And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Friday, December 19, 2025
Main landing gear deployment of a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy.
I never got to fly on a C-130 while in Vietnam but I did hitch a ride on a C-123. Those airplanes gained their notoriety in Central America and the CIA flying out of Mena, Arkansas.
I flew back from Japan on one once, before the Vietnam crash got the Air Force to stop using them for military space available travel. You went up a sort of circular staircase to the top deck and all the seats faced the rear. It was a great way to fly, nothing like a C-130 for sure.
Yup, jack-and-retract check. There’s a lot more monkey-motion going that’s hidden by the outer door. The bogies with the six tires sits nearly level in the wheel well. The strut has a pivot mechanism at the bottom that allows the gear to “flatten” out as it lifts into the wheel well. Not to mention the caster system that helps reduce the overall turning radius, and the kneeling system that lowers the airplane closer to the ground for loading and unloading, and the braking system that stops the wheels from spinning after takeoff. Without that braking, gyroscopic forces would prevent the gear rotation on the vertical axis. Very complicated, amazing that it works at all… (C-5 Flight Engineer in a former life) Wandering Neurons
Flew on one deploying to an exercise once. Also got a full tour of one after dropping off our WG/CC at Dover. Got to climb up inside the tail and look out the top hatch. Could see all the way across the bay to Atlantic City from up there. Amusing anecdote: as we were finishing up the tour the guy from Transient Alert that was showing us around was noting each aircraft model on the ramp. "That's a C-5A, that's a C-5B......". I stood there looking back and forth between the two, "okay, I'll bite, I don't see the difference". The C-5A lower nose antenna is angled to be "low drag", for the C-5B they said "what were we thinking, there's nothing low drag about this airplane" and put the standard rectangular antenna on it.
An old joke from my days in the AF....
ReplyDeleteYou land somewhere and on the ramp you see 2 C-5s, one of them up on jacks, and the other just sitting there. What does this mean?
It means that both C-5s are broke, but they only have one set of Jack's.
azlibertarian
I never got to fly on a C-130 while in Vietnam but I did hitch a ride on a C-123. Those airplanes gained their notoriety in Central America and the CIA flying out of Mena, Arkansas.
ReplyDeleteI flew back from Japan on one once, before the Vietnam crash got the Air Force to stop using them for military space available travel. You went up a sort of circular staircase to the top deck and all the seats faced the rear. It was a great way to fly, nothing like a C-130 for sure.
ReplyDeleteYup, jack-and-retract check. There’s a lot more monkey-motion going that’s hidden by the outer door. The bogies with the six tires sits nearly level in the wheel well. The strut has a pivot mechanism at the bottom that allows the gear to “flatten” out as it lifts into the wheel well.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention the caster system that helps reduce the overall turning radius, and the kneeling system that lowers the airplane closer to the ground for loading and unloading, and the braking system that stops the wheels from spinning after takeoff. Without that braking, gyroscopic forces would prevent the gear rotation on the vertical axis.
Very complicated, amazing that it works at all…
(C-5 Flight Engineer in a former life)
Wandering Neurons
Caught a hop from Madrid to Dover on a C-5 in 1978.
ReplyDeleteFlew on one deploying to an exercise once. Also got a full tour of one after dropping off our WG/CC at Dover. Got to climb up inside the tail and look out the top hatch. Could see all the way across the bay to Atlantic City from up there.
ReplyDeleteAmusing anecdote: as we were finishing up the tour the guy from Transient Alert that was showing us around was noting each aircraft model on the ramp. "That's a C-5A, that's a C-5B......". I stood there looking back and forth between the two, "okay, I'll bite, I don't see the difference". The C-5A lower nose antenna is angled to be "low drag", for the C-5B they said "what were we thinking, there's nothing low drag about this airplane" and put the standard rectangular antenna on it.