Seen one Herc, seen 'em all...

[charliegolf]

... but the one that went right over the top of my car at about 250' in beautiful sunshine earlier (J48 M4) really cheered me up. It was clean too, not as in no flaps down- more as in, not dirty!

CG

[SASless]

Not quite!


C-130 YMC-130H Lockheed Hercules flight test accident crash - YouTube


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCtZa0qeajA

[Top Bunk Tester]

Just watched the Spectre vid, very impressive as always, but can someone identify, within the bounds of OPSEC, what the square tubular shrouds are at the rear of each jet pipe, never seen them before and can only think they may be some type of DAS for defeating MANPADS. I accept that I may not need to know :=

[Ogre]

On a similar tangent, I remember reading "Gunship, Spectre of Death" by Hal Zorn many years ago. It tells the tale of these aircraft in Vietnam, but in several points it makes reference to the rear spotter lying on the ramp which was open in flight. Looking at the video above, I take it that practice has been replaced with the plexiglass dome inserted into the ramp.

[c-bert]

tubular shrouds

At a guess I'd suggest they were to minimize the visibility of any exhaust glow from the ground, given the frequency of night ops.

[OafOrfUxAche]

Is that because we only have one left?

[jimgriff]

Great to see them at about 100' in the Mach loop last night- (21.33- Corris- Heading west down the valley) Sky went dark for a few moments and then the noise kicked in- Brilliant:ok:

[Top Bunk Tester]

c-bert

That would have been my logical guess, if that is the case though I wonder why we do not see a proliferation of these devices across multiple fleets that are operating in the same threat arena. :confused:

[Dan Gerous]

Ref the AC130, since they work at night and have a shedload of optics to aim and target the weapons, why do they need tracer? That must provide the enemy with a good idea where the aircraft is.

[500N]

The Flash from the guns would give the enemy a pretty good idea anyway.

[melmothtw]

Ref the AC130, since they work at night and have a shedload of optics to aim and target the weapons, why do they need tracer? That must provide the enemy with a good idea where the aircraft is.


The aircraft captain (left-hand pilot) has a side-mounted head-up display which he can use to manually target the guns. The tracer enables him to 'walk' the rounds onto the target.

Interestingly, although the pilot can manually take control of, and fire, any of the on-board weapons, he is unable to take control of all of the weapons at the same time, and can only fire them individually.

[JFZ90]

The shrouds are probably to mask the hot engine exhaust parts from view tangentially to the ground target.

These ac typically fly close to the target and fly around it anti-clockwise - they will be visible and present an obvious target for MANPADS. The shrouds will help make it more difficult for simple MANPAD systems to lock onto the typically hot engine exhaust parts - as the shrouds are in free air they will be cooled to ambient temps and will therefore present a low IR signature.

I guess they are fitted to these 130s and not others as they are at specific risk given their relatively low alt flight profile near targets likely to have some defensive capability.

Are these still in service? Do they have DIRCMs?