Tweak My Ride

Willis Hawkins had many highlights during his nearly fifty-year career with Lockheed, but he considered the C-130 Hercules one of his greatest successes.

The worldwide community of C-130J Super Hercules operators surpassed the one million flight hour milestone in late April 2013. The million hour mark came slightly more than seventeen years after Lockheed Martin test pilots Lyle Schaefer and Bob Price took the first J-model aloft for the first time on 5 April 1996 from Dobbins ARB in Marietta, Georgia. That aircraft, an extended fuselage length Super Hercules, was delivered to the Royal Air Force after testing was completed.

The following images represent just a snapshot of some of the Skunk Works’ leaders and aircraft that pushed, and continue to push, the envelope of aviation.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, has a reputation for applying innovative solutions to practical problems. Getting personnel and vehicles off of roads with known threats, such as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, is one such problem. DARPA is addressing this problem in a program called ARES.

The Joint Precision Airdrop System, or JPADS, is a multipart, GPS-based method that allows for highly accurate parachute airdrop of cargo loads of various sizes from altitudes as high as 25,000 feet. And, with only a forty-minute flying time from Dyess AFB, Texas, to the extensive training ranges and drop zones at Fort Hood, the 317th Airlift Group has become a recognized leader in C-130 precision airdrop operations.

Every so often employees at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics are asked to clean house. They go through their desk drawers and file cabinets to discard old and unnecessary materials to make space for the new. This process often results in unearthing items of historical significance. This was the case in 1990 and again 2006, when concepts or advanced design drawings, reports, and other documents dating back to the 1940s and ’50s were found.

This Hercules packs a punch! Harvest HAWK is the armed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance version of the Marine Corps KC-130J tanker that has proven very succesful in Afghanistan.

Convair abruptly halted efforts on its losing Kingfish design when the CIA selected the Lockheed A-12 in August 1959 as a high-speed, high-altitude replacement for the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The CIA officially terminated Convair’s work on Project Gusto—the project code name for the Dragon Lady replacement—in February 1960. The company received a final payment for work related to the program in January 1963.However, only ten months later, Convair used the predecessor to Kingfish — FISH — as the starting point for design studies for an A-12 replacement.

Collection of C-130 Hercules and C-130J Super Hercules photos.

World War II-era images of the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, California, that was camouflaged to look like a town from the air.