This Week In AFLCMC History – August 19 - 25, 2024

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  • By Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office
19 Aug 1974 (Mobility & Training Aircraft Directorate)
 Today, 50 years ago, a C-141 Starlifter arrived in Dhaka (Dacca), the capital of Bangladesh, carrying a load of relief supplies from the United States—including 5,000 blankets and 200 tents. Heavy rains over the summer of 1974 flooded Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra and Ganges River valleys, inundating over half of the country and resulting in the displacement of more than 5 million people. Hundreds were also killed, mostly as a result of epidemics and famine that followed the flooding. In total, Military Air Command flew 50 tons of tents, blankets, tarpaulins, and water containers to the region during the month of August. Additional C-130 missions occurred later in the year, from 3-18 December, to deliver food as the area’s famines intensified.
 
20 Aug 1910 (Armament Directorate)
On 20 Aug 1910, the first shot to be fired from an airplane occurred when Lt Jacob Earl Fickel of the 29th Infantry—an expert rifleman—fired upon a target about 100 feet below from the backseat of a Curtiss biplane. Lieutenant Fickel missed the shot by about six feet, but the pilot, Mr. Glenn Curtiss himself, took the blame for that, stating that he had to tilt the machine just as the shot was fired. For the firearms demonstration, which took place at Sheepshead Bay Track near New York, Lt Fickel used an Army Springfield .30 caliber rifle. Although this first attempt at firing from a plane was a miss, the idea of weaponizing the airplane was not—and in just a few short years airplanes would be dogfighting with each other over the skies of Europe in the midst of Word War I.
 
21 Aug 1998 (Hill AFB/Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate)
 Today in 1998, then-Maj Michael J. “Brillo” Brill, a full-time reservist with Hill AFB’s 419th Fighter Wing, became the first Air Force pilot to accrue more than 4,000 flying hours in the F-16 Fighting Falcon (“Viper”). At the time, no one was even close to overtaking Maj Brill, who had then been flying F-16s for 18 years and had “never gone more than two weeks without flying” in that entire time. In 1998, 3,000 pilots had more than 1,000 hours in the F-16, more than 400 pilots had over 2,000 hours, and only 21 pilots had flown over 3,000 hours. When asked in 1998 if he would keep the streak going, he said that he would “keep going as long as [he still enjoyed] it”—and ten years later, in 2008, now-Lt Col Brill accrued his 6,000th hour in the airplane on a 2 May 2008 combat mission out of Balad Air Base, Iraq.
 
22 Aug 1834 (Aviation History)
Today, 190 years ago, Samuel Pierpont Langley was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. In addition to being a brilliant engineer, inventor, and astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at today’s University of Pittsburg, and the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (from 1887 to 1906, when he died), Langley was a pioneer in the field of aviation. He corresponded with the Wright Brothers as they were beginning their experiments with flight, and he himself successfully designed the first powered (by a steam engine), heavier-than-air machine to actually sustain flight—though it was the size of a large model airplane. When he scaled up this “Aerodrome No. 5” into a piloted vehicle, it failed to fly, instead plunging from its launch platform into the Potomac River. Nevertheless, it contributed to a row between the Wrights and the Smithsonian Institute over who should be credited for first flight, with Orville Wright so annoyed by the argument that he initially sent the Wright Flyer to London instead of to the Smithsonian. The Wright Flyer only returned to America in 1948 after the Smithsonian Institution acknowledged the Wright Brothers’s claim to first flight and apologized.
 
24 Aug 1974 (Aviation History)
On today’s date, fifty years ago, Alexander P. de Seversky, aviator, engineer, and airpower advocate, died at New York’s Memorial Hospital. He was 80 years old. Born in Russia, his father bought that country’s first privately-owned airplane, and Seversky learned how to fly on it. He lost his right leg as a fighter pilot for the Russian navy during World War I, and after the war, he was serving as an attaché in the U.S.A. when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred. He chose to stay in America after that, went to work for AFLCMC’s predecessor, McCook Field, and became a naturalized citizen in 1927. After inventing the first fully automatic synchronous bombsight, which produced $50,000 for him when he sold it to the military, he founded his own airplane company, the Seversky Aircraft Company. After getting into some hot water for selling his P-35s to Imperial Japan, Seversky was voted out of his own company, which became Republic Aviation, and produced the P-47 Thunderbolt of World War II-era fame. In addition to being an inventor and businessman, Seversky was a proponent for airpower, particularly strategic bombing, writing a bestselling book entitled “Air Power: The Key to Survival”—which Disney turned into a film.
 
25 Aug 1984 (Tinker AFB)
Forty years ago today, under the wings of a B-52 bomber at Tinker AFB, a ceremony took place honoring Oklahoma servicemembers missing in action in Southeast Asia. Families of those MIA servicemembers received gold medals—authorized by Congress the year prior—featuring an eagle behind a fallen bamboo rod in the jungle. The medals were handed out by U.S. Senators David Boren and Don Nickles, and U.S. Congressman Dave McCurdy. At the time, Tinker AFB’s Maj Gen Richard A. Burpee said that, “All of us who serve in the military recognize the gallant and distinctive contributions of those who are prisoners of war (POW) and those who are missing in action (MIA)”—a recognition that has continued to the present day. At these ceremonies, everything from the number of place settings (representing each branch of the military) to the round table to the white cloth to the single rose all have symbolic meaning, with each symbol meant to honor and remember those who are POW/MIA. _

 
70 Years Ago This Week in AFLCMC History: 23 Aug 1954
First Flight of the YC-130
 
In 1954, President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office; the US Air Force Academy was founded; and the first of over 2,500 Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft took to the skies.
 
By that time, the Cold War was in full swing. The newly independent USAF had begun to recapitalize its fleet around the atomic bomb and the jet engine, with its tactical and mobility fleets making due with the World War II leftovers. Though those aircraft were less than a decade old, the intervening advent of the turbojet engine had ushered in a new era for aviation that made the classic piston-and-propeller propulsion combination nearly obsolete.
 
The Korean War made clear the deficiencies of those legacy transports; what was needed was a medium-sized tactical airlifter for delivering heavier equipment or paratroops quickly and over long distances to combat areas, yet capable of operating from short, rough airfields. The key enabling technology was the turboprop engine. Standard turbojet engines that relied on expelling hot gas for thrust were terribly inefficient at low speeds, making them impractical for transports. The new concept of a turboprop engine instead harnessed the jet engine’s energy to drive a propeller, combing the compact power of the jet with subsonic efficiency of a propeller. Because the Air Force had ceded turboprop development to the Navy, while they focused on turbojets, they had to derive the intended engine from its sister service’s programs.
 
In June 1950, the Air Force released the first General Operational Requirements Document for a new medium turboprop transport, with requests for proposals coming the following January. Of the five contractor submission, Lockheed was announced as the winner on 2 July 1951, receiving a contract to build two YC-130s on 11 July, powered by Allison T56 turboprops. The prototypes were designed and built at Lockheed’s California facilities—it was just then re-activating the former Marietta, Georgia, B-29 plant for future C-130 production. As legend has it, the Hercules’ mockup debut resulted in stunned silence...and not the good kind, because it bucked the sleek-and-streamlined trend of the early Jet Age. Skunk Works founder Kelly Johnson reportedly dismissed it entirely.
 
On 23 August 1954, just about a year behind schedule (due to both engine & airplane delays), Lockheed test pilots Stan Beltz and Roy Wimmer, and two flight engineers, ran up the engines on the second YC-130, tail number 53-3397, in Burbank, California. Just 10 seconds and 855 feet later, their plane leapt into the air for the first flight of the C-130. An hour later, they landed at Edwards AFB where it would undergo the rest of its flight test program.