A third of the nine helicopters... That is like a quarter dozen of them!
We had one Marine Scooter drop napalm in front of us so low that the burst of flame enveloped his whole plane. When he emerged from the fireball, he had flames in the little bits of vacuum behind his wings and stab. He pulled up, did a little snap roll and all of us cheered like we were attending the world's best airshow.
A buddy of mine, LtCol VanEs flew his Scooter in direct support of the attacks on Hue City's Citadel in '68. That's his Skyhawk in all those famous photos. Took unbelievable precision and courage to fly that low to get the hits in that critical objective.
I remember building the now very old Revell ‘box scale’ kit of the Skyhawk from the late 1950s. I thought it was a ‘really neat’ looking aircraft.
http://www.oldmodelkits.com/jpegs/Revell%20H232-89%20A-4Daa.JPG
My father worked for McDonald Douglas in Long Beach. He proudly displayed a bumper sticker on his car that read “A4s Forever!”
I have a feeling that these are the sorts of planes, in large numbers, the USA will need in the future.
Not the super-expensive F-35.
I saw an A-4 land gear up at Cubi Point. The runway had been foamed and the pilot literally greased ‘er in.
no muss, not really much fuss
