Aviation BS and Photo Thread

Do it!

 

Today in LaGarbage

 

Flew a momma Great Dane and her 9 puppies to start their journey for a new life today

 

I did 25 hours in the Idaho Backcountry this month. ~50 different landing strips. It was awesome. Hopefully I'll have a kitfox of my own soon.

 

I want a KitFox so bad. Badass planes.

 

If I ever dreamed of a hybrid Bush plane, this Draco would be it. I have watched this video many times and it never gets old.

Not sure if this has been posted before ... excuse me if it has been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqhI4MeCn1c

 

Wow, I'm jealous. Take me with you!

Bad to the bone. I saw it at Oshkosh

 

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/09/30/pilot-deploys-parachute-emergency-landing-addison/

So this happened this morning before I took off

 

Draco is cool, but if we're dreaming, I'll take an OV10G+ stripped of armor



The landing gear shares some similarities with Draco, except it's retractable and tricycle.

My old man spent some time doing low level jumps out of the back of Broncos when he was in the USMC. If you were the last jumper into the plane had to tape your pant legs tight around your boots since your feet hung out in the slipstream. He also said you couldn't take your time when was time to jump. They'd come screaming in just over the treetops, the plane would pop up and everyone would skedaddle out the back. As the last guy was leaving the plane would wingover and then head straight back down to the ground. He told me that you had to have your ass in gear because the pilots didn't give you much time, but it was tough because you were fighting the G's of the climb.



I'm hoping the USAF starts building them again for the OA-X program, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Wow, I've never seen or heard of those before

 

They were built for light attack and forward air control during Vietnam. They started getting phased out of military service after Desert Storm. Two were lost to IR MANPADs. The planes that were lost were A models that had not been upgraded with the IR shrouds that the D models had. NASA and CalFire use them, they're also used in Columbia and the Philippines.

There are a few old training and informational films on Youtube about them. My favorite is the landing gear testing that they did on the initial version with the stubby wings. They went into production with the longer wings.

 

...^^^... They were super cool fixed wings .... I had a buddy who flew them and he also spent 16 years in Air America starting in Laos during the RVN war and ending in Egypt.

Very cool guys doing a chit job and they got no bennies in the end. I did some work with Southern Air Transport in FL and got to know a few of the A/A guys back then.

It was a shame how those guys got screwed out of their government benefits after A/A. Many of them quit their previous military MOS jobs of 10+ years to work for A/A too.

 

Super Jelly

 

Just watched a program called Air Warriors on the Smithsonian Channel. One show covers the Bronco. Awesome program, awesome plane. I want one!

 

I've only seen snippets of that show. I keep waiting for them to throw the full version on Youtube since I don't do TV.

Did they talk about running the OV10 on floats?



I'm not exactly sure how you'd get into/out of the cockpit though.

Sucks that the govt didn't back them up afterwards. My neighbor was an engineer in the US Merchant Marine during WWII and pretty much the same thing happened to him. He kept trying to move over to the Navy but mariners were in such demand that the govt wouldn't let him go. After the war his brother (who went Navy) was discharged with all the benefits without ever having left the states, meanwhile my neighbor got nada despite having two ships sunk out from under him. The real pisser on that as well is that your pay stopped the moment your ship sank. He didn't make a dime during the time he spent in the raft waiting for rescue. It wasn't until LAST YEAR that congress finally extended benefits. Bastards basically waited til most of them had passed. My neighbor passed away three years ago (almost to the day) and didn't get to see anything.

 

Floats? I dunno, my rememberer doesn't work as well as my forgetterer. I saved it, so I will watch again and report back, if i remember.

 

Having Oshkosh withdrawals...

https://youtu.be/8_XQdRtn-G0

 

Does your audio recorder not record outgoing transmissions?

 

Procedure at Oshkosh is not to read back instructions. It records just fine

 

The Navy actually brought a pair of OV-10s back to support SOCOM for a while. It was a push to actually get a proper COIN/CAS aircraft back with the A-10 being threatened at the time. They kicked ass from what a few of my friends told me, but the powers that be weren't about to start down that road.

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...s-forces-want-their-own-light-attack-aircraft

...The results of Imminent Fury informed a follow-on program known as Combat Dragon II, which resulting in the deployment of a pair of heavily modified OV-10G+ Bronco aircraft to the Middle East in 2015. Again, the Navy, acting on behalf of SOCOM, cut a deal with NASA to borrow both aircraft for the field tests with the agreement that the service would return them to the civilian agency with significant upgrades after the evaluation period ended.

While supporting special operations forces in Iraq, the pair of Bronco’s flew a total of 120 combat missions. Their primary weapon was the APKWS II rocket. Though the two aircraft reportedly had a very successful deployment, the Navy dutifully returned them to NASA afterwards. As of June 2017, the planes were still sitting in a hangar at the Langley Research Center in Virginia still wearing their gray tactical paint scheme and “black pony” art, an homage to the Navy’s storied Vietnam War OV-10 unit, Light Attack Squadron Four.


It was unlikely that SOCOM would ever have considered actively adopting the aircraft, no matter how successful they proved to be, as the Bronco is long out of production. The decision to use the planes as the test platform seemed to be a matter of convenience more than anything else...