From: chance wolf (chance_wolf@shaw.ca)
Date: Sun Apr 17 2005 - 10:58:03 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Tighe" <larryradio@worldnet.att.net>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: [MV] Helicopter Sealed Bid at Surplus Property
> It is one very expensive mil veh to operate, for sure.....main't ain't
cheap
> and neither are parts. I often wondered if the Vietnamese were removing
> data plates from machines left behind and selling them...lots of room for
> profit there, I'll bet!
When the North Vietnamese captured so much air materiel from RVN forces in
1975, they quickly rounded up everyone they could who'd been trained on the
equipment to turn it to their own use. I remember reading that at one point
they were using 100-plus captured Huey models in their own Air Force, though
by the early 1980's I think this had dwindled down considerably due to
attritition and lack of spares. The Vietnamese government apparently *did*
offer a fair quantity of Hueys on the international market sometime in the
mid-late 1980's, but I've no idea if any of them wound up changing hands.
(It'd be kind of cool to come across one with all the old-school avionics
and accessories still intact, but buying one of the VN gov't...hmm...lots of
baggage there. ;)
> I've flown CH-34's OH-23's OH-6's and UH-1 B and M's to Davis
Mothan....the
> most overwhelming experience to see this place from 50 miles
> out...glittering windshields of retired planes awaiting your arrival and
> your machine's final landing....upon touchdown, practically before the
rotor
> stops there's a crew out there taping over vents and ready to tow it away.
> I didn't like that.
If you look at some of the pics from the Tucson-area scrapyards, you can see
stuff which came straight out from DM still with the mothball-plastic
shrink-wrap over everything, and right into the inventory of Joe Junkyard
Dog down the road. I can't quite figure out why AMARC will deal with those
corporations and not one set up by a group of collectors in X-State,
but...go figure. The junkyards themselves are oddly difficult to deal with,
and won't even reply to emails unless it looks as though you're in charge of
a foreign Air Force looking for 13,000 lbs of Class A Widgets,
Non-Locking -- presumably because they equate "collectors" with
"time-wasters" in the traditional big-corporate-America bottom-line sense.
Courtesy email replies come pretty cheap though, so...I dunno.
According to AMARC records, entire rows of Hueys have gone from AMARC
inventory straight to the scrapyards. From the pics I would say AMARC is
just removing the tailbooms and a few miscellaneous components from many of
them and selling them to the scrapyards directly after (i.e., otherwise
more-or-less intact, with no cocooning/mothballing of any description having
been done.) Quite a few have also been given to Colombia as part of some
MDAP-type scheme, and to be fair to AMARC, quite a number of Hueys and
various other aircraft have also been donated to outfits like Pima and other
museums/veterans groups across America and even the odd one to places like
Australia.
If you like your military vehicles with wings and want to check out the
holdings of the world's biggest government a/c boneyard, have a look at a
privately run website called "The AMARC Experience" at
www.amarcexperience.com Unfortunately the section showing the Tucson
privately-owned junkyards is down for the moment, but it's worth checking
back later because that section's pretty fascinating too.
I'd still like a UH-1H. It was such a pivotal military machine in terms of
redefining the way wars were fought, and the H model sort of the ultimate
expression of it in terms of sheer deployment. Now I just need a 53'
garage.
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