The landing gear is squat and simple, retracting into fuselage pods that take no space from the cargo area and allow for the most basic straight-up, straight-down retraction mechanism - no fancy linkages or complex gear-folding geometry. The Herk’s vertical tail is enormous and mounted up high - enormous to provide slow-speed stability and control, high to leave an unobstructed area under it for trucks and cargo just aft of the loading ramp.
#Does a c 130 cockpit layout windows
The lowest windows are for use during airdrops, so the pilots can keep the drop zone in sight even after it has passed under the nose. It is configured to allow pilots to see everything around them in an unfamiliar, unprepared landing zone that might even require using prop reverse to back up, and with no marshallers waving wands for guidance. The C-130’s most distinctive feature is a schnoz as multifaceted as a disco ball, with 23 individual windowpanes, some of them below and others behind the flight crew. The cargo area is boxcar-huge, rectangular and unobstructed (no spar carry-throughs or sidewall bulges) and it sits belly-to-the-ground at truck-bed height, so that the C-130 has true ro-ro capability: roll-on/roll-off loading.
#Does a c 130 cockpit layout plus
Plus the ability to carry 15 tons of cargo into dirt strips, with reliability and power that no piston engine could provide, and a range of 2,000-plus miles.Įverything about the aircraft that Lockheed came up with in answer to this request for proposal was designed to address those needs.
When the Air Force put numbers to the need, they came up with a requirement for what at the time seemed like a superplane: a 35,000- foot high-altitude cruise capability at 280 knots at one end of the spectrum, and a controllable 125 knots down low and slow for airdrops and STOL capability at the other. “We need a medium transport,” he said,“that can land on unimproved ground, be extremely rugged, be primarily for freight transport with troop-carrying capability, and carry about 30,000 pounds for 1,500 miles.” He had defined the C-130, which would do this and more. (Tactical means an airplane that can go to the forward battle area strategic transports, like today’s Lockheed C-5 and Boeing C-17, handle the intercontinental missions but are too valuable to risk in hot-fire zones.) A colonel on the committee, whose name seems to be lost to history, finally framed the need in understandable terms. American airlifters didn’t have the necessary range, and they didn’t have the payload to carry heavy support equipment and armor.Ī Pentagon committee was formed to fix this for the future, to give the Air Force a tactical transport with great payload and good range. It took the Army six weeks to move two divisions from the U.S. Even the four-engine C-124 could only gain 50 feet per minute on a warm day if it lost an engine on takeoff while loaded. Even the biggest recips didn’t have the power to carry truly significant tonnage, and since many transports were twins, they had a fatal flaw: If you lost an engine, particularly on takeoff, staying in the air when loaded was a desperate game.
The Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar was state of the art for tactical chores - airborne troopers called it the Dollar Nineteen and hoped to never have to ride in one - and the obese, double-deck Douglas C-124 Globemaster II was the strategic-airlift superplane. As America went to war in Korea with Johnson’s F-80s and then swept-wing North American F-86s, supplies and troops were still being hauled in Ernie Gann–era Douglas C-47s, C-54s and some leftover Curtiss C-46s. While the 1950s Air Force sired badass jet fighters and mega-engine strategic bombers, the neglected orphan of its fleet was the transport, the cargo plane, what later came to be called the airlifter. We’ll probably only sell about 100 of them.” As I write this, more than 2,400 C-130s of seven basic models and a total of 70 individual variants have been sold throughout the world. “The Hercules is a good design,” Johnson eventually admitted, “but there is no market for it. The soccer mom truck was a vehicle whose time had come. Get a grip!īut Kelly Johnson disdaining the C-130 was like Enzo Ferrari poking fun at the Chrysler Minivan. The Lockheed of Connies, Shooting Stars and missile-with-a-man-in-it Starfighters.
This was Lockheed, forgodsakes, not the Grumman Iron Works or Republic ThunderThud. The airplane was totally out of character for a company that prized aesthetics. Yes, the C-130 was a boxcar with wings on fat Tonka-toy wheels, and yes, it had a straight wing that looked like an ironing board bolted atop its fuselage. Yes, the C-130 in prototype form had a nose like a goat. The Herk prayed at the altar of simplicity, reliability, ruggedness and economy. Johnson worshipped speed, sophistication and beauty.
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