Yes, I think that is it! (Holy Mackerel, a war story with photographic proof!)
I was there between early '67 and early '69, first working on RU-8Ds as a non-flying crewchief at Tan Son Nhut. I can't remember if it was "my" airplane, but I remember going out to the runway after the landing, when I was surprised by how bad that foam smelled. (I guess it's made of some sort of animal protein, and when the hot sun hit it that foam smelled like a ton of hamburger gone bad.)
I think the main gear on that machine retracts forward, using an electric motor driving chains, and that coming back down on the retracting gear broke a chain. You probably know the way that the Army works, when the official story was simply "gear failure," but everyone saw the machine orbiting for four hours burning off fuel before the landing. This story about the gear switch only came out later as the real explanation.
For us it was an insanely boring war for the most part. (Tet was interesting, of course.) It's easy to imagine a flight crew doing something as silly as that out of sheer boredom.
I saw another RU-8D with about 5º extra dihedral and the top wing skins all wrinkled, after the crew must have been screwing around doing some high-G pull-out, playing "Top Gun." Those planes did not have real strong wings, so that they were lucky not to pull the wings off, doing that.
From my point of view it did not matter much: we only did first echelon maintenance so that this complete mess was loaded onto a boat and sent back to the States for major repairs: not our problem!
At the time I knew very little about flying. Looking back it's clear that there were a lot of practices that were not very clever, and some that were downright dangerous. The most annoying thing was that we were running these machines on 115/145 Avgas, when they were designed for 100/130, I think, That meant that there was a hell of a lot of extra lead being deposited. The crews would taxi back after landing, when Tan Son Nhut was pretty big so that meant a long taxi, still on a full rich mixture at low revs. You could hear them coming with the engines going chug-chug-chug. Then they would stop just short of the ramp to do a full-power run-up and a mag check, and then taxi in to park, reporting fouled spark plugs before a quick turn-around. Of course the long taxi on full rich had let the lead accumulate, and then the sudden application of full power had let it land on the plugs, what we know as "splash-fouling," when you could see all the plugs with literal splashes of material.
That meant popping the cowlings and replacing 24 or 32 smoking-hot spark plugs, which was no fun at all. With hindsight, if they had just leaned the damned thing out and kept the revs up a bit during taxi, and not whacked it from low idle to full chat on that run-up then they would probably have avoided all that splash-fouling of the plugs.
Later I was working on Beavers, which were pretty oily beasts. We used those old fire extinguishers called "douche cans" loaded with Varsol to clean off the mess post-flight.
Some genius of a Spec-4 noticed that Varsol worked better on a warm engine than a cold one, and best on a hot engine. So there he was one day, happily going douche-douche-douche with white vapor coming off the R-985 when suddenly the darn thing burst into flames! Luckily we caught it with CO2 extinguishers before things went right out of control, but after that we all went back to waiting for the engine to cool off before douching it down.
Last edited by chuks; 18th November 2016 at 10:13.