My uncle flew T-28s back in the day. Said it was a huge change to go from T-34Bs to the T-28s. It was a much larger, more powerful, and apparently a handful of an aircraft to fly.
-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
Vt-2
- Thread starter flyerstud4
- Start date
My uncle flew T-28s back in the day. Said it was a huge change to go from T-34Bs to the T-28s. It was a much larger, more powerful, and apparently a handful of an aircraft to fly.
No, not shit-hots.
It was just a little before my time, but I think orange bags were the standard back then...... probably for rescue visibility.
I remember in the recruiting brochures, everyone was in orange bags.
By the time I started VT-1, Nomex had been invented by Dupont and everyone had switched to the standard green Nomex bag.
Sounds like another tracom aircraft transition I am familiar with...
I do remember my dad's stories of the T-28....he said it was like a childhood dream come true, being remarkably similar to some of the WWII period Naval aircraft, big radial engine and all.
Crazy in that the bad-ass trainers like the T-28 are often used in combat as well. It has seen air-to-air as well as air-to-ground. Has at least two kills, an O-1 and C-46 while a Honduran T-28 fought both the F-51 Mustang and FG-1D Corsair in air combat as well. The Honduran T-28 badly damaged an El Salvadorian Corsair.
I've heard that the T-28 can outmaneuver some jets down low.
Prop aircraft usually can, big straight wing, dow low, jets can't turn with em, at least historically. Mig-15 vs F4U for example.
It is ironic that the first and last Navy MiG kills of the Vietnam War were - like Clint Johnson's Spad – all flown off of the USS Midway.
Clint missed being the very first Navy MiG killer by only three days, because on 17 June 1965, VF 21 F-4s aboard Midway downed three MiGs.
CDR Lou Paige and J.C Smith had the honor of the first MiG. Old friends, Lt Vic Kovaleski and Ltjg Jim Wise of VF-161 aboard Midway in 1973 bagged the last MiG of the war.
The F-4 currently on board the USS Midway Museum has been painted in VF-21's colors on one side, and VF-161's colors on the other side, to commemorate the 1st and last kills.
Midway's MiG kills Link
Vic and Jim's aircraft:
Hey ... it's not only the T-28's ... I once "thumped" a P-3 when comin' back into CUBI just outside the entrance to Subic Bay ... @ 450-500 KIAS underneath him & then showed him a plan form view of my airplane as his nose passed over the canopy bow ...
...Went high -- and was gonna' come back & fly by and give him the Hawaiian good luck sign ... but the SOB started turning INTO me ...
... I went hi again ... and again ... same-o, same-o ... about 3-4 times as he continued to turn inside me right down on the deck, thus ruining my "run" on him ... so then I said: "Fuck it" ... and went in & landed. Met some of the cockpit crew that night up on the hill -- lots of laughin' & scratchin' and drinks all around -- I guess the entire crew was running around in the tube going "there he is -- 8 o'clock -- he's turnin' back on us " ... etc, etc.
Good crew; lots of fun.
^ That P-3 CAC must have gone to PropGun.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6554713845142828957
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6554713845142828957
P-3s versus F-14, F-18, F-16, F-15..... if we stayed on the deck and denied them the vertical, we out turned them all day long.
When I was in Corpus the studs did Primary in the T-28. I was the Ops duty officer (E-8 - E-9's stood the watch nights and weekends due to a shortage of available O's) when a plowback IP forgot to have his stud set the rudder pedals so he couldn't lock his knee. Studs's first T/O in the Mighty Trojan, right leg all the way out and then some, IP can't overcome to correct and they depart the runway before the IP can get power off.
Made for an interesting watch...
My old man flew ADs out of Kimpo (K14 I think) just after peace broke out in Korea. Prior to his first flight in the Spad he was flying Panthers for VMA-223. By the time he made his first flight in an AD he had learned to all but ignore those pesky rudder peddles taking up all of that floor space in a Panther.
The way he tells it, his check out in the AD-1 consisted of reading the manual and having the plane captain show him how to start the engine and pointing him toward the active runway.
He said the ONLY reason he managed to keep the beast on the runway during his takeoff roll was because he watched the newby AD driver in front of him run his first take off through a nearby hanger before he pushed enough rudder.
I guess OJT works well as long as you live long enough.
I knew a guy who had been in the squadron training RVN pilots to fly the AD. I remember him saying they had lost a couple of aircraft to low level rollovers on waveoffs by the RVN pilots.