Trevor Jones wrote:

The Davenport's wrote:

To have one of those gatlings....it'd make me happy.


Hell, I couldn't afford the AMMO for the thing. We had three General
Electric miniguns on the AC-47 "Spooky" gunships that I flew in
Vietnam and we carried 24,000 rounds of 7.62. 2,000 in each gun and
18,000 strapped to the floor for reloading. we could empty the
airplane in a matter of half an hour or less. Sure was effective
though. :-)

Jhim



Do you mean the AC-130 Spectre?

The AC-130 Spectre was deployed in 1972 and the AC-130 Spooky was
deployed in 1995.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ac-130.htm

And I can find no mention of an AC-47....closest thing is a H-47 Chinook.

Mike



Naw. He meant AC-47.

DC-3 with the guns pointed out the side of the fusellage.

It was where the idea to build the C-130 gunships came from.


http://www.af.mil/news/story_media.asp?id=123037200

Cheers
Trevor Jones



I had over 1200 hours on Spooky during my year ('67-'68) in RVN at Bien
Hoa. Check out www.theaviationzone.com/factsheets/ac47.asp for a
fairly factual story on them. John Levitow was a friend of mine and a
fellow loadmaster. His actions to win the CMH happened shortly after I
left. He died of cancer a few years ago in Seattle. Some of the facts
in the "factsheet" are slightly erroneous, such as, we actually carried
24,000 rounds as stated before and we almost NEVER fired at 6,00 rpm.
It was too hard on the guns. Burned barrel clamps off and such. We
most often fired short bursts at the "slow fire" rate of 3,500 rpm. I
have some cool memories of those missions, including the one where a
bunch of APCs were being over run and the radio operatio said "We're
buttoned up. Go ahead and fire directly on us." We did and we could
hear the bullets bouncing off the armor and the VC screaming when they
got hit.

Jim