That's a lot of missions!
Give him my thanks and a welcome home.
During the war, they were modified to carry 107 of those 500 pound bombs, as pictured above.
They are still flying, and some of today's pilots are the grandsons of earlier pilots.
Some designs just work. The C-130 is another one.
Paul, my FIL, was a loadmaster in 130’s who worked to help develop some of the extraction methods for cargo in 130s.
Wife and I frequently discuss that we would never give up the memories from living as a military kid. The experiences were great. I kind of feel bad for our daughter for living in one place until she went to college.
I'd be good with Jungle Pam.
I seen her in person a couple of times [you know when I was like 2 or 3 LLlol]
seriously, I did get to see her in person and spoke to her a few times towards the end of her gig when I was a teenager.
my old man and me worked out to the Race track in Salt Lake for a number of years doing various things like flagging, on track clean up crew, running the burn out boxes for the drags etc.
he was the official photographer for a long time so I pretty much had the run of the place as a kid, and free labor wasn't going to go to waste back then.
I've loaded more bombs than probably most . 500s are cute .
But truck loads don't count unless you're feeding by the truck load .
Once I worked a job on 750s , at the end of it all I personally sent 9600 of them to Berlin .
You see the Kosovo gig washed out with our shipment in port so rather than send it back a still having to pay for the boat it was rerouted . Berlin is or was in 1998 still disposing of UXO from 1944-5 at a rate of 300 detonations per year . So that roughly 4 million lbs of materiels became 2 mil lbs of donor and 2 mil lbs of iron scrap . Don't know what happened with the fins , I shipped 14 crates per at 437 cans ........ I wanna say 12 fins per crate .......but it was a long , long time ago .
Can't even guess at how many Mk 82&84s I sent .
Did you know General Mills the Cheerio's guys made torpedoes ?
Man CW couldn't find a picture of a nice six gun or pistol? Nice rifle, iron mold, pile of red white & blue patriotic bullets, cool old car, classy babe like Fiver? Old four wheeler, box of tools, something? LOL!!