I met a man this morning who was a crewman on one of these over in S.E, Asia in 71 and 72 , Lot's of stories from that old guy , Do any of you men who were there have any stories about them? Sounds like hearing from this guy they were a pretty cool aircraft .

Dad was a flight engineer on C-119s during Korea and a Reservist through '69. Flew men and material. Had multiple missions in support of the Cuban missile crisis. Never flew with mini-guns to my knowledge.

IIRC They got pretty limited use, being kind of a gap-filler aircraft between the then too vulnerable AC-47 and the upcoming AC-130s.

Pretty much what Rocky said. They had heavier armaments than miniguns for rambunctious targets.

IIRC, dad said one was the Shadow and one was the Stinger. One had the minis and the other had the 20mm gun. Don't remember which is which. I remember him saying how the Fairchild was a flying leaky gas can. More than one blew up in flight. I wish I could ask him more about it, but dementia has taken a pretty firm grip on those memories.

Hopefully jnyork will be here before long to clarify.

From Air Vectors

I wish there was a thread dedicated to military aircraft and the guys that flew and crewed them .

Oh heck, MJones. It would be a huddle of guys doing "There I was..." with their hands, spouting jargon only the other guys in that specialty would understand, and "enlarging" their own roles a tiny bit with stories they've been embellishing for half a century.

In short, a fabulous place.

I could start with the Cessna Sky Pig you see there to the left.

Would that story begin with:

"There I was, standing on the Long Tieng air strip in 1964 when Vang Pao approached with his 8 wives in tow.....

The Air Force Brothers at Phan Rang that maintained the AC-119 gunships --- armed with both mini and vulcan 20 mike mike --- were the ones who took us under their wing and set up our mini on our guntruck " Wild Thing " the guntuck crew was given a 50 cent tour of the Gunship. Bank that boxcar, rotate those electric fan motors and say good night ---Good Men at Phan Rang --- Spent many a night there. --------- Web

I used to sit around back in the 70's when in grade school and listen to my dad and those old guys like him who were in Korea tell all kinds of stories . I loved that stuff and now he's the only one left of that bunch . Now I read this stuff ! Tell'em while you can guys , we're all ears and eyes .

After my divorce, I had a few dates with a real estate gal in Ft. Worth who said she would only fly with me if I had a twin engine Cessna, specifically a "sky pig", a.k.a. Skymaster. I actually looked at getting one, not 'cause of her, but just because they're so dang unusual. And kinda cool. I am internet buddies with a guy who used to fly one in the Nam...

We probably flew some of the very last in country combat missions via our AC-47's before VNAF inherited them. Stingers and Shadows at this time were few and far between as I remember and flown mainly from bases in Thailand. They had some issues with gun sights especially with 20 mike mike but most of all were way under powered and overloaded most of the time with pucker factor take offs being SOP.. Even still they saved lives with their devastating fire from the sky..

!969-70 PhuCat RSVN...





picupload

That old guy this morning said he was flying out of Thailand too ! This is so neat .

I wish I had asked for his name , I only said Thank You .

wldthg-- How far north did Wild Thing range from Phan Rang? Hwy 1? When were you there? Sorry for the thread hijack.

smike308-- Wildthing was with D co. 815th Engineers ---- Based Camp Dillard about 30-40 miles south of Dalat on QL 20 --- we ran our own small convoys. Down to Long Bien or into Cam Ranh Bay and all points in between. ONCE and only once the guntruck got called in out of the central highlands in about May or June of 1971 . We were part of a very very large convoy that was moving equipment up QL1 Some where around Phu Cat. AFB. we turn around and headed back to Cam Ranh--- ------ I was in Natrang unofficially from CRB with it one night Jan71--------- Were you there ?------ Web

Have heard less complimentary names for old Suck'n Blow, yes sir!

I have no personal experience with these things, except for seeing them on the ramp at various locations in SVN and Thailand. There is an excellent book entitled "Charlie Chasers, History of USAF AC-119 "Shadow" Gunships in the Vietnam War" by Larry Elton Fletcher, published by Helgate Press of Ashland OR. Dont know how many copies are floating around out there , probably a fairly limited edition. Got my copy off ebay a few years ago. A great book for those interested in this sort of thing.

Edit: Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Chasers-History-USAF-AC-119/dp/1555717314/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531754635&sr=1-1&keywords=charlie+chasers&dpID=41ILdg8RNdL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

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.

I’m way too young to know much about this stuff but my Uncle flew an AC-119K in Vietnam. He has a few remarkable stories about hitting trucks at night on the HoChiMin trail. Watching tracers barely miss the cockpit and stacking one of these planes up in a rice paddy as a result of a faulty fuel gauge indicating he had plenty of fuel as he ran out.

Rocky, speaking of “Naked Fanny” remember this ? SE of Pleiku.

"Little Cat" Mountain? Never got over it, but yes.

My hats off to you boys who flew those missions over there....never tire of hearing of the stories that you gents experienced...
I don't think the air crews ever get enough credit for the ways they put their asses on the line, and how many American lives they saved flying over our troops who were in a tight spot.

StepDad didn't fly gun ships over there, he flew 130s on those black bird missions...CIA stuff he won't talk about much to this day.. being 87 this year. He did set down a 130 in flames at Khe Sahn... crew got out..plane was mortared on the flight line ..
cargo was kind of explosive.... nothing left for spare parts...

Times you guys speak of, I was still stateside wrapping up high school and enjoying being safe and out of harms way, worry when my draft number was going to come around....

God Bless the boys who made the noise....

When the old man was stationed at Pope in 66-68, before heading to Nam... I use to watch the 130s, that had rotated over to Vietnam on TDY, after they came home.... 90 to 120 days...they were so patched up, parts from other 130s...you couldn't tell what the camo colors were suppose to be....the things got shot up so much and repaired over there....

Unit on base was the 464th TCW... old man was assigned to the Tactical Airlift Center...
while there, he was attached to the folks developing the HC 130Hs....for pilot retrieval in the jungles...

as close as I got, but certainly enough of a spectator to know what you guys went thru....
hence my immense respect to each of you....

Tripped across this video after reading this thread...

a walk down memory lane for you Air Crew Types... and plane lovers like me....

a Little Davis Monthan Tour...

It's a funny thing, Seafire. The scaredest I ever got was on the drive to the airport on my way to Vietnam. I was just wet from the fear that I'd get killed.

Once there and actually doing the job, it was just...the job. I was well trained (although what they taught me stateside turned out to be almost opposite of the real combat learning) and I re-learned fast. Getting shot at was exciting at first, but after the first few hundred thousand rounds it was just a tame fireworks show. The twinkling white stars of muzzle flash, the arc of red and green tracers, the trail of rocket smoke...it all became sort of detached from the fact that all those gomers down there were actually trying to kill me. It became a game of that professional against this one.

Fortunately, I won. 300 to 0.

John, I enjoyed the video. When we hauled for the St. Louis ANG unit I would look at their F-4Es. Several had at least one red star on the vari-ram ahead of the intake. It is one time a plane can tell you a story.

There was always the unexpected just waiting around the corner. This one is kinda special. A ZSU23-2 captured by one of the B/2/17th Cav Scouts. It never got off the first shot, nor did the ground crew. What you see here is the gun sans carraige, set in concrete in front of the 2/17th Cav HQ Operations Center. 1970 in the A Shau Valley.

Oh, THOSE were nasty. Their tracers were a deep yellow, and the four-gun ZSU-23 radar-aimed ones put out such a heavy stream of fire we called them "The Golden Hose." Truly terrifying to go up against.

#Respect#

Rocky, my recollection has it the twin and quad 23s brought down more of our boys than any other air defense system the north had. The one in the pic was not equipped with radar but I think most of the quads up north were. Late in the Spring '72 Offensuve timeline I was working with 1st Cav leftovers up in I Corps (MR1) and had occasion to play with a twin captured intact near Quang Tri. It was sobering to witness the speed of traverse and the ease required. I was told then they could follow a target flying directly overhead at 500' and 500 knots. Have no doubt that was true.

It was during that operational period that I quit worrying about small arms and all of our tactics revolved around defeating the threat of AAA and SA7 missiles.

DD

John the guys that got all the accolades were the fast mover drivers in my timeline..Not that they didn't deserve it however it was rather sickening at times to see the staged photo sessions out on the flight line with stateside and or Stars and Stripes journalist falling all over themselves beside an F-4...I never saw an article about a single crew member during my tour..If you weren't wearing a go to hell hat and sporting a handle bar stash you were chopped liver I guess.. One of my pilots an ANG LTC had been reactivated as he flew C-47's in Korea since the AF was short of experienced pilots for the gunship program...He wasn't a spring chicken like the rest of us, had logged many hours flying air drops around the Pusan area during the war yet here he was Spooky pilot on his second deployment in SEA.. He was a great AC [aircraft commander] and friend to all of the crew with the prime directive to get all of us home in one piece which he did time after time....What a damn shame not to tell his story still pisses me off to this day ! Rant over

Dan, I never had to duel with one, but the FACs who flew the Trail at night in O-2s did. (The OV-10 couldn't work at night because of its canopy design. Too long to explain that here)

Anyway, the night FACs say they'd MUCH rather deal with 37mm guns than the Zsu-23. The 37 had heavier punch and could reach a lot higher, but both were moot if they couldn't hit ya. And with their much slower rate of fire and optical (guesswork) tracking at night, their red tennis balls were just a light show.

But they had to really jink and jive if a Golden Hose opened up.

I may have had one of the first encounters with a SA-7 Strella IR manpad. The idiot fired it at me when I was only about 100 feet above him, fortunately. It went by me between my wingtip and the cockpit, but had not had nearly enough time to acquire me and arm up. If the one-level gunner who fired it had just counted to 20 before he pulled the trigger, I'd be lying in Cambodia right now. I'd bet he was used to firing RPGs. The Intel guy in my debrief that day got real bug-eyed when I described the launch. We called it "getting a Strella suppository."

Lost some good friends to Strellas, they were a daunting challenge. Had occasion to witness this one and by odd chance the crew survived, against all odds I might add. The painting is relatively accurate, but the snake was in about a 90^ left bank when struck. I was on the ground in the backdrop with 12 other Hueys dumping off troops. Watched it from launch to impact.



One of the lighter tales that came from them was a Spectre up west of Hue on a night mission, using the IR vision equipment. They got to watch a Strella launch and track directly into the camera which was apparently mounted in very close proximity to the search light. Flew it home and presumably washed their shorts afterwards.

So did that snake crew!

The rest of the story re: Blue Max. After getting hit they began a vertical autorotation with the fuselage slowly turning counter clockwise. The hit occurred at about 3,000' as I recall and just SE of Con Thon east of QL9. The pilot tried to jettison the pods but that didn't work, likely due to tripped breakers etc. The battery for the Snake was in the tailboom right about where the separation occurred. Recollection has it that he shut the engine down, but I'm not certain of that. The bird was about half way down when the flight of slicks I was with departed for RTB and per protocol the last bird in the formation was assigned recovery duties. They broke off the formation headed toward the falling bird w/o gun cover initially and due to proximity were not far away at all when the snake crashed into sparse single canopy scrub. The slick driver landed a short distance away and tried to get the dink infantry they had picked up to off load but they refused, so after one of those WTF moments he picked up and hovered over to the crash site to find both pilots waiting for pickup. The CP had a broken ankle and dead trees blocked an on site landing, so they chopped the trees down with the main rotor and got low enough so the gunner and crew chief could get them on board.

They were dropped off at the EVAC hospital at Bien Hoa and the A/C was released shortly thereafter. CP was treated and released, but by the time he got back to his unit, the A/C who was regular army (Cpt) had crafted and handed in his request to separate from the service. I was, uh, jealous?

A few days later I got a call from Brigade HQ wanting to know where the preliminary accident report was for the damaged Huey. One of my collateral duties in the unit was safety officer and I'd had precious little reason to consider that affair up to that point. Main rotor strikes that caused even minor dents or incursion to the rotor blade skin was considered a major accident due to collateral damage likely to occur to the drive train and power plant. I was somewhat stunned by the tone of the major's voice and pondered briefly before saying, "Sir, it wasn't an accident. They did it on purpose when they snatched the crew of the downed Blue Max snake." Long pause........."Mister, I like the way you think!" No paper work was generated from that affair.

End of tale.

Dan, Dave, Woody, and Rocky....

enjoyed reading your posts... and want to thank each one of you for your service, and your service in S. Vietnam...

came close to being sent over there, but I guess the Good Lord Figured he needed me around a while longer... so I got diverted elsewhere...the only one out of 200 guys...

I heard about 60 of them never came back alive...

Always thought I'd have been one of them if the Good Lord didn't intervene...

Just want to let you gentlemen know, its a real personal honor to me to consider you each as on line friends..
and especially to Dave and Woody, who I have been blessed with the honor of being a guest in their homes and
treated like I was someone real important...( which I ain't )...

Just thank you gentlemen for your service to your nation... and a salute of respect for your service in Nam and for coming home and living a good life...

May the Good Lord watch over and bless each of you boys...

Appreciate your thoughts, but you realize we were being paid while having all that fun, right? Tax free............about $600/month at the start. Damn few places to spend it as well, so I saved a bundle.

Plus that magnanimous extra $60 a month combat pay! Two bucks a day to get hammered each evening - drinks were 35 cents at the bar.

No thanks necessary. It was a duty and an honor to serve, even when it wasn't a pleasure.

Tthanks John you know you are welcome here anytime you pass through...Yes $60 extra went along way in those days, like Dan I managed to save, send some home and still have some for pitchers of swill with my crew. Wouldn't trade my experience for all the tea in China just some regrets this late in life that I didn't stay for 20. I miss the flying but not being an airborne 10 ring ..

Looking for C-7 still pictures and I didn’t find any good ones.
These are not good quality but you can at least make out what the aircraft are.
These are two AC47’s taxing out for a training mission at Na Trang.
VNAF trained AC47 and A37 flight crews at Na Trang.
There was also an Air Commando group with AC-130’s and U-10’s.
AC 47 taxi out at NaTrang




Along the coast you were far more likely to see Air Force or VNAF C123’s.


This is Red Baron 614 on the MACV pad at Gia Ngha. We did not land there much as it was dusty. Both blade grip seals were leaking and the cabin roof was slippery. It was hard to maintain a helicopter on the edge of nowhere. If we got it, it arrived via a C-7.

Talked to cousin today at a family funeral, he said most of that tour he was at Korat keeping the F105's flying (two missions a day), but part at Nakhon Phanom. "Naked Fanny?" I asked. Big grin, "Yeah, Naked Fanny" he replied. About then his wife said "Oh no, don't get him started talking about airplanes." I do believe he loved the planes.

Thank you all for your service.

My first jump, back in '78 at Benning, was out of a C-123. I couldn't wait to get out of that hunkajunk POS. IIRC, they said it was the last one in USAF inventory, and as clunky as it was, it might damned well have been the first one in inventory, too.

Of course, being my first jump, I had no idea what to expect, period, but that 123 sure made the C-130s seem like Cadillacs in comparison in later jumps.