Username Protected wrote:
I flew 177 combat missions over Laos and Cambodia in the Bronco, and loved it from the first time I saw it. It was a very stable weapons platform and a great aerobatic machine. Looking at that video of the washboard runway brought back a memory from training: We were told that the airplane suffered no damage from those tests, but that one of the pilots wound up with a tear of his diaphragm that required surgery. For most of my tour out of Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai AFB I flew over the Ho Chi Minh trail in the daytime with nobody in the back seat (occasionally we had an intel officer back there for familiarization with the Trail and to qualify for combat pay since they were stationed in Thailand, or also occasionally, an Air Force or Navy fighter/attack pilot that wanted to get a closer/lower/slower view of the Trail), and the configuration was the four 30 cal machine guns with 2000 rounds, 4 rocket pods with 28 white phosphorus rockets, and a centerline 600 gal external fuel tank which gave us over 5 hours endurance. For about 6 weeks I flew out of Ubon RTAFB doing the combat evaluation of the Pave Nail Version of the Bronco. (Eval targets were in Cambodia) This one had the stick removed from the back seat to allow for a scope that was attached to a belly pod that replaced the 600 gal external tank. The pod could be rotated 360 deg horizontally and 180 deg vertically. It contained a starlight scope and boresighted laser. In addition a loran receiver and computer were added. Also there were 2 250gal aux tanks, one on a hardpoint of each wing. A navigator rode in the back and operated that gear. When we had a target, the back seater would lase it and the computer would calculate the target's position based on the aircraft position, the laser range, the plane's attitude, and the attitude of the pod. We would then call Hillsboro (daytime C130 ABCCC) or at night Moon Beam and they would launch an alert pad F4 from Ubon armed with a couple of paveway laser guided bombs. When the F4 checked in we would give him the loran time coordinates for the target to put into his computer and told him what attack heading to use. He would come in at 14000 feet, call us 1 minute from bomb release so we had time to get out of the way of the bomb path. When he called bomb away the back seater would start counting down from 32 seconds (bomb fall time), and when he got down to 15 seconds he would start lasing the target. Of the 41 bombs Tom Wilson, my back seater, and I guided during the eval, 40 were bullseyes (the one that missed was about 100 meters long and we assumed that it must have had a stuck guidance fin in the back). After the eval we took all 5 or 6 Pave Nail birds up to NKP and started flying them at night over the Trail. It was a great system, the bomb release happened about 5 miles from the target so they never heard the F4. My experience was that the F4s had to drop an average of 20 to 30 dumb bombs to destroy a single truck in a heavily defended area (the Air Force F100s and the Navy A4s and A7s did much better than that). The paveways more that paid for their cost difference in just the munitions cost not to mention the additional sorties. Plus the F4s were not subjected to the triple A fire.
Vincente,
Please check your log book for this aircraft. Also would be very interested if you have any pics.
Regards,
Norman
OV-10A, s/n 67-14621
Manufactured by North American Aviation, Columbus OH and gained by the USAF on
12 Jun 1968.
Jul 1968 To 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing (Pacific Air Forces), Bien Hoa AB Vietnam
(via Hurlburt Field FL)
Aug 1968 To 504th Tactical Air Support Group (PACAF), Bien Hoa AB Vietnam
Jul 1971 To 504th Tactical Air Support Group (PACAF), Phan Rang AB Vietnam
Dec 1971 To 504th Tactical Air Support Group (PACAF), Da Nang AB Vietnam
Mar 1972 To 366th Tactical Fighter Wing (PACAF), Da Nang AB
Jun 1972 To 6498th Air Base Wing (PACAF), Da Nang AB
Nov 1972 To 56th Special Operations Wing (PACAF), Nakhon Phanom RTAFB
Thailand (deployment to U Tapao RTAFB Thailand)
Sep 1975 To 56th Special Operations Wing (PACAF), U Tapao RTAFB
Oct 1975 To NAS Cherry Point NC
Sep 1976 To 507th Tactical Air Control Wing (Tactical Air Command), Shaw AFB
SC
Jul 1978 To 601st Tactical Air Control Wing (US Air Forces Europe), Wiesbaden
AB Germany
Jun 1984 To 602nd Tactical Air Control Wing (TAC), George AFB CA
Aug 1986 To 343rd Tactical Fighter Wing (Alaskan Air Command), Eielson AFB
AK (deployment to Davis-Monthan AFB AZ)
Sep 1989 To 602nd Tactical Air Control Wing (TAC), George AFB
Jun 1990 To 602nd Tactical Air Control Wing (TAC), Davis-Monthan AFB
Records don’t show the transfer to the Venezuela Air Force in 1990. It was on the ground there with the engines removed in the 1992 Hugo Chavez coup attempt before I acquired it.
Video of one of at least 3 F-16 Bronco shoot downs during the coup attempt
https://youtu.be/nDASW6X0XoUI purchased 3 that made it back to the airport with battle damage. One had it’s aileron blown off by his buddy that didn’t want to kill him. Another landed gear up on his centerline drop tank and reportedly ejected 0/0 on the runway when it caught fire. The other was riddled with bullet holes. The fourth one was 14621 and was on the ground with engines removed during the coup.
They were recent trainees and were firing on a row of parked F-5s thinking that they were F-16s. Little did they know the F-16s had already scrambled and were jumping the low time Bronco pilots from a nearby base.