Warbird Information Exchange

USAF PHOTO
DESCRIPTION; A U.S. Air Force Lockheed EC-121R Constellation of the 553rd Reconnaissance Wing over Southeast-Asia on 15 January 1969.
=============================

_________________
Fly Fast Make Noise!

Red Crown??

_________________
Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Batcat.

translation? :p

_________________
Magister Aviation
It's all in my book

Red Crown was the airborne air traffic controller.

Batcat: Here is a link http://personalpages.tdstelme.net/~westin/batcat0.htm

did this aircraft once of the top dome? It looks like that area has been painted over?

_________________
Shop the Airplane Bunker At
www.warbirdbunker.com

The Batcat EC-121Rs were all Navy-contract WV-2s or 3s, so they originally had the upper and lower domes. It is interesting that you can still see where they touched up the paint on this one, leading one to think they removed the upper antenna dome after it was camouflaged.

S

Great pic! It's cool to see a Connie in Vietnam camo paint and all the big antennas removed.

It's hard to believe that the Air Force tried to downsize and replace the big ol' Connie and it's 16 (or so) crewmembers with an itty bitty modified Beech A36 Bonanza, the QU-22B Baby Bat. Beech only built 27 of them and there are a few left in civilian hands with maybe 2-3 flyable that I know of. One of 'em is based at my home field and I was lucky enough to get to fly it a year or so ago on a short test hop after being parked for 12 years. Got to fly my first actual Warbird, cool! It's kind of odd to think of a Bonanza being a Warbird, but this thing appears to be the real deal; thumbing thru the logs shows it was attached to the 553rd Recon Wing, based at Nakhom Phanom... the records include mission log pages as well as the usual MX write-ups, plus the induction paperwork when it was stored at AMARC. It's a pretty cool machine...

Here are a few pics. BTW, it's for sale. Anyone interested?

John B
Houston, TX