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Aviation Guys - Which plane does this belong to?

cattleman99

Snyder Precision LLC
Full Member
Minuteman
Mar 28, 2018
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Lincoln, NE
www.snyderprecision.com
This walked into my shop today, kind of neat. It's a booster for helping big planes take off of small air strips I believe. Any way you can track down the SN and figure out which plane it came from? I was told a C130 called Fat Albert, but have no way to verify.

Jato MK 6 Mod 1

Thanks!
 
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Any way you know of tracing the serial number to a specific plane?
Nah. They aren’t tracked like that. I mean it’s tracked when installed but like anything that’s military they get swapped around. Generally allotted to a squadron and used as needed.

I mean there could be a way but I honestly doubt it.
 
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Put it on a bicycle like these crazies and their pulse jets
 
I saw Fat Albert's final JATO performance at the Homecoming Airshow for the Blues at NAS Pensacola several years ago. Unless something has changed, they announced that there were no more JATO bottles left in inventory for them to use.
 
Obviously it's from the plane that is missing one.
Have any really tough questions you need answered, just ask.

They’re a “fit as required” type device, so no aircraft is “missing one”. They also only work once.
 
1960s era solid rocket motor. That’s got some potential.

See what I did there? That’s a middle school science teacher double entendre.
HOLY FUCK!!! You are WAAAAAAAY, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, WAAAAAAAAAAAAY, way smarter than I had thought.
 
There was a C130 that delivered an end dump truck (full of parts for a crusher), a dump trailer (full of parts for the truck, the trailer, and a backhoe), a backhoe and a surplus airforce HMMWV (full of spare parts) that landed on a runway plowed out of the ice and snow on a river way out in the middle of nowhere Alaska while I was there. It used some of these things to stop. Cool as shit!!!! I had never seen anything like it and haven't since. The plane landed, turned around, taxied to a stop. While the cargo was being unloaded, both the pilot and copilot exited to take a leak, then came over to where I had my camera set up on a tripod and asked if I had gotten good pics. I supposed so. They then told me to zoom good on the windows as they took off. They were both waving!!!! I halfway expected to see at least one full moon. These 2 guys gave the impression of ne'er do wells, if you know what I mean. HAHAHA!!! (Who was making that nose lift off?)
 
Used to be used for all sorts of things. B47s had a bank of them built into the fuselage so the nuclear alert aicraft could get in the air faster.
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They are not used anymore because they are wickedly dangerous if the slightest thing goes wrong, and aircraft are generally better. Alert aircraft can start up faster, and engines got more thrust so can simply take off at max power in quite short spaces compared to the early Cold War era.

Fat Albert is the nickname for the Blue Angels transport aircraft. The previous one, a C130T #164763 was fitted with racks for externally mounted JATO bottles, clearly visible here:
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For no "reason." Just a party trick when safe to perform, and over the years fewer of them, as bottles became harder to find. They haven't been made since like the 60s, but with no one else using them operationally, lasted a good long while.

That a/c has since been retired and replaced with a former UK service C130J, which I believe does not have these racks.


Agree: someone, somewhere knows all about this bottle and can say who it was issued to when, and likely when it flew. But it's not like aircraft numbers, that won't be public record. Not secret per se but also not public. If you do a hell of a lot of research you can find who to issue a FOIA request to, in order to find out that info.
 
My first experience with the JATO came from a very skilled pilot, Roger T Bannon, one of few to actually use them in an active combat zone. "Race", as he was known to many, was more famously known as one of a handful certified to fly the Dragonfly SST, a unique aircraft design which used the horizontal stabilizer as its main source of lift. He was also known for his small arms and hand to hand combat skills, and I owe it to him for influencing many of my life decisions.
 
Oh fine, I guess I am with a crowd that doesn't know about the Credible Sport C130, follow on from Eagle Claw failure:

Not just crazy extra JATO to take off in a football stadium, but to STOP in the same space. Crash shown a lot is a bug or maybe a human error from the quick-and-dirty development, the system actually worked.

So well that USAF SOF tried to get a Credible Sport II with rockets and all as the MC-130H Combat Talon II program. They made and flew one, worked fine. But this is still before SOF had any power, AFSOC was a few years off, etc so the check-writers didn't care, wanted a safer bet, more general use airframe.


The Credible Sport II aircraft was too weird to modify back to normal so languished and eventually got restored, is in a museum:
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Brackets on the side are the lift and deceleration JATO rack mounts. Triangles are brackets for the fairing on the pods. All housings etc long lost apparently but it was to be modular, would mostly fly around like this, just become the rocket-STOL version as needed.
 
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My first experience with the JATO came from a very skilled pilot, Roger T Bannon, one of few to actually use them in an active combat zone. "Race", as he was known to many, was more famously known as one of a handful certified to fly the Dragonfly SST, a unique aircraft design which used the horizontal stabilizer as its main source of lift. He was also known for his small arms and hand to hand combat skills, and I owe it to him for influencing many of my life decisions.
Thanks, Johnny.
 
Thanks, Johnny.
Hey it’s probably the 1970s. You’re a hot shot pilot for some military branch or air America or something like that. And your last name is Bannon.

Unless you were a complete fuck up, your nickname/callsign is going to be ‘Race.’
There’s just no other way.