A week or so ago in the "Herc landing on an Aircraft Carrier" discussion, I mentioned that there had been a special program in 1979 to get a Herc to land and take off from a soccer field. A collegue of mine who is a 4,000 hour C130 pilot (yes, 4,000 hours!), filled in the details for me, and pointed out a website or two that I thought everyone might be interested in. Check these out and the photos of the vertical thrusters on the second site - that has to be a pucker factor of at least 10!!!!:http://www.spectrumwd.com/c130/articles/Credible_Sport.htmhttp://home.earthlink.net/~quade/crediblesport.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters...assaultzone.htmSearch Google Here for Credible SportNow if we could only model that for FS9!Hope you enjoyed the bit of history. They were indeed amazing people, times and efforts.

Hi Tom,Interesting to read on one of those sites that the JATO rockets were only ever used 'in anger' on ski fitted C130 d's.In RAF we spent a lot of time keeping the various bits of JATO-relatedairframe hardware 'serviceable', even though we never actually had any JATO rockets to fit to it (they were probably in some stores somewhere though) :-lolAll just in case 'it might be needed someday' :-lol:-wavePete

Neat stuff Tom. Thanks for the post.JimCYWG

Very interesting. If you haven't already, this post would go really well in the Century of Aviation forum :)