50 Years of Hercules

摘要

On August 23, 1954, Lockheed test pilots Stan Beltz and Roy Wimmer powered up the latest of their company's improbable designs, and after an 855-foot ground roll, pulled it up into the southern California sky on its first flight, bound for Edwards Air Force Base. Designated the YC-130A, the new airplane was the second of two prototypes built at Lockheed's Burbank plant. The aircraft looked nothing like its contemporaries. Its wings lay like a plank balanced on beefy shoulders. Power came not from great reciprocating radials but four General Motors Allison turboprops. Its aft fuselage sharpened to form a wedge capped by an enormous vertical fin. Its narrow landing gear dropped out of pods on the fuselage. Its flight deck lay beneath a multi-pane greenhouse and above a beak-like nose. It had an earnest, surprised, round face that only, as some have opined, a mother could love. Indeed, by Lockheed standards, the newcomer was exceedingly plain; one might have asked how a company that produced such glamorous aircraft as the Lightning, Constellation, Shooting Star, and U-2 could have brought forth the Hercules. But this ugly duckling would grow into something much greater than a swan. In time, the plangent roar of its engines would signal that help, in the form of food, fuel, medicine, materiel, or firepower, was at hand.