazing aircraft in their time. OK maybe not the Swallow or Comet (bad name choice), but their prop aircraft were/are amazing workhorses.

I worked on Dash 7s for a while. Didn't get to fly one but did start up and taxi one once. Quite a rig with similar performance. But bigger.

I Corps departure

DigitalDan would that departure be Quang Tri in 1968?

I watched an AFRES C-7 come across the end of the runway at Myrtle Beach AFB and once over pavement the pilot did an almost vertical landing. He didn't go forward much more than the length of the plane. That awed me more than the AV-8s that came in.

One of my old B & W pics [1970] of one of several tail #'s we shared adjacent revetment parking with

however the 483rd Tactical Airlift Wing at Phu Cat was later moved to Cam Ranh Bay from early 1968 to December 1971.

Our C-7 ops were mainly used in Binh Dinh province and surrounding remote areas.

I'm interested, where did you find that the Caribou is still in use by the Canadian SAR?

This is what I found: https://www.canada.ca/en/air-force/programs/search-rescue.html

Helicopter: CH149 Cormorant and CH146 Griffin.

Fixed wing: CP140 Aurora, CC115 Buffalo, C130 Hercules, and the newest, the CC295 Kingfisher.

I see that the Buffalo is a descendant of the Caribou. http://www.dhc4and5.org/Buffalo.html

My cousin started his Air Force career flying B 17s in WWII. His last combat assignment was as a wing (?) commander in Vietnam of C-7 Caribous in 1970 . He was promoted to full bird for this assignment. He retired from the Air Force in 1975. He did the Berlin Air Lift, Korea and the Pershing one deployment program in between.

kwg

No, it was a strip southwest of Quang Tri as I recall. Lot of Montagnard villages in the area.

Amazing STOL aircraft! Those would’ve been popular in Columbia back in the day.

I only saw a couple while in Korea. I thought they were kind of cool looking. Had one declare an emergency and landed at the Tucson airport. Believe is was a landing gear problem. I had to do the special weather observation which was posted as an acft mishap. If it had been a crash it would have an ACFT accident. ACFT for the unenlightened is the contraction for aircraft, just in case someone needs to ask.
PJ

Thanks for posting the thread Woody...

There was a guy I met at an Air Show in St Paul when I lived back in Minnesota, who had a Caribou he had flown in...

Many years after Vietnam was over, he had been able to locate and purchase the one he flew in Vietnam, restored and rebuilt it
and was flying it to air shows...late 80s or so.

I was in the back of one for a landing like that. Dropped and stopped, across the runway rather than along it. It must have looked impressive. We all ended up in a bit of a tangle in the back.

dan, the one I watched touched down soft and didn't stop.

Jump Mastered outta one lf those one time up in Alaska. They told us it would be like a C-123 jump .... but it wasn't. They could definitely take-off and land on a postage stamp though.

The C-123 was the other, slightly larger "tactical supply" cargo plane in 'Nam. Unlike the 'Boo, though, nobody has fond memories of the 123.

I was in Viet Nam on C-130's for several years and always thought it would be cool to take a ride on one of the C-7's, but never had the time.
The first time I saw one other than at CRB, was at Katum and was having a hell of time landing into a strong wind. Looked like it was not moving.
Like they say, "real planes have props"..

I certainly don't have "fond memories" especially after Ranch Hand missions..They were dripping A Orange everywhere. The fire Dept did its best to hose off the taxiways however most of it went into grassy areas which eventually turned brown even after being diluted.

Over 3.5 million liters of Agent Orange were located on the Phu Cat Air Base during Vietnam. Several areas of the Phu Cat base were found to have elevated levels of dioxin requiring remediation (above 1000 ppt in soil or 150 ppt in sediment).

It's a wonder I don't have a third eye !

I flew on them a couple of times n Nam. They seemed to be somewhat unstable - always wagging left and right. I thought they were cool with that hatch on top where a crewman could stand up in when moving about on the ground.

Thanks for posting this, Woody.

Here's a link to the Caribou website, tons of pix etc from Vietnam.

http://www.c-7acaribou.com/

The AFRes units at Westover and Pittsburg had them. They'd take a weekend trip down to Patrick AFB, FL and stop on Sundays going home. Top off the gas and 15 gal of oil in each engine.

When I was at Bragg sometimes they had weekend fun jumps. I got just a couple C7 jumps. Tailgate. What a blast!

Now that I think about it, it WAS the Buffalo. It and the Caribou are so much alike, my brain says "Caribou". Still, those guys in the Rescue Service up there are real studs.




My first parachute jump at Ft. Benning was out of reputedly the last C-123 in service in the USAF. It was memorable, mainly because, even as scared as we were, we were anxious to get out of that POS. I am amazed that it could even get off the ground. I think the USAF bought them to punish pilots they didn't like.

I had one in-country hitchhike ride in a C-123, and I would not have ridden in another if they told me it would take me straight to the big Freedom Bird in Saigon. Two big radial engines and two auxiliary jet engines for takeoff made such a horrific noise that it is a wonder any of their crews were not stone deaf.