Hi!
Does anyone have some examples of real life flights that these amazing planes have done or do? I am sure there are many of them and it would be fun to try something "extreme" or "crazy". I am sure these planes have been to many places and flown difficult approaches etc.

So if anyone has some examples I'd be grateful. 8-)
Thanks.

Tatu

Try assault landings on remote dirt strips.
It works best with 50% or less fuel.

Come in high to avoid enemy ground fire.
Spiral down over the end of the airstrip.

Land and come to a stop as quickly as possible.
Unload the troops.

Then do a maximum effort takeoff to get as high
as possible as soon as possible to avoid enemy
ground fire on the departure climb out.

It's harder than you think!
It takes some practice.

While in the Military, I had the "privilege" to ride in
the back of C-130s making assault landings.
It's a rough and bumpy ride, that always ended with
the Loadmaster yelling, "Get Out".

You can try lifting 452 passengers and crew with a C-130A,
as one did during the evacuation of Saigon, on April 29th 1975.
I can't even imagine where they put all those people lol!  :P

Tyrion

Tyrion wrote on May 16^th, 2009 at 1:19pm:

You can try lifting 452 passengers and crew with a C-130A, as one did during the evacuation of Saigon, on April 29th 1975. I can't even imagine where they put all those people lol!  :P Tyrion

Unless most of the passengers were small children and infants, there is no way that a C-130A could have carried that many persons. Even taking the small stature of the Vietnese, you would start to excede the Gross takeoff weight at around 300-350 passengers depending on how much fuel was on board. I know that there were C-141's that made emergency evacuations cramed full of people and is the aircraft that should have been referenced.

What's the reference for this story anyway?

When I looked up the correct number of passengers,
I found reference to it on wikipedia (of course), but more reliably on the site of Lockheed-Martin. It's also mentioned in a couple of books I have.
The aircraft was C-130A USAF 56-0518.
It's now the gate guard at little rock afb.
If you search for it on google, you'll find lots of info!
for more details about that extraordinary flight:
http://www.patriotfiles.com/forum/showthread.php?p=137080

Tyrion

Ok, I have been corrected. There is even a picture and blurb about the plane in the June/July09 issue of Computer Pilot.

I was a navigator on Air Force C-130Es in Southeast Asia in 1971 and 1972.  We had a weekly cargo and PAX mission to fly from Bankok to Diego Garcia Island in the Chagos Archipelago while Navy CBs were building the base there.  This probably wouldn't be very exciting in Flight Sim, but for a navigator it was *ssholes and elbows for 14 hours, calculating and taking celestial shots  every 20 minutes (no GPS or INS in those days) and arriving in the area of Diego Garcia (where there were no nav aids other than the base radio station) without enough fuel to get to any alternate airfield.  On top of that, the runway was crushed coral and only about 2000 feet long, if memory serves.  The route was west from BKK to Car Nicobar Island  and then southwest to Diego Garcia.
I think I remember correctly that in November 1971 one of my Wing's C-130s hauled Bob Hope and his Christmas troop to Diego where they did a show.

Or you could try and do what the Israelis did in Operation Entebbe, fly down the Red Sea at 100m, then land at Entebbe airport, with no lights. Unload a couple of cars, then prepare for a hasty get away. It's fun  :)