2013 Photo Calendar Finalists

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 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.

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.

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

The 314th Air Wing at Little Rock AFB, Arkansas, trains approximately 1,800 C-130E/H and C-130J aircrew members annually—about 450 daily—from the US and from nearly thirty-five countries around the world. Close to 1,600 Hercules maintainers from the US and from more than fifteen allied nations are also trained every year.

Videos of C-130 Hercules.

The Modular Airborne Firefighting System, or MAFFS, is the US military’s way of giving the US Forest Service assistance in putting out forest fires.

For nearly thirty years, almost every airshow presented by the Blue Angels, the US Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron, began with the team’s C-130 Hercules support aircraft making a fiery, smoky, noisy jet-assisted takeoff. That era came to an end on 14 November 2009 as the crew of Fat Albert, the affectionate nickname given to the team’s C-130, carried out the last-ever JATO blastoff.

Delivery of the first C-130J to Gardermoen came only eighteen months after the US and Norwegian government representatives signed the contract for the Super Hercules.