"* * Chas" wrote in message
om...

"Fred the Red Shirt" wrote in
message
om...
"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
...
snip

... This was at a time
when the Marines were so hard pressed for pilots that
they
had to send men to Army and Air Force Flight Schools.

It seems to me that if the Marines had to send pilots to
the
Army and AF for training then the Marines must have had a
SURPLUS
of pilots (e.g. too many to for the USMC to train on its
own)
rather than being hard pressed for them.

DOH! we were loosing them at an extremely high rate.

So was the Army, and the USAF, and the USN. In fact, IIRC the USMC aircrew
casualty rate was below all of the above?

The
life expectancy for USMC Huey crews was about 3 months! I
have a quote from a current Marine fighter pilot "I'm a
riffleman and I fly a jet fighter!" The Marines developed
the concept of close air support in "banana Wars' of the
late 20's and early 30's!

And that is applicable how...?


Hmmm...one wonders why those same archaic fighters were
sent to Thailand and
Vietnam throughout the major part of the war, and as we
have already seen in
another thread, why a couple of them were lost in combat
operations.


If indeed they were archaic that does help to explain why
some
were lost in combat, does it not?

They flew anything that they could get off of the ground
down at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Airbase outside of
Tucson, AZ.

Not really.


We had 2 R4Ds at Danang in 1964-65 (C47 also known as DC3).
The seats were removed and they were used to ferry ARVN
troops and their families and all of their pigs and chickens
around. They were full of patches from bullet holes.

The C-47 family continues in service in some air forces to this day; its use
during Vietnam was while it was a relative *youngster*!


The Air Force flew WWII era Douglas A26/B26 Invaders up
until Feb 1964. They carried 6,000 bomb loads and had up to
16 .50 Cal MGs.

Those "On Mark" B-26's were used for a number of reasons, not because they
were the only thing available.

Then there were the B57 Canberras which the
Aussies also flew.

Which were not that old at the time (the last EB-57 did not exit service
until after 1980), and BTW, they were not the same aircraft. The USAF flew
the Martin built B-57, with a fair number of mods; the Aussies flew the
original BAC Canberra.


The mainstay of the USAF close air support effort were the
old ex Navy/USMC propjob AD-6 and AD-7 Skyraiders renamed
A-1E through A-1J.

No, they were not. The A-1's did fly CAS, and a lot more RESCAP, but they
were not the USAF's "mainstay". There were more F-100's in country than
A-1's.

The Marines retired the last Skyraider
squadron out of NAS Memphis in the early 60's. The Navy
still flew them off of carriers in the Tonkin Gulf until
late 1965???

Good airplane--so your point would have been?


And of course, the spooks had a slew of C-47 and C-23 cargo
haulers.

That would presumably be C-123, and they were also used by the USAF side,
alongside the later C-130's. And the last C-123K's did not leave USAF
service until the early eighties.

Brooks

--
Chas. (Drop spamski to E-mail
me)