In early march, a crew from Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 352 at MCAS Miramar, California, picked up a new KC-130J-the fourth new aircraft for the squadron-from the Lockheed martin facility in Marietta, Georgia. The unit's ongoing conversion meant the time had come to retire one of its older aircraft.
Like nearly every other tanker in the US Marine Corps fleet, Bureau Number 149798 had seen its share of action in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Unlike other aircraft that have served out their careers, the final destination for this specific tanker was not to be the aviation boneyard in the Arizona desert. This aircraft was a little different. When the VMGR-352 crew shut down this KC-130F's engines for the last time on 1 March, the aircraft was parked at Forrest Sherman Field, NAS Pensacola, Florida, where it was to be enshrined in the National Museum of Naval Aviation.
“The fact that aircraft was finally retired in 2005 is proof that I didn't bang it up too badly,” jokes Jim Flatley. The retired rear admiral and Naval aviator is referring to some 1963 landings he made in this KC-130-aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal (CVA-59).
This Idea Won't Go Anywhere
“Engineers were taking measurements on a Hercules and saying the plane was going to land on an aircraft carrier,” recalled Ed Brennan in a 1998 interview. “I didn't believe them. Later my commanding officer came around and said the same thing. I still didn't believe it, but I raised my hand to volunteer for the project anyway. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
Brennan was an Aviation Machinist's Mate First Class (ADR-1), attached to Transport Squadron One (VR-1) at the Naval Air Test Center at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, when his commanding officer made that unbelievable announcement-the Test Center was indeed developing a program to land a Hercules on an aircraft carrier. Brennan and ADR-1 Al Sieve were the two flight engineers assigned to the project.
The idea of taking a big aircraft with a 132-foot wingspan and landing it on what is frequently described as a postage stamp did seem far-fetched. However, the carrier suitability testing was based on a legitimate operational requirement. The Navy needed to resupply a carrier operating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Grumman C-1 Trader, then the Navy's carrier onboard delivery, or COD, transport, did not have the range and could not carry an oversized payload like a General Electric J79 jet engine, which powered both the North American A-5/RA-5 Vigilante attack/reconnaissance aircraft and the McDonnell Douglas F-4 fighter-bomber populating flight decks at the time. The C-130 had both range and cargo-carrying ability. So, the idea of a Super COD was born.
Once the project went forward, the Test Center staff had to decide whether to have pilots with multiengine experience learn to land on a carrier or have test pilots with carrier-landing experience learn to fly multiengine aircraft. Carrier experience won out.
“Either I was in the right part of the line or the other pilots said, 'Give this one to Flatley. It isn't going to go anywhere,'” said then-lieutenant Flatley, the newly minted test pilot chosen to lead the project. “In flight test, you have to earn your spurs. I had just reported to Pax River and this was my first project as a test pilot. It was a rather unique assignment.”
Lt. Cmdr. W. W. “Smokey” Stovall, the lead test pilot on another project at the time, volunteered to be copilot on the C-130 trials.
The trials aircraft, in service at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, at the time, was chosen at random. The Hercules was flown back to the Marietta plant, known then as the Lockheed-Georgia Company.
The aircraft needed only minor modifications. The wing refueling pods were removed. A precision airspeed indicator was installed in the cockpit. The antiskid system was replaced with the type used on commercial 727s. The aircraft was also fitted with a smaller nose landing gear orifice, which allowed for slower metering of the hydraulic fluid and made for smoother touchdowns.
“The most critical guy on the crew was the flight engineer because he knew far more about the airplane,” Flatley notes. “That sounds a little cavalier for a test pilot. But at that point we were not required to learn the aircraft, just to learn to fly it.”
Practice, Practice
Lockheed test pilot Ted Limmer monitored Flatley and Stovall as they made their first flight from Marietta to check out the modifications. Limmer then gave the Navy pilots their check ride on the way back to Pax River. “The aircraft is so beautiful to fly and so simple to operate, and it handles so well,” Flatley recalls.
Flatley and Stovall paid a lot of attention to the ground handling characteristics of the C-130 and then focused on the slow-speed maneuvering characteristics of the aircraft in its landing configuration. The crew began practicing landings at Pax River almost immediately. Engineers from the Carrier Suitability Branch set up multiple cameras and came out to observe the first practices and take measurements. “For most of the next fifty-five flight hours, we flew around the field practicing short field landings and takeoffs,” Flatley says.
High on the list of things to be accomplished during the practice landings was to determine the optimum carrier approach speed for the C-130. While the normal approach speed for a Hercules is 115 to 120 knots, carrier approaches at five to six knots above stall speed were to be flown for the planned landing gross weight.
A second landing parameter that concerned the pilots was the aircraft's sink rate at touchdown. Flatley and Stovall had experience flying carrier-based fighters that have sink rates of about fifteen to twenty feet per second, so they were apprehensive about the C-130's design limit of eleven feet per second. Even though the test data collected during the field trials indicated that sink rate was not going to be a problem, the pilots would not be convinced until they actually made the test flights to the carrier.
One of the major challenges in the final stage of a carrier approach is mastering the so-called rooster tail of turbulent air, the carrier equivalent of the ground effect encountered when an aircraft crosses the approach end of a runway. “If the rooster tail is not handled well, more often than not, your aircraft feels like it is being sucked into a hole right at the deck rounddown,” adds Flatley. “So being able to fly the desired glidescope, right to touchdown, is critical.”
The crew found they could easily fly the required 3.5- to 4.0-degree glidescope on a standard approach. “It became evident very quickly that landing a C-130 on a carrier was not going to be a problem. Even the engineers stopped coming out to watch us practice,” Flatley recalls.
A side trip to the Naval Air Rework Facility in Norfolk, Virginia, was made so engineers there could figure out how to get the Hercules off the ship if, for some reason, it got stranded there during the trials. “If we had broken down at sea, the deck hands would have lifted the plane up with the deck crane and tossed it overboard,” Brennan mused. “Hopefully, they would have let us get out first.”
To The Boat
On 30 October, the USS Forrestal was steaming off the Florida coast near Jacksonville. One wag at Pax River had painted, “Look Ma, No Hook,” under the cockpit windows of the KC-130. An arresting hook, a normal piece of equipment for a carrier landing, wouldn't have helped because the Forrestal's flight deck had been cleared of the arresting wires to save wear and tear on the tires of the Hercules. The air wing's aircraft were removed as well and either flown ashore or parked on the hangar deck.
“The day was blustery and squally with a forty-knot wind gusting to sixty knots and huge ocean swells. The deck was heaving twenty feet up and down,” Flatley recalls. “In such conditions, an experienced carrier pilot comes in handy. Every two and one-half minutes or so, no matter what the sea state, the ship will steady out. Because of the excessive wind and sea state, we did forty-two approaches to the ship just to get nineteen touch-and-go landings.” Those touch-and-goes revealed no sink rates in excess of five feet per second, a fact that amazed even the Lockheed engineers.
The Hercules crew first made touch-and-goes on the ship's 682-foot-long angled deck and then went down the 1,017-foot-long axial deck, where, on the next trip, the actual landings would be made. The first flight lasted five and one-half hours, two of which were spent in the Forrestal's landing pattern.
“We had a skull session the next day with the flight test engineers back at Pax River, and all the data looked good,” Flatley notes. “It was then just a matter of rescheduling the ship.”
On 8 November, Flatley, Stovall, Brennan, Sieve, and Limmer approached the Forrestal under way off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A broad, dotted white line painted down the middle of the axial deck greeted them on their first approach. The Forrestal's skipper put the carrier into the wind and added ten knots, which gave the flight crew a forty- to fifty-knot headwind over the bow.
After making the three warm-up touch-and-go landings, Flatley was cleared for the first full-stop landing. The first approach was made at seventy-nine knots indicated airspeed.
The Forrestal's landing signal officer gave Flatley the traditional “cut” signal as the aircraft crossed the rounddown at ten to fifteen feet in the air. Flatley lifted the throttles over the gate and put the propellers into reverse pitch as he settled down on the deck. At the same time, he and Stovall stood on the aircraft's brakes so that, when the aircraft touched down, the KC-130 was in full reverse with full braking applied. It stopped in 275 feet, actually short of where the number four arresting cable would have been lying.
“Normally on a carrier, sailors and tractors move aircraft,” Flatley says. “We simply backed up with reverse thrust to set up for takeoff. You should have seen the looks on the faces of the deckhands.”
Heavyweight Landings
In addition to testing the basic feasibility of landing a Hercules on an aircraft carrier, the project was also designed to make landings at increasingly heavier weights to determine how large a payload a C-130 might safely bring aboard. Because the aircraft was a tanker, its gross weight could be increased by simply adding fuel.
After taking on more JP-4 to go to the next higher gross weight, the crew revved up the aircraft's engines, set the flaps at seventy-five percent, and took off. Fifteen feet separated the KC-130's wingtip from the island.
The only restriction placed on the crew during takeoff was to not rotate the aircraft until the wingtip passed the forward end of the ship's island. “Otherwise we could have been looking down on the captain on his bridge when we took off,” Flatley adds.
Three more full-stop landings were made the first day, followed by ten landings on 21 November and seven more the next day. Stovall made three of the landings on the last day. A total of twenty-nine touch-and-goes were made on the four trips to the carrier.
The KC-130 weighed 85,000 pounds on the first landing. Thereafter, landings were made in progression up to a gross weight of 121,000 pounds. At maximum weight, which set the record for the largest and heaviest aircraft landing on a US Navy aircraft carrier, Flatley and Stovall used only 745 feet for takeoff and 460 feet for landing. One landing at a weight of 109,000 pounds required 495 feet to stop, and that was in a heavy squall. On the last takeoffs, the crew didn't even back up-they simply took off from the point on the deck where the aircraft stopped.
The crew completed the carrier qualification tests around noon on 22 November. “We got back to Pax River and started collecting the statistical data and writing the final report. We wrote the recommended procedures so anyone else wanting to land on a carrier had the information available. We went about our business and were told not to talk about it.” The project remained classified officially for a year, although word got out quickly to the flying community.
The feasibility of landing a C-130 with a useful payload on a carrier was clearly demonstrated. But in the end, such landings were not practical. “A carrier with no tactical aircraft on deck makes a skipper antsy,” Brennan noted. “The captain of the Forrestal gave us two hours-to the minute-each trip, and then we had to go home.” The Grumman C-2 Greyhound, a more practical COD aircraft, entered fleet service in 1966.
The Rest Of The Story
Stovall, later awarded the Air Medal for his work on the project, went on to command a carrier fighter unit during Vietnam and attained the rank of captain. He died of leukemia in 1973.
Brennan was also awarded the Air Medal. He became a flight engineer on P-3 Orions, accumulating nearly 7,000 hours flight time. He retired in 1976 as a chief petty officer after twenty-two years in the Navy. Brennan was on a plane to Iran four hours after his retirement ceremony to work as a Lockheed field service representative on the P-3F program. He later went back to working with C-130s, this time with Coast Guard HC-130Hs, as a Lockheed field service representative at CGAS Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He retired in 1998 and passed away a short time later.
Sieve shipped out immediately after the program concluded to fly Lockheed WV-1s-a.k.a. Willie Victors-Warning Star airborne early warning aircraft in Argentina, Newfoundland. Flatley lobbied for years to recognize Sieve's contribution to the carrier landing, and Secretary of the Navy Gordon England approved the Air Medal for Sieve last summer. The medal was presented by the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Mike Mullins, in Sieve's hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. A crew from VMGR-352 flew 9798 to the ceremony.
Flatley was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, a difficult award to earn anytime, but especially in peacetime. He spent the rest of his Navy career in fighters. Even though he didn't have a tail hook on the KC-130F, he counts his eighteen landings in a Hercules among his 1,608 traps, which puts him in the top ten of the Navy's all-time carrier landing list. He retired as a rear admiral in 1987. He served as the chief executive officer of the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, the state's most popular tourist attraction, for seven years before retiring again. Between his twenty-one grandkids and his work raising money for a new Catholic hospital in Charleston, he stays active. “I stay busier than I can stand to be,” he notes.
After a thirty-eight-year career, the USS Forrestal was decommissioned 11 September 1993 and stricken from the Navy Register the same day. Currently, she is on donation hold as a museum and memorial at Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island.
KC-130F BuNo 149798 went on to a full career, receiving a service life extension upgrade and a new center wing box in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It spent most of its career with VMGR-352, first at MCAS El Toro, California, and later at Miramar after El Toro was closed and the Raiders, as the squadron calls itself, moved. In November 2001, 9798 was the first aircraft to land at Expeditionary Airfield Rhino during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It was used on a low-altitude, night helicopter refueling mission and to insert elements of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit's battalion landing team near the Pakistani border. A little over a year old during the carrier qualifications, 9798 was retired to the National Museum of Naval Aviation forty-two years later and right at 26,220 flight hours.
Basically relegated to the status of a footnote to aviation history, the Hercules-on-a-carrier idea recently came back to the forefront. The joint Army-Navy-Marine Corps concept of sea basing-positioning supplies and equipment near potential areas of operation around the world-is gaining interest. While much of the sea basing concept is still to be defined, one idea involves a movable facility the size of a small island with a 3,000-foot flight deck. Lockheed Martin has received a government contract to study the concept of C-130J operations from this floating runway.
“I am always running into people who say they were there when we landed, though I don't recall seeing that many people on the deck,” Flatley observes. “The KC-130 carrier trials have always captured people's attention. Some folks still don't believe we did it.”
Jeff Rhodes is the associate editor of Code One.
