Bob Moore wrote:
CWO4 Dave Mann wrote
This looks like the photo recon version with the zillion candlepower
strobes in the wing tips. Rare bird. The Mohawk had a similar system
only the strobe light was under the fuselage.

Nope! Just the standard 30 million candle power, copilot controlled,
searchlight mounted on the starboard side only.

It's a standard SP-2H of the RAAF. There is a photo of its sistership
number 81 on page 240 of Wayne Mutza's "Lockheed P2V NEPTUNE, An
Illustrated History"

Bob Moore
VP-21, SP-2H, 1959-1962
PanAm (retired)


I am wondering if the "flash bulb" P2V was something special cooked up
for Vietnam. We had two of them flying out of Da Nang with US Army
crews on board. That was from mid-1965 to -mid 1967.

The US Air Force really agitated against the Army flying any aircraft
over a certain gross weight, capacity, speed, etc. Air Force folks got
real nervous when we fielded the OV1D Mohawk with rockets and then gun
pods under the wings on the hard points. Made us take off the weapons
and have only drop flares on the hard-points. That was the same time as
the Caribou controversy and Knock-Down Bitch-Slapping on the Pentagon
E-Ring about the Army having "cargo capacity". Our lovely Boo's went
away with USAF markings. The Army's SIGINT assets managed to get away
with some other platforms, as NSA used their clout. The SIGINT birds
flew with Army markings except for the odd C47 with "civilian" registry.

The Mohawk flash-bulb was cool since when it flew a mission on a
moonless night, the flash made an almost perfectly square illuminated
footprint on the ground. It was like the Hand of G-d to the VC I
suppose. Only trouble was that the imagery was not real-time and it
usually took a 24-hour period to get the B52's overhead and by that time
the dinks had moved on to someplace else. Of course they also had the
radio relays from their interception sites near Guam which relayed
real-time B52 flight information back to the North Vietnam High Command.

Cheers,

Dave