March/April 2004 Air Enthusiast Review

[quote=Dataview Publishing]
Particularly chilling was the mention of an airliner crew
seeing a "Weenie Wagon" coming out of a cloud base in an inverted
spin. A major C-133 role was the transport of missiles - this was
avery delicate affair - the rails for carrying the Atlas ICBM had to
be placed with a 1.6mm tolerance! There are a number of interesting
illustrations, including a shot of a dissambled CH-54 (itself no mean
aircraft) being loaded into a Cargomaster. One thing I hadn't seen
before was a shot of a C-133 wind tunnel model fitted with twin
vertical tails and carrying a Saturn IB rocket stage atop its
fuselage.

Chris

I am the author of a forthcoming comprehensive history of the C-133 Cargomaster, and flew 1,875 hours as a navigator in the airplane and no one ever mentioned a C-133 spining down out of the clouds. In fact, except for Edwards test pilots, no Air Force pilot was allowed to even stall the C-133, much less to let it get into a spin.

The author of the article, Bill Black, ran the text by me before he published it but the tale of a C-133 spinning out of the clouds got by me. That never happened. I am convinced that it was a corruption of an actual United Airlines airliner crew sighting of part of the events of the last C-133 crash on 6 Feb 1970, near McCook, NE. That airplane crashed because an old skin crack on the left forward fuselage propagated catastrophically, throwing skin into number three. There was inflight fire at 23,000' which was visible to the UAL airplane some miles in trail, at night.

In my two years in the airplane, I heard several tales of the airplane's mythology (most of which proved to be true). A C-133 spinning out of the clouds would have resulted in a crash. Several of the C-133 crashes resulted from the airplane's dramatic stall characteristics. The typical stall, which had no warning, was a sharp right wing drop to as much as 70 degrees, the nose pitched down into an adverse yaw situation and recovery required 1,500 to 3,000 feet. Not until 1965 was a fix for the stall installed. It made the airplane stall level without a break to one side or the other.

Check my web site for more C-133 info:

http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/c133bcargomaster/home.html.

Cal Taylor
The C-133 Project
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