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Us Navy Carrier Based Hercules Record Still Stands
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During its nearly four-decade career around the world, Lockheed’s rugged C-130 Hercules transport has chalked up some incredible flights – the Entebbe rescue of 104 hostages in 1976, live pickups from land and sea and the intrepid rescue of six scientists in Antarctica – but one of the most daring chapters in the plane’s history occurred when the US Navy decided to land one of the big propjets on an aircraft carrier.
The late 1963 mission, involving the USS Forrestal in the North Atlantic, was a ‘first’ for a four-engine aircraft. It was a world record feat as the heaviest aircraft ever to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, a record that is believed to still stand on this, the 75th year of US Naval aviation.
When the project was proposed, there was a bit of scoffing in aviation circles: How could the big propjet with its bulky fuselage and 40. 2-metre wingspan land on the deck of a carrier? Even the project pilot selected for the mission, Navy fighter pilot Lt. James Flatley Ill (now a rear admiral, assigned to the Navy’s Office of Naval Warfare in the Pentagon), when first told of the assignment, thought perhaps someone was pulling his leg.
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