1956: China’s C-130 – And A Look Back At The Lockheed Original

Senior Pentagon Editor Amy Butler and I spent the better part of Nov. 10 touring the Lockheed Martin aircraft complex in Ft. Worth, Texas, where we saw an F-35B hover in a test flight and got a close-up look at the F-35 and F-16 production lines (sorry – we weren’t permitted to take pictures).

Our visit occurred several hours after Avic revealed a model of the Y-30, a turboprop military airlifter approximately in the class of the Lockheed Martin C-130 at Airshow China in Zhuhai. As Beijing Bureau Chief Bradley Perrett reports from Zuhai in the upcoming issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology, a first flight of the new Chinese airlifter could take place as early as 2020.

The Y-30 would have almost the same gross weight as the Hercules and Embraer KC-390, but is being designed to haul payloads up to 30 tons, compared with 19.6 tons for the C-130. 

Aviation Week published an in-depth look at the original C-130 Hercules nearly 58 years ago.

“I took off my hat the first time I walked in here,” said a visitor to the aircraft’s cargo hold. “I thought I was in a cathedral.” That was a “slight exaggeration,” the article allowed.  But one wonders if our magazine’s editors at the time envisioned the C-130 enduring for so many years.

► Read the report in the December 3, 1956 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology:

USAF Receives Highly Versatile C-130 (part 1)

USAF Receives Highly Versatile C-130 (part 2)

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