OV-10 Bronco Walkaround Fort Worth Aviation Museum

hi good morning I'm Jim Hudson I'm the executive director of the Fort Worth Aviation Museum and I'm also the chairman of the board of the ov-10 Bronco Association and now we're here today to talk about the ov-10 the one behind me here is a Marine Corps ov-10 went into service in the 1968 and served in Vietnam this one also after the Vietnam War went to Okinawa terms with the VMO six in Okinawan served with VMO two in Vietnam and then later towards the end of its career went back to VMO two at Camp Pendleton in California about 1990-91 and then went to the Bureau of Land Management where it was transferred up to Fairbanks Alaska and it operated with with BLM up there as a lead in aircraft for for fire fighters so we're going to talk a little bit about the airplane here this morning and some of the characteristics of it I flew the airplane for about three years and so this is the first airplane I flew out of flight school some of the first things you're going to see is this little little stick out the side and that's the angle of attack indicator so from there you could get the idea of what the the airplane is doing in relationship to the angle of attack on the wind you're going to notice that the landing gear on this airplane is not common to most airplanes that you see primarily because it was designed to operate off of unprepared fields in many cases even in furrowed fields it was tested in furrow field so it's kind of a knuckle gear it's a trailing a trailing gear so that you can it can handle rough surfaces now we've got the cockpit if you look at it from the front we're going to show you one of the primary features of the airplane is if you look nose on to the airplane if you look nose on to the airplane you're going to notice that the canopy is curved and that was intentional this airplane was designed from the ground up to be a forward air control airplane reconnaissance airplane so the curvature the canopy allows you to actually see underneath the airplane from the front seat the high wing was designed so that you would have good visibility all the way around so there are very few blind spots on this airplane when you sit in the cockpit the the seat of the airplane is up just about to your hip level as opposed to when you look at a fighter or some of these other airplanes with a canopy rail is it your shoulders you're sitting way up high in the camp and the cockpit on this one okay couple things about the nose of the airplane I want to talk about that we've got this on here for protection right now but this is the pitot tube on the airplane and oftentimes we take them to air shows and we had we had a series of questions that that we had to answer for people we'd go no it's not a p38 it's a no v10 Bronco no that's not a machine gun it's a pitot static tube and yes this is the airplane that's been flying over your house interesting landing lights it's in the nose of the airplane as opposed in the wing roots like a lot of other airplanes are we used to fly me in Yuma Arizona a lot out of there and working with airplanes on the range and one of the things that we did on more than one occasion was at night leaving the ranges fly down on the railroad tracks until we'd see another train and turn on the landing light and we'd watch sparks come off the wheel on a train we've got a little up our ventilation system here our total air conditioning system on the on the Bronco is just like a 53 Buick you pulled a little handle in front and that would pop up and you get airflow through the airplane and then we had exhaust ports in the in the canopy itself entry and exit on the airplane no graceful way to get in and out of an O v10 you simply climb up and you step on things and you grab and climb until you're in the airplane nothing nothing very graceful about it at all once you're settled in it's a reasonably comfortable seat although when we would operate in the Southwest down in Arizona and places like that or anytime in the summertime we always take two or three or even four canteens with us no air conditioning because we were mentioning it it's not an easy task to get in you just have to grab and climb in and just get up into the cockpit once you're there you're pretty well settled in everything is the airplane is relatively easy to fly because the primary job of the airplane is not flying the airplane but it's directing aircraft and artillery from outside so it's a very busy cockpit from that standpoint we had a UHF VHF Fox Mike radios and in high freq radios so we could literally talk to almost anybody in the world from the airplane and we would use that for talking to ground troops for talking about battery's talking to mortar platoons talking to ships when we did naval gunfire exercises or be talking to two airplanes or SATCOM around the world so there was plenty of opportunities to communicate and in many situations that we got into we became an airborne command and control as opposed to doing our actual job was controlling things on the ground two seats in the airplane one on the front one on the back can be flown from either cockpit the back seat was primarily primarily for an observer we used artillery officers a lot Air Force used it I used interpreters in the back seat in Cambodia but we would also have any number of other people that which would be in the back seat utilizing the back back seat for different different purposes limited instrumentation in the back there were throttles there was a stick there was no landing gear handle in the back and to be able to key the radio somebody would have to have the person in the front seat change the radios many of the aerial observers that we flew with carried a long expanding pointer so that they could reach up front and switch the radios around if they had to part of that was their own insurance in the case with incapacitated pilot they could still control those radios from back on all of the ov-10s they were built with a sponson the sponson was designed to go for two purposes one is effect carry to m60 machine guns on board the the sponson and also underneath where the ordnance Rex so there were two ordnance racks both of the sponsons plus a centerline so we had a capability of carrying five external stores of various different types we've got a hundred gallon 100 500 gallon fuel tank on here right now but we oftentimes carried a 20-millimeter cannon on the centerline of the airplane fuel was a big one when we'd go out and be on station for a long time to do forward air control missions with a external dropped anchor borne for four and a half to five hours so it got to be a long half-day sometimes we'll show you on the Air Force model that we've got the the rocket pods that we used to carry the 19 shot rocket pods but we also carried zuny's we also carried the ad SIDS which were acoustical sensors that we dropped along the us-mexico border and they'd be used in in Vietnam so they look like a they look like a cartoon bomb and when they'd hit the ground they had they had like it looks like branches off the back so it looked like a shrub without leaves and that was actually the antenna so they had a crista : seismic seismic sensors in there so that they could monitor activity around the area - 2 t 76 turbo turboprop engines 745 shaft or starter they're about airplane the airplane used as I mentioned that T 76 but was also a t PE 331 same engine that came out of the aero commander and and several other airplanes as we walk walk along here it was originally designed with the air scoop down below but in production models they turned it upside down so that the air scoop was up high and this was to avoid sucking in debris off of off of the ground airplane was fairly easy to work on mechanically they could just open up open up the clamshell in the so you had easy access to the to the engine and most of its component parts big fat wing so not necessarily terribly aerodynamic the airplane wasn't still for built for speed or comfort but it was built for observation purposes and being able to stay on station for quite a while the production airplane had a 40-foot wingspan the the pre-production prototypes were 30 foot wingspan and what the test pilots told us is that they didn't like the capabilities of the airplane that was the only airplane now that it Gillespie said ever scared him it was the 30 foot wingspan airplane the roll rate was very high most of the thrust was actually coming was being produced off of the props and the engines across the wing as opposed to just the just as the standard airflow so for production purposes they added five feet to to both sides airplane is a full scope keep capable airplane when the flaps were all the way down and and you needed to the airplane could be could be you can take the airplane off in about eight hundred feet and you could land it stop it in about 200 feet going into reverse thrust so highly capable of getting into confined areas in and out but as the Natanz manual said full so operational to the airplane should only be considered with me welfare of the crew is not a kickstand that would go you can't really see it but up on the top of the wing are slots and there were little spoilers that would pop up and this is part of the active flight control system it was incorporated with the ailerons so you would when you'd exercise the ailerons on the opposite wing you would get these spoilers that would come up that would kill the lift and so that the airplane had very good maneuvering capabilities infected at max knots which was about three hundred and fifty fifty nine in a dive on a good day the minimum turn radius was 500 feet and that was partly because of the the spoiler system on the wing then the cells on the on the wings on the on the airplane are identical left to right it was done for a number of reasons one was commonality another one was so that they were somewhat interchangeable and inside in the landing gear area still pretty much the same again you notice it's got the knuckled landing gear with a big balloon tire for unprepared strips the hole up in the front right there was where the battery for the airplane would go excuse me the airplane was designed so that it was highly utilitarian from the standpoint that it could utilize a number of different fuel mixtures that could use it could use a standard gasoline if need be and all you had to do was change the specific deal setting on the engine to go from JP to go to AB gas to go to truck gas now that wasn't something that you'd want to do on a regular basis but it was you had the capability of doing that starting the airplane was also fairly simple especially if you had two airplanes with you because if you were in a situation where the battery was dead you could take the battery off another airplane stick it up in in the airplane here start it up then remove the battery put it back in the other one there was also another way to do that and that's back here in the cargo compartment all right next to the cargo compartment this is the auxilary power power supply you'll see utility power and starting power so you had the capabilities here of using a start cart and plug it into the airplane to be able to start the airplane you also had the capability if you took a cable like this with you and you had two airplanes on the road you could start one airplane up and use the cable out out power from one airplane in part of the other one and start it that way and then the last way to get the airplane started was doing on the ground air start you could go to the prop take the spinner off the prop unlock the blades put any other airplane in front of it and do an air start on the ground so one of the secrets of the ov-10 as the cargo compartment so the the airplane is designed so that it could carry thirty two hundred pounds of whatever you could fit in the cargo compartment and it wouldn't change the CG of the airplane by more than half an inch so the airplane was designed by a couple of Maureen majors so that it was to live with the troops and to live with a live of the company or at least with a regiment the high tail was for a number of different reasons number one was so that a six by could could back up underneath the airplane and the bed of the six by would be even with the bed of the ov-10 so that you could transfer items back and forth you could carry two stretchers in here with a corpsman or you can carry four jumpers and it had lights lights here in the in the compartment jump lights that the pilot would be able to signal people when it was time to get out well we found in the early 70s when we started doing that with with Recon Marines at Camp Pendleton is that most of them didn't want to get out when you told them to get out on a level drop we rarely carried a drop tank if we did we take the tail off of it so that the last man out here the door would be off the last man out would sit here with his feet dangling out up the back if the guy the flask of the first guy out didn't see the target underneath his feet they wouldn't necessarily get out so we had to begin devise a way to get the people out when they needed to get out and that was simply the zoom climb and they would come right out now you'll notice nobody's going to stand in here they would sit in here toboggan style so no seatbelts or anything in the back and so when it was time to go you just zoom climb it up everybody just came right out so and also that gave them the room here so that they wouldn't be wouldn't be hit by the tail of the airplane so these things have been used for a lot of different things carrying things I just know one operation at depth a China Lake where we had an infrared mapping system that was in the back of the airplane and we flew over the Owens Valley and they they did recordings of what was on the ground now we were doing it in conjunction with some other things too to see the capabilities of some of the the photography at the time and the IR photography so we knew that there were people in the ground in the fields identifying what was actually in the fields and then we were flying along at about five to eight thousand feet with this and then there was an RF eight or an RF for overhead taking pictures and then there was an sr-71 above that with satellites and I was one of that picture of all of those things all lined up underneath the airplane so this side of the airplane essentially identical we do have antennas up on the top of the end the cells we've got a variety of antennas as we mentioned we've got a variety of different radios that we carry from the airplane again this side is identical to the other side and you can see the battery compartment and this one it's closed up we don't have any battery in it but that's where the battery the airplane would go so good this side of the airplane pretty much like on the on the other side no real difference tax would come out come out of this site and this airplane was susceptible to to Sam missiles a number of them that were shot down in Vietnam essentially because of this they were redesigned a little bit without a model change for the Desert Storm here but still there's a lot of hot gas coming out of here and it was not uncommon for Sam's to come up and actually come up through the come up through the wheel wells and take out take out an engine on one side of the airplane the D model this is an a model airplane the D model is essentially the same there was very little done to it other than to extend the nose and do some electronic things in it did put the the forward-looking infrared radar on it and to put what we refer to as the disco light up on the top which was the the mirrored the mirrored device that spun around to to try to defeat other IR sources and things like that and laser guiding again you can see the width of the the width of the the wing and how fat it is so not terribly aerodynamic was very effective single-engine characteristics with the airplane it was counter-rotating props single-engine characteristics of the airplane it was it was fairly easy to fly it was not a big deal to fly it or land it or any of those things the bigger situation though was on the ground at takeoff losing an engine on takeoff was was very was very pricey they're a very iffy situation you had to get through a transition on the ground of between about believe it was 90 knots to 110 knots because if you lost an engine anywhere in that position the airplanes roll capabilities would would roll the airplane over real fast at the zero zero seat but it was only zero zero as long as the airplane was on the ground the nose wheel or the any of the main strapped off of the runway you're outside the envelope now something didn't mention on the ejection system on this airplane is that the canopy did not leave the airplane in an ejection yeah let's walk up to the canopy we'll take a look you'll notice it's not a single piece canopy it's made in sections the the forward in the app section and a rear section and a piece on the top if you look up closely on the top of the seat you'll notice that then on the top of the seat on each end we call them horns that are sticking up so if you ejected from this airplane the rear went first and then the front seat went but you actually went up through the canopy so there's things on the top of the seats or canopy breakers so you'd pull the handle and you'd go up you go right up through the canopy itself the parachutes were not attached to the pilots and the observer they were attached to the seat you buckle them into you but you didn't have the pack on your back it was actually on the back of the seat and they were offset so they were on the different sides of the seat so that as you'd come out of the airplane the weight of the parachute would separate laterally as you come out airspeed takeoff airspeed was normally about 110 knots that was where we would you could take off a lot lower than that but you were risking risking the proposition of a loss of an engine and having an excessive roll rate with the landing gear still down and just and just transitioning to polite so most of the time from an operational standpoint we stayed on the ground until we transition through that and rotate it and took off at about 110 knots normal cruise is about two thirty to thirty-five up to 250 and then in maintenance test flights and things like that we would get up to 350 knots at the airplane how many hours how many hours do you have an aircraft I've got just over 500 hours in these actually the airplane for not quite three years and so this is my initial airplane out of flight school at that point in time this airplane was considered second tour for helicopter pilots our first tour for jet pilots sown on the Air Force model that we'll go over to show you will show you the rocket pods over there now this is the airforce ov-10a we showed you the marine version this one is actually about two weeks younger than the marine version it was built in Columbus Ohio like all of the over tens it left it went overseas it went to Thailand to nkp it spent its the entire war there then it came back to the states and it went to Shaw Air Force Base from Shaw it went to to Europe to Germany to Sembach Germany and it was translated and flown over and flown back after it got back it was transferred out to the Tucson or to George Air Force Base I think it was and then from Georgia went to Osan Korea and then came back and then went to Tucson at that point in time about 1990 or so it was decommissioned from the military and it went to the Bureau of Land Management and it went to Fairbanks Alaska where both of these airplanes operated for for a number of years when when the Bureau of Land Management shut down its it's over 10 program the airplanes went to Cal Fire in Sacramento and that's at the point where we acquired both of the airplanes was through Cal Fire when they decided they no longer needed them so if you look at the rocket pods on these on this airplane this is a 19th it's got two rockets and if they're 2.75 inch rockets they're unguided and the blue one means that it's inert the other one is painted up is what would would normally look like as a Willie Pete rocket head which means it had white phosphorous in it so when it hit the ground you get a large puff of white smoke and that's how you controlled airplanes and directed airplanes onto a target you would get them to identify your smoke and then you tell them where the target was from the smoke and you would tell them you know 3 o'clock 100 feet or 100 meters or whatever and then then you tell them to go ahead and and they would be cleared hot when you felt that the area was clear and they had the target in sight and you've given them the instructions for how you wanted them to run in and then leave the target and then come back around for another pass if you did it perfectly you tell people to hit your smoke and that was always the call that you wanted to do is have your smoke right on the target so that they didn't have to adjust at all well the larger rocket is a representation of a nhe high-explosive high-explosive round and this airplane you'll notice it's got it's got two of the rocket pods on it to the 19 shot rocket pod I've flown these with as many as four of these on and a centreline drop tank so you'd be out all day doing this this kind of stuff and it got to be it got to be very very tiring at the end of the day being in an all glass cockpit like this all day long making single passes one rocket at a time single passes because you're controlling controlling different plates of air on target so this airplane is for all intents and purposes it is the it's identical to the to the marine corps version I was just looking to see that the Air Force sometimes on theirs had a high freq radio and antenna we called it a towel rack antenna that you'll see on some airplanes we don't have that on this one so other than that essentially the same airplane the Air Force often flew single pilots with these airplanes but the Marine Corps rarely ever did if we did it was a maintenance test flight or something like that we always flew with an observer in the back seat or another pilot in the back seat all the pilots in the back seat could do all of the same types of things that the artillery officers could do Air Forces we mentioned oftentimes flew by themselves they also flew this airplane as a male fact which underneath underneath the airplane they had a device that looked like a long cylindrical tube and it was a laser designating pod and they could designate designate with that and then control other airplanes with laser-guided bombs that could drop their bombs on target they did those over the Ho Chi Minh Trail that was some of the early uses of laser-guided bombs was there so they had an operator in the back it was essentially a systems operator who was our this laser spot and when they flew in Cambodia they would have translators in the backseat the KML and Cambodian spoke French as well as Cambodian so the Air Force had to go out and find people who that they could put in the back seat of the ov-10 who could be translators for them and so in some cases they went out and got people and we know stories of somebody who was there who was a baker one day in two days two weeks later rather he's in the backseat of a nova tent helping control airstrikes in Cambodia so that's kind of the story of the ov-10 it's over 50 years old now the last there were two that just was in the last year we're over in Iraq and being used against Isis it's a solid platform it needs some updating from the standpoint of electronics and navigation and those types of things but still the Navy in its program or so common its program which is called combat dragon 2 still with those airplanes they they tested the a t6 Texan they tested the Chicano and they tested the ov-10 and they found that the ov-10 even as a 50 year old airframe was superior to the two others maybe not in performance but in visibility and so that's the the primary benefit that this airplane has always had great visibility and the able and the ability to be able to go out and see so that's kind of where we are so we have we actually have three over tens here we have these two that we've we've just talked about we've also got the original factory mock-up here and that's probably one of the rarest pieces we had bare at the museum because it was it was the design that was built prior to production of the airplane so at any rate when we encourage everybody to come on out we have the Bronco ready room here and we have much much history about the ov-10 Bronco here at the museum so there was a gun safe that would have been in the middle we've got a gun sight inside but we don't don't have one here there's one in the mock-up that it was very much Kentucky windage there was no there was no lead computing gun sight or anything like that at all but here let me close this up so you can look down on the side that's really cool and you can see your hips are right up here as opposed to like an f4 and it can't be really shoulders we use a lot of grease paint on the windows to go out go come out the same way you went in backwards come out backwards well backwards okay you can do that way but it's going to be a bit of a chore now left leg keep your left leg and go straight down to the log step there you go and it's right

Channel: Erik Johnston

Views: 559,890

Keywords: OV-10, Bronco, Fort Worth Aviation Museum, Turbine, Turboprop, Airplane, Plane, Aviation, Walkaround, Airport, Meacham Airport, Ft Worth, Marines, Air Force, Guns, Rockets, FAC, Ground Support

Id: jWi7xYE2JWg

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2017