Historic Overweight C130 Incident
 

Some years ago, an RAF c130 took flight with the crew unaware of the true weight of the aircraft. Not sure of the details, but aircraft landed ok. Crew room chatter said it was the heaviest ever c130 flight and even Lockheed couldnt understand how it still flew.
Can anybody point me towards the report, or provide any information regarding the incidient?

I do recall a C130K getting airborne out of Aki during GW1 when the movers had mixed up lbs and kgs and the crew became 'slightly' suspicious due to the length of the take off roll and the fact that that they failed to make FL240 by a several thousand feet.

In 1969, I recall a C130 landing at Fairford after a flight from Gibraltar and the aircraft's captain ordering every piece of freight to be re-weighed.

The vast majority of the cargo consisted of the PE's of a 1* Army officer. Quite a lot of the wooden crates were marked with a weight of 273lbs - which was the limit for PE boxes at the time. These large wooden crates took five of us to lift, never mind carry, (the aircraft was in clean floor fit) and were conveyed to the cargo shed where they were put on the scales. The aircraft captain logged the individual weights which showed that the total weight of the load was far in excess of the manifested weight.

Our resident customs officer was also present and he ordered all the crates to be opened when the contents of the overweight crates were revealed as rocks and stones of various colours and shapes. The cases also contained articles which attracted the attention of the customs officer, who impounded them in his own lock-up.

Another member of this forum was on a Fairford squadron at the time and he may recall this incident.

I thought it was at Bahrain not AKT. The pallets had been transhipped from a TriStar to the Hercules. The T* had been converted to Kgs but the Hercs were still in lbs. The pallet weights were taken as being in kgs and converted to lbs but they had already been converted. So the load was double what it was manifested as. The Herc got off the ground....just, made a circuit and landed.

We all said it was an accident waiting to happen introducing the change over from lbs to kgs gradually, aircraft type by type rather than in a one hit.

That reminds me of the time I was bringing back a Puma from Gutersloh, to UK. I was tasked at short notice to additionally bring back some personal effects of a senior army officer. Two fully laden 4 tonne trucks appeared and I asked where the personal effects for us were. I was told by the driver that everything in both trucks was expected to go on! It looked like the entire contents of a married quarter including furniture and large tri wall boxes. Unfortunately we had a ferry tank inside plus some ground crew passengers. I took one look at the ridiculous load and refused the lot except for a few small boxes and a comfy swivel chair, which the crewman strapped down and happily sat in all the way back across the channel.

We also went through a time in Belize where a newly arrived army major convinced himself we were being over cautious about what we could carry for him on our regular flights from down south. He built a mini air terminal and insisted that every soldier and piece of equipment went on a set of scales. To his dismay and our benefit, it resulted in us carrying even less than before because the declared weights of much of the stuff we had been regularly flying was badly under-estimated.

IIRC from a looong time ago, at Habilayn, there was a case of a Wessex being loaded with (I think) Wombat rounds which weigh X lbs. The problem was that there were two to a pack...so. Mind you, the army has always considered a helicopter to be an airborne three-ton truck.

Reports of C-130s taking off with in excess of 240 pax during operation frequent wind. I know the cargo load in question likely exceeded the pax weight, but it's one more testament to the strength of the Herk.

I seen to recall that in the book "Herk, hero from the skies a Hercules is mentioned as getting off 10'000lbs overweight in Vietnam. Load was trucks which on further inspection, after the event, were found to be full of claymore mines.

The story of a a USAF crew carrying an ICBM from an airfield to re-work facility that wound up in the weeds due to a bit of confusion over the weight of the missile and crew coordination re Throttles is a good one.

Seems the manifest weight did not include the transport trailer.

Per cockpit drill the hands shift from Pilot to Co-Pilot to Flight Engineer went awry when the throttles crept back a tad as the Co-pilot took hold....and as the Captain decided the slow acceleration was due to that minor flaw....simultaneous to a rapidly approaching end of the Runway prompted the Co-pilot to reach for the Gear Lever so he could be quick with raising the gear.....as the Flight Engineer got hold of the Throttles while sensing there was not enough room left to get off the ground....said Captain yelled...."Takeoff Power!"...which the dutiful Flight Engineer did!

The terminology was changed to be "Maximum Power!".

I do remember the Fairford incident but had forgotten the details.
The GW1 incident came about because MOD insisted that a planned move from lbs to kgs for Hercules cargo went ahead. I phoned up the person responsible to get it delayed until after GW1 as the pressure on the movers etc was so great that there was bound to be an incident. His attitude was that this had been planned for years and it would go ahead. So we had our incident and at least one other 'near miss'.

The shut down checks at AKT were interrupted to allow the Captain to leave the flight deck to restrain the ALM from inflicting too much damage to the DAMO.

Morning boys.
Not an isolated incident but during Op Corporate several "overweight" take offs were authorised at 176k ramp weights. This huge zero fuel weight meant refuelling in Gib.
One notable event occurred with Lima Echo (no longer with us so no drinks penalty)as Eng.
The Herc became airborne due to the Gib runway suddenly ending and Albert proceeded towards Algeciras across the bay without gaining height and take off power still set. The Eng then noticing a needle flicker announced. "Abort abort" The pilots exchanged glances and sighed

Maybe the ALM was just embarrassed that he had skimped on his own checks....:rolleyes:

JJ,
Under the RAF system the ALM is (or was) obliged to accept the weights presented to him. The same can be said for the movers unless a means of checkweighing the load was available. Away from a main base this was seldom the case. The big danger was tac onloads at another NATO base where everyone used kgs but the UK and the USAF.
The Herc tanker regularly operated at weights well in excess of the normal TOW.
But this was planned as were several of the other Corporate excesses.
When the lbs/kg rule appeared in build up to GW1 I put a warning note in the section 'Do you know' book. This was mandatory for my troops to read and sign before they set off. There were no excuses for non compliance !

Would that not mean the Hercules would be lighter than manifested?

So T* has 100 kg load, that's approx 220lb. Herc takes pallet as being 220Kg, so converts to 484lb, when it's actually 260lb lighter?

This thread reminds me of the Herc test flight shown in an episode of the '80's "Test Pilot" series, made at ETPS Boscombe Down.

One of the trials was to establish the max load that could be airdropped from the (then new) Mk3 C130K.

The load was a large earthmover of some sort, mounted in an airdrop rig.

Several times the load was referred to as weighing 30 tonnes....somehow I doubt that Albert would have even got airborne if that was the case!

Even so, the cockpit clip showing how much the control column moved as the load travelled aft was interesting!

6 x GE's and their beer chits will put any C130 overweight until the first night stop

The change from lbs to kgs was rather short sighted. Everybody involved in the C130 or VC10 could real off all the figures in lbs without referring to any AP. gs meant re-visiting the books. We still have the issues of converting lbs to kgs or kgs to lbs as the C-17 now operates in lbs unlike the rest of the ATF fleet.

Slightly off topic.

I recall an incident in the book 'Chickenhawk' where an Army Huey disappeared into the jungles in Vietnam never to be found. Signal went round asking if anyone had anything on it.

Apparently there were so many Suppliers saying they all had loads of stuff on it some wag said something like 'No wonder it crashed it must have been carrying about 40 tons'

Back in the days before 241OCU was destroyed, we started doing 'C-to-K' courses for 10 Sqn's first AAR crews as their C1s were converted to C1Ks.

Which meant we had to convert back to the VC10C1, as well as flying the VC10K2, K3 and anticipating the delivery of the K4. There were minor differences between the C1 and C1K, but the checklists and SOPs were different for the -C and the -K. As if that wasn't bad enough, the simulators weren't fully representative of either variant.

At least the checklists and SOPs were subsequently harmonised though, as far as possible.

Then the decision was made to metricate all VC10C1 aircraft. So at one point we had to cope with some which were metric and others which were imperial; I'm not sure, but I don't think that the metrication programme was part of the C1K conversion? At least all the K2/3/4 were metric.

I'm still amazed that there wasn't a serious lb / kg cock-up. If a lb load turned up for a metric aircraft on an AT/AAR task, we had to do the conversion manually - on the flight deck with a 'chocks time' to make... Which was great if the load sheet arrived late. Fortunately everyone coped but eventually all VC10s ended up as either tanker transports or pure tankers - all with metric units. But we also had to cope with receivers using lb, or kg - or even litres, in the case of the Mirage F1. It didn't help when, for example, an F-4 would ask for '4K' meaning 4000 lb rather than 4000 kg - the quaintly British unit of the 'kilopound' being the normal unit used by our AD mates at the time!