Posted on 09/22/2001 11:01:55 AM PDT by lormand
Prior to AC-130s I did a tour in the 5th Bomb Wing, 23rd Bomb Squadron, Crews E-18 and E-19 (‘72-75). During that time I did three Arc Light tours and counted myself lucky to do only three.
The D model was old, cranky, had a mind of itsown and would get you into serious trouble if you didn’t stay ahead of it. It could also carry bombs on 108 (?) hard points between the big belly mods and the external racks. Somewhere I have a photo of my pilot playing Quasimoto while I pull the pins on the externals. It was taken on Charlie Ramp at UT Airbase, Thailand the summer of ’73.
Excitement was dropping the whole load, armed!, in 1.5 seconds. It left one hel* of a “Buff Print”!
As for the real power of the BUFF – nothing beats the reports from our POWs when we first went North. Once they (our POWs) realized that the air raid was a Buff raid they knew that they would be going home shortly because no one could stand up to mass B-52 strikes. And, most importantly, so did their North Vietnamese guards!
Old aerodynamic testers never die; they just stop passing wind.
During the Vietnam War, the USAF used 10,000-lb. M121 bombs left over from World War II, to blast Helicopter Landing Zones (HLZ) in the dense undergrowth. As the supply of M121 bombs dwindled, the USAF developed the Bomb Live Unit-82/B (BLU-82/B) as a replacement. Weighing a total of 15,000 lbs., the BLU-82/B was essentially a large thin-walled tank (1/4-inch steel plate) filled with a 12,600-lb. "slurry" explosive mixture. The designers optimized this bomb to clear vegetation while creating little or no crater, and it cleared landing zones about 260 feet in daimeter - just right for helicopter operations. Since only cargo aircraft could carry them, C-130 crews delivered the BLU-82/B with normal parachute cargo extraction systems.
The BLU-82/B first saw use in Vietnam on Mach 23, 1970. Throughout the rest of the war, the USAF used them for tactical airlift operations called "Commando Vault." After the war, the BLU-82/B was used during the Mayaguez rescue in May 1975, but the remaining BLU-82s went into storage until the mid-1980s, when the Air Force Special Operations Command began using them in support of special operations. During Operation Desert Storm, MC-130E "Combat Talon" aircraft from the 8th Special Operations Squadron dropped 11 BLU-82/Bs, primarily for psychological effects.
nuke-p afghanistan? Yes
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