Originally Posted by
SASless
Any one care to tell us why the aircraft is painted up in Camo....and has that nice pretty shiny white paint over the cockpit area? I know it makes for a lot less heat transfer and all but it does seem a bit daft to spend the effort putting the bird into sandy camo and leave that huge white patch for contrast.
Indeed, it does make a mockery of the whole thing, also with red/white/blue roundels. They even decided to omit the starboard wing roundel as an aid to 'disguise', so any attacking aircraft seeing these aircraft on the ground would not see two roundels and think it was an aircraft! This scheme, complete with white cockpit patch, was also applied to the RAF's Hercules, Andovers, some Argosies and Twin Pioneers. By the mid-70s, they realised that the white patch was pointless on the Hercules, which had this deleted. At the same time they repainted the camouflage matt and took the white out of the RAF roundels.