Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Maverick on August 04, 2009, 01:33:10 PM
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The last training flight of a T37 also known as the "tweet" was flown on the 17th of June. The last 4 operational models of the birds, after a retirement ceremony at Sheppard AFB, will be delivered (if not already by there by now) to the AMARC section of Davis Monthan AFB. During it's career the tweets trained 78,000 pilots for the Air Force from 1957 to 2009.
This does not include the combat version of the same bird, the OA37 or observation attack version of the aircraft which was retired some time ago. Think bird dog.
Well done and not a bad career spanning 42 years of service. :salute
This was the front page article of the Desert Lightning News for the July 31'st edition at DM AFB.
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Wow, thats hard to believe. What are they going to use now? F-16s?
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Wow, thats hard to believe. What are they going to use now? F-16s?
(http://xea.xanga.com/cb1f202440d30250857340/w199132812.jpg)
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During it's career the tweets trained 78,000 pilots for the Air Force from 1957 to 2009.
My Dad was one of them.. Too bad to see those birds go.. :salute
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Just a side note. Today marks the 54th anniversary of the maiden flight of the U2 prototype.
Sorry to see the T37 go. It was a great aircraft.
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I enjoyed flying the tweet. Just a bit shy of 1000 hrs in them. It was a great primary trainer, forgiving and very teachable. You could really let a student go out and make mistakes in them that would tear the new T-6 apart.
I'll miss them, even though they were loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. It's a shame they weren't modernized/rebuilt or the basic concept recycled into new-build aircraft. The T-6 just doesn't hold a candle to the T-37's overall value/utility IMHO.
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After receiving my primary training in one, I logged 161 sorties as a copilot in SAC. T-37s (and -38s at some bases) were detached to bomb wings to allow copilots to get decision making experience prior to upgrade.
The Tweety Bird was loud and unpressurized. On the plus side, it only required 5000 feet of runway and no external air to start.
Many great memories. Fort Smith FBO with the young girls and chocolate chip cookies. Easterwood field and a burger at the Cow Hop. Entering the pattern at Texarkana - "Number 2 behind the B-17." Flying in south Texas in a non radar environment at the top of a rolling cloud deck.
The end of an era. :salute
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Wow, thats hard to believe. What are they going to use now? F-16s?
(http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Edwards2005/Highlights/T38TakingOff_1.jpg)
Or the T-38, an older bird but still alot of fun I can imagine.
<S> Strip
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I remember seeing the tweet in Houston a time or two when I was doing some upset training. Would have loved to get a couple of hours in one.
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(http://www.derstuhl.com/ryan/eaa/images/DSCF0522.jpg)
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Hay! At least now they can pretend to be strippers and sit on poles. :devil
(http://x94.xanga.com/f42f60f629534251273877/w199499435.jpg)
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Hay! At least now they can pretend to be strippers and sit on poles. :devil
(http://x94.xanga.com/f42f60f629534251273877/w199499435.jpg)
Uhh strippers don't sit on poles that might be a bit painful. Unless the pole is very short at least.. :rock
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(http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/jelly_se_ad.jpg)
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Hay! At least now they can pretend to be strippers and sit on poles. :devil
(http://x94.xanga.com/f42f60f629534251273877/w199499435.jpg)
:lol
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I live near DM. Wonder if they are out in the open in the bone yard.
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There is a whole mess of tweets at DM but you have to be on the base to see them. They are across the street from the golf course.
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Saw another one today Mav.
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So the question is this....can you now buy one? I mean if it's no longer being used by the military could you buy one and have it flying as a piece of military history. Just a thought. Would be sad to just see them waste away in a bone yard or be cut up for scrap.
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So the question is this....can you now buy one? I mean if it's no longer being used by the military could you buy one and have it flying as a piece of military history. Just a thought. Would be sad to just see them waste away in a bone yard or be cut up for scrap.
Absolutely
u
gotta bid on it
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Now that would make a fun ride. :cool:
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:salute 6,000 pound dog whistle :salute
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I enjoyed flying the tweet. Just a bit shy of 1000 hrs in them. It was a great primary trainer, forgiving and very teachable. You could really let a student go out and make mistakes in them that would tear the new T-6 apart.
I'll miss them, even though they were loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. It's a shame they weren't modernized/rebuilt or the basic concept recycled into new-build aircraft. The T-6 just doesn't hold a candle to the T-37's overall value/utility IMHO.
Hey Eagle,
Did the tweets have full aerobatic capabililty or was it limited? Just curious.
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Hey Eagle,
Did the tweets have full aerobatic capabililty or was it limited? Just curious.
All planes have limitations. I have no idea about Tweet, but T-6 has 15 sec max being inverted.
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Toad is the guy to talk to about T38s.
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All planes have limitations. I have no idea about Tweet, but T-6 has 15 sec max being inverted.
Wow capt obvious. Nice non answer there.
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Hey Eagle,
Did the tweets have full aerobatic capabililty or was it limited? Just curious.
Full aerobatic, stressed to positive 6.67 and negative 2.5 (if I recall correctly... maybe it was neg 4, can't remember). We added a prohibition against intentional negative-G flight due to the age of the oil system and potential for temporarily starving the engine of oil, and snap rolls were prohibited due to the violence of the maneuver depending on entry speed. But otherwise fully aerobatic and incredibly predictable.
I think the negative G flight limit was 30 seconds because that's how much fuel the inverted reservoir would hold.
I was doing a little "follow the leader" maneuvering against another IP in a second T-37 (technically it was our "extended trail" exercise but we flew more aggressively when it was just instructors in the planes) and at one point, I found myself inverted with very low airspeed and with the other guy about 1000 ft behind me. Knowing that our flight paths could not intersect due to the geometry of the situation, I thought I'd give him a little suprise. I gently pulled the plane almost into the stall (an experienced pilot can feel this by varying amounts of airframe buffeting) and nudged just a tiny bit of rudder to get the nose rotating. I let the plane rotate 180 degrees and halted the rotation by easing off on the stick and applying opposite rudder, still inverted and doing only about 60 knots. It wasn't a tail slide or anything prohibited, but because of the geometry of the maneuver I was inverted, still climbing with positive G's, with essentially no forward airspeed and drifting away from the other plane, but I was pointed right at him. It shocked him so much that since he was also very near the stall, his instinctive twitch on the controls sent him into an impending spin entry. Since I was still fully under control, I was able to flop right down onto his 6 as he fluttered on past. Of course that sort of position change isn't allowed under the "extended trail" exercise, so we knocked it off and set up another exercise :) Good clean fun, within the rules/regulations, something we did to improve our mastery of the plane and make us better instructors.
My point is that the plane was a joy to fly especially once you figured out exactly how much the plane would give you and where it would bite you in the butt. We taught the students to fly in the center of the envelope and how to recover back to the center if they went out of control, but as instructors we could go out and explore the WHOLE envelope because the plane was so durable and forgiving. The T-6, not so much... If you try to do that with a T-6 the prop would probably fall off or something else yet equally disastrous would happen.
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Be interesting to see what they will come up with to replace the white rocket with wings. The C model 38 is definitely not the A model my father flew as an IP.
A tweet as a private plane would be a ton of fun. Anyone know the range with external fuel?
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As I recall, it is not easy on fuel.
With the wing tip tanks (T-37C), I think the range was right at, or just over, 1,000 miles and without wing tip tanks it was around 450,...460miles.
Trying to dust off the memories here, but I seem to recall the fuel burn rate at around 150 to 160 GPH.
Eagl, you have a more recent history of with the plane. Please correct me here as it has been more than a couple of decades for me.
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Yea, the T-37 engines were not very efficient and the wing is big/fat, so it gulps fuel. As has been pointed out many times, the Tweet's main purpose was really to convert jet fuel to noise...
It would hold right around 340 gallons, and at medium-low altitudes it would empty the tanks in somewhat under 2 hours. If you went up high (20-25k) you could stretch it to a legal 2.5 hour flight with about 20 minutes reserve at 10,000 ft, but realize that's about 2 hours at 20k+ in an unpressurized cockpit, which can lead to the bends or other physiological problems beyond merely being fatiguing.
Med alt cruise was somewhere in the ballpark of 1000-1200 pounds per hour if I recall correctly. Range could be stretched to over 500 miles at high altitude, depending on winds but a comfortable range for planning was 350-400 miles, with reserves.
NASA put a LOT of money into a whole family of small jet powerplants, with the objective of transitioning light commercial aviation and some high-end private aviation away from piston engine gasoline powerplants. The result was a wide range of very high quality and relatively "cheap" jet engines, from 300 to 3000 lb thrust. And they cost "only" about $1 million each, with a time between overhauls over 1000 hrs. The very light jet industry profited from this in a big way, but we could also have dropped a 1200 or 1500 lb thrust engine into the tweet and given the plane a whole new character. Those engines just sip fuel and are very reliable, so we'd probably double the endurance while giving the tweet a larger single engine safety margin due to more installed thrust (original motors put out maybe 900lbs once installed).
But they didn't.
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There's an outfit who is working on a mod to the Paris Jet to use a single JT-15D (Citation 500 series/Beechjet/T-1 the AF already operates) instead of the 2 fuel suckers installed on it.
Seeing the inside of the engine compartment I couldn't imagine a Tweet would be much different to do something similar and the AF has lots of experience maintaining the Pratt JT-15D on the T1. I'd rather be in front of a single JT-15D than behind a single PT-6 personally. I also imagine that some of the Williams engines used on the CJ series of airplanes would do even better than the Pratt in terms of fuel economy. Shame to see the airplanes parked. :(
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They had one incomplete tweet engine at the school where I got my A&P along with more modern engines including several that were from other military aircraft. The instructor told us that the engine came from a tweet and was part of a group of non functional but fairly complete engines, mock ups and cutaways that came from the Air Force surplus and was donated to the school. The engine instructor said part of the tweet's barrel shape was because of the engine in it. It was centrifugal compressor rather than a much slimmer true turbine compressor. The engine, when vertical in an engine stand looks much like a kettle drum.
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They had one incomplete tweet engine at the school where I got my A&P along with more modern engines including several that were from other military aircraft. The instructor told us that the engine came from a tweet and was part of a group of non functional but fairly complete engines, mock ups and cutaways that came from the Air Force surplus and was donated to the school. The engine instructor said part of the tweet's barrel shape was because of the engine in it. It was centrifugal compressor rather than a much slimmer true turbine compressor. The engine, when vertical in an engine stand looks much like a kettle drum.
A bit of trivia - apparently a tweet motor will run in about 2 inches of standing water/mud. A T-37 ran off the runway many years ago, and the gear collapsed due to side loads in the mud. The plane landed in a pool of standing water/mud, and the crew was suprised to see that the engines were still running, sucking water/mud in the intakes and shooting it out the back.