Warbird Information Exchange

As with many wars that are reactionary in nature, you rarely go in with what you need. We didn't go in with what we needed at the start of Korea. We didn't go in with what we needed at the start WWII. We didn't go in with what we needed at the start of Grenada or Panama. The Afghani's didn't go in with what they needed in the Russia-Afghani War. The Brit's didn't go in with what they needed in the Falklands.

The key isn't whether or not you've got the tools to do the job but whether you can take the tools you have and get them to do the jobs you need. The F-4 is a case-in-point of taking an aircraft not designed to do a job and getting it to do the job. It was a capable fighter-bomber and fighter when used properly. Yep, it can't turn with a MiG, but it sure as hell can beat one in the vertical and did regularly. Gee, that sounds a LOT like the battles of WWII where the Wildcat and Warhawk couldn't turn with the Zero but could beat it in the vertical and DID. The other end of the spectrum was the F-102 and F-106. Pure interceptors which could never work in a visual environment and didn't. But they tried anyway. Same with the F-111. The plane was designed as a low-level interdictor and bomber. It wasn't a carrier plane and thank GOD that the Navy put their foot down on that one, but it did turn out to be a pretty good conventional bomber, reconnaisance, and electronic warfare aircraft in addition to its nuclear role.

The F-4 however was designed and in service BEFORE McNamara, not during. The only thing that McNamara did was make the Air Force adopt the aircraft instead of spending money building more aircraft that did the exact same thing the Navy's plane already did. Also, you should consider the fact that while McNamara told the Air Force to buy the plane, he didn't tell them they had to buy so many. In fact, the USAF was the largest user of the plane and introduced most of the major modifications to it like the internal gun.

The point is - McNamara did plenty of things wrong during his time. But don't try putting off successes as failures. You're right, the M-60 and the F-4 had some teething problems - surprise - most new systems, especially cutting edge ones, do. The gauge of success or failure is whether they fix it or abandon it, not whether or not they ran away as a success. In the case of the M-60 and the F-4, they didn't abandon them. In the case of the F-111B, and most of the Century Series of fighters, they did.

Marineair,
The C130A did have better performance (takeoff) than the H due to it's lighter weight and three-bladed props, and better manueverability (roll rate) because of higher aileron boost (not rudder). I've been to 32,000 feet in a C130 but ATC doesn't like you there because your too slow for the jet traffic, also you need to be empty to get there. Fully loaded at 165,000 GW we could maybe get to 18,000 feet. It took a long time to burn enough fuel to make it to 25,000 feet. I once figured a C130H at 96,000 GW could takeoff in 1,200 feet (approximate) and land in about 900 feet (approximate). The C130A engine was rated for about 3,700 SHP vs 4,500 SHP for the C130H. Above about 20,000 feet we would burn about 4,800 pounds of fuel per hour. We figured 5,000 lbs. per hour for flight planning purposes.

I thought the point was that once again, the bean counters are trying to make the services accept and adapt their mission objectives to a machine they do not want or probably need. The Navy wants to land big cargo carriers on ships, so everybody else has to accept an aircraft with that capability, even though it won't do as well or as cheaply or as safely as the aircraft they already have. Why the Air Force needs to have a small cargo carrier with a VTOL capability is beyond me. The limitations of the machine far outweigh the benfits to their mission.

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1944 L-4H 44-79731 9th Army Artillery Air OP

Actually Paul, no one is forcing this plane on the Air Force. The services said they'd work together if they could have an aircraft that met all of their requirements. This was why it wasn't joint previously.

As for it being useless for the Air Force, I think you've not read the initial posts fully. The Air Force is not wanting this to be an airport-to-airport delivery system. They want something that can get into the places a C-17 and C-130 can't - the battlefield itself. The Air Force has been transforming the idea of what tactical transport is with the C-17 and is looking to continue it with this new transport. The idea is to put the weapons on the front line or just behind them, not where you have to have a fleet of logistics vehicles to deliver the important stuff from several hundred miles back as they are doing now or having to use helicopters to long-line the equipment. The idea here is that you use the C-5s or C-17s to fly the stuff into theater and then the new Joint Transport put the equipment into whatever base, line, or camp needs the equipment directly. Right now, the C-5s and C-17s deliver them to the theater, the C-130s deliver them to some airport within 200 miles of the base or camp and then the equipment is either trucked or heli-lifted to the final point. That exposes the equipment to attack and causes you to use a lot of assets to move the equipment. They can eliminate that entire last leg with this new aircraft, I think that's a good idea.

BTW, this isn't the first plane required to fit both naval and land use. Let's see -

F-4
V-22
F-35
A-7
Any Marine Corps aircraft of the last 60 years
etc.

So, why must it be a problem to design a version capable of flying onto naval ships? It isn't. It's just another design consideration to be allowed for.

OK, nobody is forcing it on them, but they wanted the next generation of transport, not a complete change of mission. They had to swallow their objections and play ball.

Now. In order to make the aircraft reasonably efficient, you have to have some capacity. That means not just weight, but size. In order to lift around 200,000 pounds of load, you're going to need a fuselage along the lines of a 130 to a 17 in size. How are they going to get something that size on a ship unless they plan to build new ships to land this thing. You can't practically do it on a fleet carrier because what happens if you break the bird or the weather closes down or the seas get too rough to launch? You got this humungous hunk of metal fouling your deck and you can't do squat with your carrier until you get that monster out of the way. What are they going to do, push it over the side?

And it's not just the size of the fuselage. It's the rotor diameter and the engines to lift something that heavy. If they have 2 sets of engines that are interconnected so that if one goes sour, you can still land the thing reasonably well. OK, so what happens if you lose another one? With four engines or two sets of two, you have twice as many chances of losing the whole bird as the Osprey. It's like the N model Huey. It can't fly on one engine. If you lose one the other will only take you as far as the crash site.

All of these engineering problems are coming into play just so we can move cargo slightly faster that last 200 miles than we can today. You still have to download the stuff at your forward base, then either unpalletize it or keep it on the 463-L pallet system. Now you have to transfer it to another aircraft and move it forward? Then unload it again? We have to do that now, so what's it saving us?

Sounds to me like they need to get the Boeing Vertol line moving again and make us some more Shnooks. They're a heck of a lot less expensive than trying to make some sort of super-Osprey.

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1944 L-4H 44-79731 9th Army Artillery Air OP

That's not what the article says. The USAF is wanting the change as much as the Army is. If you read the article, the guy in charge - a AIRLIFT guy, is stating that they've been trying to change the way they do things for years but it's taking time. Notice that not once since the C-17's entered service has it been used in the off-airport role it was designed for. It's done the same old airline missions that AMC/MAC/MATS has always done. The whole point of the CRAF is to free up AMC assets to deliver direct to the front line, yet those in charge (not the users, not the customers) continue to tie up assets doing things that other platforms can achieve just as well and usually at less cost.

You are forgetting that the primary customer of airlift is the Army, not the Air Force. Thus, in the real world, the Army, not the Air Force, defines what is needed as far as airlift assets and it is the responsibility for the Air Force to acquire the equipment to fulfill the customer's need.



I see nowhere the number "200,000 pounds" as part of the payload requirement. The C-130's nominal payload is 25,000 pounds and usually doesn't carry much more than 20,000 pounds. So what massive airlift asset are you trying to build when the user's specification doesn't even ask for something that big? They want to supplant/replace the C-130, not the C-17 or C-5. You are creating problems that don't exist Paul in an attempt to justify your dislike of the program. Still, let's solve your problem - you want to move 200,000 pounds to a carrier. Which is more efficient - 10 JCA's or 100 CH-47s? Simple - 10 JCA's. You don't have to do it all in one move. If you need to move 200,000 at once to a ship, then you do it via UNREP, not airlift.



Umm... I think you're still missing the whole point.

Here's the current chain -

1) C-5, C-17, or CRAF loads cargo at Dover and flies it to Kuwait.
2) Cargo is transloaded to C-130s and flown to a base in Iraq.
3) Cargo is unloaded from C-130s, trucked to a depot in a convoy (requiring a lot of protection).
4) Cargo is unpacked at the depot and most of it routed to a single FOB.

Here is the JCA chain -
1) C-5, C-17, or CRAF loads cargo at Dover and flies it to Kuwait.
2) Cargo is offloaded to depot at airport and sorted for distribution to each FOB.
3) Cargo is loaded to JCAs and flown direct to FOBs.

The point - you cut out the depots near the front line and the convoys needed to move cargo from the small airports to the depots on the outskirts of town.