Surely there is someone out there that has the venerable Lockheed C130 on their list of favourite aeroplanes to have flown.
I could have sworn I saw someone commenting on the Herc very early in this thread, but it's gone now, so let me repeat what the now missing post said. The real 'dream machine' was the C130-A. The Herc shared one thing with the MG line - they stopped making sports cars after the 'A'.
It was a lovely,
lovely aeroplane, made even more magic for me thanks to a fortunate accident of incredibly good timing on my part - I just happened to arrive on the squadron as a teenage boggie straight off pilots course not long after they changed policy and allowed first tour co-pilots a chance at a command slot on that first tour - after achieving 1000 hours total flying time (which equated to just under 800 hours on type) if you made the grade.
Captain of a C130 at 21 years of age, sometimes with a nav and a co-pilot even younger that that, (although the loadies and flight engineers were never so young)... where else but Ronnie RAAF could you get to do something like that? And, as someone has already pointed out, despite the youth and inexperience of many of its Herc captains, the RAAF holds a unique record - in over 50 years of Herc ops, they haven't lost one yet or ever had a major accident.
And it isn't as if those ops have been conducted on straightforward airways between established airports. The Hercs did (and still do) a little bit of everything, from long range (for a Herc) international services to marginal - and I mean
marginal - strips in the highlands of Papua New Guinea; ops into war zones -
(some unusual ones; one 37 Sqn E model took a hit from groundfire - a .303 bullet hole in its elevator, while doing night circuits at Laverton, Victoria) - with, for the A Models in my day, aerial delivery and paratrooping thrown in. I even got to land one on an unprepared paddock near Singleton when the 'wheels' on the squadron missed the fact that that was involved when they crewed the task and put a boggie captain on the (weekend) trip. Serious good fun!
I've been extraordiarily lucky in some of the aeroplanes I've flown since I left Hercs, but for me, the Herc is still the top of the tree for fun and utility.