I got this from a friend of a friend?? And it seemed like it almost met the live to tell requirement.

How The O-2s Really Got There

It's 1967 or maybe early 1968, I forget, and the Air Force has bought a mess of Cessna Super Skymasters and called them O-2s. The Cessna factory at Wichita, Kansas is pumping them out at a pretty good clip and your problem is to figure out how to get them to Vietnam where they are needed. Your choices are:
1. Fly them to the West coast and turn them over to the Army for transport by cargo ship.
2. Take the wings off them and stuff them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and fly them over.
3. Fly them over under their own power with no C-124 attached.
Question: Which method was used? Right! Every single one of those puppies was hand-flown across the Big P to Vietnam. That sounds like it might have been a Mickey Mouse operation. Believe me, it wasn't that good.
Air Force Systems Command (AFSC) was running that show and their knowledge stopped somewhat short of knowing anything about ferrying air­planes. The Air Force had a perfectly good organization called the 44th Aircraft Delivery Group which operated world wide and managed the ferrying of all aircraft; except the O-2s.
AFSC contracted with some outfit in San Francisco to deliver the planes to Saigon. The contractor hired a bunch of civilian pilots who couldn't find honest work elsewhere. Since the O-2s were technically "public" aircraft (as opposed to civil aircraft) no pilot's license was necessary to fly one and I'm not sure that all of the pilots had licenses. Some of them were pretty good, but the rest of them were the most god-awful collection of unquali­fied scruffy-looking alcohol­ics you ever saw. The dregs of the flying profession.
The deal worked like this. The pilots were given a plane ticket to Wichita where they got a quickie checkout in the O-2 if they needed one. Then they launched in bunches of four and headed for Hamilton AFB on the west coast of California. Enroute, they were instructed to carefully monitor and record their oil consumption, which, of course, they did not do. That type of pilot does not monitor and record oil consumption.
At Hamilton, the Air Force removed all the seats except the left front one. The seats were shipped to Vietnam by air, which is what should have happened to the rest of the plane, too. Extra fuel tanks were installed in the vacant floor space fol­lowed by the pilot himself. He had to crawl over the co-pilot tank to get to the left seat. Next, they installed an oil tank on top of the co-pilot tank followed by a small emergency HF radio on top of that. Now, the pilot was truly locked in. To get out, he could either wait for someone to remove the radio and oil tank or crawl out the emergency escape window on the left side.
Takeoff must have been something to watch. With all that fuel, the planes were way over max gross weight. They had no single engine capability at all for about the first five hours of flight. If either engine hiccupped, the pilot went swimming.
The route was Hawaii (Hickam), Midway, Wake Island, Guam (Anderson), Philippines (Clark) and Saigon (Tan Son Nhut.) The Hamilton-Hickam leg was by far the longest; nominally about thirteen hours. The O-2s were carrying fuel for about fourteen and a half hours of flight.
Navigation was strictly dead reckoning. The pilots took up a heading based on wind calculations and flew out their ETA hoping to be lost within range of a Hawaiian radio station. They had no long range naviga­tion equipment.
The fuel tanks were disposable and were dropped off as they were no longer needed. The fuel pumps were not disposable and the pilots were instructed to bring them back along with their dirty underwear and the HF radio. The trip was supposed to take about a week and each pilot carried an airline ticket from Saigon to Wichita to go back and pick up another plane. For this, the pilots were paid $800 per trip with the flight leader getting $1,000. They planned on averaging three trips a month and getting rich doing it.
How come I know so much about this? Well, I was the Director of Safety at Hickam AFB and every single one of over 300 O-2s passed through my domain and created almost constant headaches. Before this all started, I had no idea what an O-2 even looked like much less any knowledge of the overall ferrying scheme.
The trouble started with the very first flight and began with the extra oil tank. The reason for determining oil consump­tion on the Wichita-Hamilton leg was to know how much oil to add during the really long legs. There were no oil quantity gages. Shortly after takeoff from Hamilton, boredom set in and the pilots would give the oil tank wobble pump a jab or two and squirt some more oil into the engines.
The O-2 didn't need that much oil. All this did was overser­vice the engines which resulted in fluctuating oil pres­sure. The pilots didn't like that at all, so they added more oil which led to more pressure fluctuation. Meanwhile, they were totally lost and not getting much closer to Hawaii. Time for the old MAYDAY call on the HF radio.
When that call came in, the Coast Guard in Hawaii was running a very interesting seminar on sea rescue in downtown Honolulu. I was attending which is how I found out that we had an O-2 problem. The Coast Guard shut down the seminar and launched their C-130 and a pair of cutters to find the O-2s; which they did.
They herded them to the nearest runway which happened to be the Marine Corps Air Station at Kanehoe on the Northeast side of Oahu. I drove over the mountains to Kanehoe to find out what the hell this was all about. That's when I saw my first O-2; actually my first four O-2s. Aside from being ugly, they were all soaked with oil over­flowing from both engines and they didn't have ten gallons of gas among them. One had flamed out taxiing in from landing. They had been airborne for 14 hours and 45 minutes. The Coast Guard was really pissed when they learned the full story and was making noises about sending someone a bill for the rescue effort. I must say, I agreed with them.
That silliness continued for three or four weeks with every single flight of O-2s getting into some sort of trouble. At Hickam, the O-2 pilots were fairly easy to find. Most of the time they were draped over the bar at the O-Club; a situation which was attracting the attention of the Officers Wives Club; always a dangerous thing to do.
I went to PACAF Headquarters and told them what was going on and they were absolutely appalled. Civilian misfits ferrying Air Force airplanes across the Pacific to a combat zone? No way!
Between us, we began firing off messages to get this idiocy stopped. AFSC couldn't understand what the problem was and probably still doesn't. Hamilton AFB was taking a lot of heat for participating and allowing them to launch at all. I was agitating about the stupidity of this through all the safety channels. I think I may have mentioned that when the inevitable accident occurred, they better hope it was out of my area. If I had to investigate it, they were definitely not going to like the report. I was prepared to write most of the report right then before the accident even happened.
AFSC backed down and agreed to let the 44th Aircraft Deliv­ery Group run the operation. The 44th wasn't too happy about that because the civilian pilots didn't seem to take instructions very well. Nevertheless, that brought some organization to the festiv­ities which included things like mission planning, briefings, weather analy­sis, flight following and escort. The O-2s weren't allowed to fly unless accompanied by a C-47 or C-7 Caribou who could fly at their speed and handle the navigation. That wasn't much of a problem as there were two or three of those planes being ferried each week to Vietnam.
That procedure eliminated most of my problems and things settled down to a routine. The delivery rate to Vietnam was slowed somewhat, but I think more total planes actually got there because of it. During the entire process, only two planes were lost. One ditched due to engine failure on the Wake-Guam leg. The pilot managed to get out of the plane and bobbed around in his life jacket until picked up by a Japanese cargo ship. The other crashed in the Philippines killing the pilot. I never knew the circumstanc­es.
We had, of course, the occasional problem at Hickam. I remember one pilot who landed nose gear first and managed to snap the gear off completely and ding the front propeller. I went out to see what had happened and got a load of bullshit and a strong whiff of gin from the pilot. The plane (he claimed) was nose heavy on landing and the elevator trim was inoperative. He couldn't get the nose up. Furthermore, his transmitter was out and he couldn't tell anyone about his problems. I checked the plane and found the elevator trimmed full nose down, but the trim switch and trim tab worked just fine. Just to the left of the trim switch, I noticed that the micro­phone toggle switch was actually bent backwards. After several hours of martinis, the pilot was trying to trim using the mic switch. He trimmed the plane full nose down while trying to talk to the control tower on the trim switch. Case closed.
None of these accidents consumed any of my time. I had learned another quirk in the AFSC way of doing business. Appear­ances aside, the aircraft were not Air Force aircraft and would­n't be until they arrived in Saigon and were formally delivered and accepted. Since they weren't, technically, Air Force air­craft; they couldn't have an Air Force accident. The planes weren't regis­tered as civil aircraft, so they couldn't have a civil accident either. They were in regulatory limbo and any accidents were non-events. Nobody cared.
That suited me just fine. I had other things to do and I couldn't see how an investigation of stupidity would contribute anything to the Air Force safety program.
Incidentally, how do you suppose they got the O-2s out of Vietnam and back to the United States? They took the wings off, stuffed them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and flew them back. AFSC was not in­volved which, I later learned, tended to improve almost any operation.
Author contact Info:
Richard H. Wood
4563 El Dorado Way, #124
Bellingham, WA 98226
360-752-0199

Great story-- even though it's probably true!

Great tale. I would guess 100% factual, except about them being ugly...

Great story except - O-2s are not "ugly." They are tough, though. I have pictures (don't know how to post 'em) of O-2s with holes shot in them big enough to crawl through that came home and flew another day.

Best,
O-2

Interesting read. Can't imagine the knot in my gut if I tried that ferry flight. Also helps you understand why we're just about up to 15 trillion in national debt because of many of the decisions made by our leadership.

As long as we are talking about ferry flights, I have a 90 gallon Sorensen belly tank that fits champs, citabrias, decathlons, and scouts in case anyone wants’ to cross a pond, or go to Alaska without messing with Canada and customs??

I've heard that Skymasters are noisy beasts. I can't imagine flying for 13 hours in one. There used to be an O-2 in the hangar I'm in. It was in the exact condition as it was when it left Vietnam. Nothing had been updated or changed. It had the Airforce Dash One (POH) sitting on the seat. Was pretty cool. Rumor has it someone bought it and they ferried to another field after it hadn't been touched in years.

when I was in Hawaii last month a guy ferrying a 310 made it to 13 miles from his intended airport in Hawaii which I think was Honolulu.... Coasties picked him up uninjured... plane sank in 1000 ft of water...

I taxi past half a dozen O-2s every time I fly out of GXY. Some guy bought them, parked them there, pays the tie-down fee every month, and they just sit, kinda forlorn. I think it would take much moola and time to make any of them airworthy again.

When I was stationed at EDF, O-2s were in use by the Rescue Squadron. They'd go out to find any downed aircraft, followed by the hegilopters to do the actual rescue. O-2s back then were extraordinarily noisy. I think the civilian versions are a bit quieter, although not much.

A friend in Lander has a pressurized version--nothing but trouble. In fact, I think every one of them, pressurized or not, that I know about has caused the owner a lot of headaches. But they are interesting airplanes.

Cary

Those planes belong to Duff..he has the airplane junkyard at the NW corner of the old Stapleton Terminal.

We have a pile of Birdogs up here, they are owned by a company that contracts them out to the Ministry of Natural Resourses for fire spotters (they have something like 15 Birdogs). They are in the air all summer. Several of the water bomber pilots got their start spotting. The owner of the company has his personal plane retrofitted with two Corvette engines. Neat planes, but the expense of maintaining two engines and the gear would be an issue with most.

Steve

Not an O2 story but one about the ferry command.
Years ago I got to fly with a retired Colonel. He was a pilot of the era that got to fly just about everything. Lots of good bar stories.
For one year, after Korea and before Vietnam, he was assigned to the ferry command. Since he had flown quite a few of the fighters in the Air Force arsenal by that time he was a squadron leader in short order. There was no checkout, if you hadn't flown that particular airplane you got a 15 minute briefing. After all you weren't going into combat, just flying another airplane.
One fine day he was assigned to lead two formations of F86's to Nellis AFB. These were five ship formations. I forget where they started, somewhere in the mid-west or Texas. I think.
Anyway they blast off from wherever, about 10 minutes ahead of the second group. The trip was uneventful barring the weather in Las Vegas.
Not that it was that bad, 8000 overcast and 100 miles on your typical winter day in the desert. He lead his group down through the soup, breaking out of the overcast about 5 miles NE of Nellis then to an overhead break for landing. Just after shutting down he looked for the second group. Nothing. About the time the other pilots joined him on the ramp they could faintly hear the second group. They looked up and to the NE expecting to see the group just where they broke out of the clouds. Well, they did break out right on schedule, except the whole bunch was upside down. It took about 2 seconds for the pilots to catch a glimpse of ground where it wasn't supposed to be and all hell broke loose. They all managed to get on the ground but several of them had vertigo so bad they were sick for the rest of the day. So much for a nice evening in the O club.

In the debriefing it turned out the flight leader though he would play a joke on his buddies. While they were in the clouds during the letdown he slowly rolled the whole formation upside down. It was decided he wouldn't do that again.

That's them--guess I never counted them before when I said half a dozen. My hangar is southeast of where they're parked. They do look forlorn, don't they?

Cary