Laos Pt.2: Mooney C-10B Hopi (Done, see page 2)

[zenrat]

Movement!

Just hope l stuffed enough lead in it.

Can't help you there.  I built mine wheels up.

[comrade harps]

Building this one a bit differently than usual. l've built the fuselage and painted it up with the side windows installed first. The cockpit windows and bulged observation windows will then go in. The wings and engines have been assembled and painted and will then be attached to the fuselage. Undercarriage and a few twiddly antennas then the decals last.

This assembly break down is to protect the side windows from errant dirty finger marks. The observation windows are also tucked up under the wings, so they need to go in at a time that the locations are still accessible. That's where l'm upto.

Not a fancy paint job on this one. All over olive drab. Simple as.

[Captain Canada]

Cool. I've got a pair of those in the stash, no idea what to do with them lol. Nice to see one being built !

[comrade harps]

Up to decal phase.

It's not the neatest build l've made. Rather crude, really, but somehow appropriate.

[Captain Canada]

Looking forward to seeing it !

[comrade harps]

Decals done and final paint touch ups completed. The backstory is written and just need to get around to the pictures.

And it's not a tail sitter!

[comrade harps]

Mooney C-10B Crucial Forge One Hopi
a/c 156767, 18th Aviation Company, US Army
Udon, Thailand, 3 July 1969
Crew: WO3 Jordan Morris, copilot/navigator WO1 James Sands and loadmaster Sgt Julian Green



Designed to meet a joint US Army/USAF/USMC requirement for a light twin turboprop STOL transport, the C-10 originated as a design by Stroukoff Aircraft. Stroukoff's was an unlikely win, as the company was small and in financial trouble. However, Stroukoff had been at the forefront of experimental STOL technology and its C-10 proposal featured the unusual combination of blown full-span double-slotted flaps and overwing spoilers instead of ailerons for roll control. The Stroukoff win was also a surprise because it beat competing designs from several bigger companies with greater lobbying power. Other than Stroukoff, the DoD received submissions from the following companies:

- Aero Commander - with a variant of its L-26/U-9
- Beechcraft - a version of its L-23/U-8 Seminole
- Cessna - a variant of its L-27/U-3
- Curtiss-Wright - a tiltrotor related to the later X-19
- Fairchild - with the Twin Turbo Porter (1 of which was later built as a private venture)
- General Dynamics - a tiltwing designed by subsidiary Canadair that was similar in concept to the later CL-84 Dynavert
- Grumman - whose proposal used the wings and systems of the OV-1 Mohawk
- North American - a twin boomer, this was similar to the later OV-10T proposal
- Summit Aviation - which proposed an Americanised Nigerian Aviation NA.28
- Vought, Ryan and Hiller - a joint proposal from for a tiltwing transport that evolved into the bigger LTV XC-142



Several submissions offered economies of scale due to commonalities with existing types, whilst others were over-engineered V/STOL types. However, the Stroukoff design met or bettered the specifications in terms of speed, range, weights, STOL performance and expected operating costs. Despite a late 1959 contract to build 3 YC-10 prototypes, Stroukoff Aircraft teetered on the edge of bankruptcy until purchased by the Mooney Aviation Company in 1960. The first YC-10A flew in January 1962. Due to its external origins, all C-10s lacked Mooney's characteristic tail design of a vertical leading edge and swept forward trailing edge. Some thought was given to changing it to the in-house style, but the US DoD declined the opportunity to pay for the necessary engineering and testing.



Mooney produced 936 C-10s in both short (C-10A, B, H, J and L) and stretched fuselage (C-10C, D, E, F, G and K) variants, of which the F and G versions featured a rear ramp that could be lowered in flight. These basic models were built or converted into numerous missionised varieties for US and export customers. Versions included AC gunships, EC ELINT, SIGNIT, EW and calibration platforms, HC SAR aircraft, MC special operations support versions, PC armed maritime patrollers, several RC reconnaissance, mapping and surveillance variants, TC crew trainers and VC VIP transports. Mooney delivered a further 504 civilian C-10s as the Mooney Monarch (a name that was officially a reference to a species of butterfly, but also a sneaky reference to its Beechcraft competitors, the Queen Air and King Air). Mooney also converted dozens of surplus C-10s to civilian configurations. 11 surplus C-10s were also converted to Cargoliner standard by Cavenaugh Aviation in the 1980s.



The C-10 became the primary STOL transport for the US Army through to the early 1990s. This was a result of the Johnson-McConnell agreement of April 1962. Made between the USAF Chief of Staff General John P. McConnell and the US Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, the agreement limited the US Army's fixed-wing transport aircraft to a maximum seated passenger capacity of 14. As a result, the Army transferred its de Havilland C-7 Caribou transports to the USAF on 1 January 1963. The terms of the agreement denied the Army access to the DHC-6 Twin Otter that emerged a few years later, restricting them to types such as the C-10, Helio's U-10 Courier and U-24 Stallion, the Fairchild Hiller OV-12 Chiricahua and Beechcraft's U-8, U-21 and C-12 series. In accordance with US Army conventions for naming aircraft after North American Indian tribes, the C-10 received the popular name of Hopi. The first Mooney C-10A Hopis were delivered to the US Army in late 1963.



In October 1965 the CIA and its associated air transport companies (Air America and Bird Aviation) were forced out of Laos following a failed CIA-backed coup. Unable to form a united command with the anti-communist Hmong, lu Mien, Patriotic Neutralist and Royalist guerillas that had been supported by the CIA (and which to varying degrees were involved in the coup attempt), the US and the Lao Issara government of Laos came to a new agreement for their ongoing support. Riled at the CIA for its actions and at the USAF for its indiscriminate bombing and use of CBUs and defoliants, the Lao Issara agreed to cooperate only with the US Army. Fearing that US-backed troops could be used (again) by the Americans in any future coup attempts, the Lao Issara denied the Army use of helicopters to support the irregulars. The terms of the Johnson-McConnell Agreement ensured that the Army's aircraft were unable to transport dangerous numbers of rebel troops within Laos; or supply sufficient logistics to sustain them. With UN combat airpower having been active over Laos for several years, the Laotian government required that the US Army aircraft and airmen involved in executing the agreement be fully marked and identified as such. For the Lao Issara, this served as a means of verification, but the US Army selected low visibility markings for the aircraft assigned to what it called Operation Tall Birch. As the service had to abide by the UN's public policy of non-intervention in Laos, missions into "classified locations" in Laos were flown by personnel sanitised of all US identification; associated paperwork hid their flight plans in a labyrinthine series of codewords and locations identified by alphanumeric codes with bespoke map references. Open source cover assignments included supporting UN COIN and civic action operations in Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.





Typical of foreign activities in Laos, the agreement was largely a fiction. As the US Army initiated Tall Birch, the USAF started Operation Bone Cold. This saw Caribous, C-123s and C-130s fly clandestine night missions to keep the anti-Red guerillas in the fight. As few rebel-held airstrips (Lima Sites) were night rated, the transports frequently resorted to airdrops to deliver supplies. Similarly, the work around for the Army helicopter ban was Operation Spring Quest, which used USMC choppers to support the Laotian irregulars. Although the Lao Issara knew about these dodges, they lacked the capabilities and the will to intervene and understood that this was an inevitable outcome; the Americans had also made it known that any attempt to publicise or intervene in these activities would result in the rapid destruction of the LNAF. This left US Army light planes to fly FAC and light twin turboprop transports to operate a logistics service in support of the various anti-communist guerrillas.





The C-10B modelled here was operated by the US Army's 17th Aviation Company at Udon, Thailand, on Tall Birch missions. It was modified to Crucial Forge One (CFO) standard by Air Asia in the Philippines in 1967. CFO Hopis were well equipped with additional equipment and navaids, including LORAN and a Texas Instruments AN/APN-165 doppler radar in a thimble nose radome. The conversion also added rear observation blisters that were associated with the need for loadmasters to maintain situational awareness with regards to surface threats and SAR tasks. Whereas the C-10A was pressurised, fitted out with a passenger interior and had a forward opening rear door, the C-10B was unpressurised and featured a quick change cabin for either passengers or cargo; a sliding door was installed to facilitate cargo access and airdrops. Flying into remote Lima Sites, the Hopi CFOs provided the US Army with a discreet organic airlift capacity to directly support the secret war in Laos. Short and long fuselage versions of the C-10 airlifted supplies, transported advisors, conducted SAR and evacuated casualties. They also served as radio relay and SIGNIT platforms on occasion, undertook leaflet drops, night flare sorties and flew photo reconnaissance missions.





This C-10B met an unfortunate fate on 3 July 1969. Flying in support of Operation Off Balance, the Hopi was on a mission to airdrop urgently needed supplies to a Hmong unit amid monsoonal weather that limited UN airpower to just 24 sorties over Laos that day. The crew of pilot WO3  Jordan Morris, copilot WO1 James Sands and loadmaster Sgt Julian Green had flown the route several times before and volunteered for the sortie. Flying low through driving rain, they were turning onto their initial point at the top of a valley when they were hit by windshear. Losing control, the plane came crashing down for a wheels-up landing in a rice paddy. All men survived, but were injured and had to endure a 2 day journey on the back of an oxcart to a Lima Site. They experienced torrential rain, road blocking landslides and a Patho Lao ambush along the way. Another day passed before a US Army OV-12A picked them up. Back at Udon, the crew members were hospitalised for several days, given leave and returned to duties in mid-August.




In the book Missions to Nowhere: eyewitness accounts of the UN's secret wars in Southeast Asia (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Jordan Morris wrote the chapter I Wasn't There: a US Army pilot's sorties north of Thai airspace. In it, Morris explained that, officially, he had never flown into Laos during his military career. Laos was, publicly, off limits to UN military aviators at the time. Instead, all his "flights into neutral Laos were to numbered airfields (Lima Sites) and codenamed positions with bespoke map references instead of longitude and latitude coordinates." Morris wrote that "no Army documentation related to our flights specifically mentioned Laos. To anyone without a need to know, we were flying in Thailand, Burma and Malaysia. North of the Thai border it was all euphemisms and merely being where we were ordered to be."

[zenrat]

Very good Comrade.  Love the look of an MU-2.

 

[loupgarou]

Very nice build, and a very interesting backstory.

[comrade harps]

Very good Comrade.  Love the look of an MU-2.

 

Thanks.

Yes, the MU-2 does look sweet. Maybe l'll invest in a long fuselage version and militarise it as per the backstory, an AC or MC version.

[Old Wombat]