My Flight with the Blue Angels – Fat Albert Airlines

My Flight with the Blue Angels – Fat Albert Airlines

It was Saturday afternoon, the 22nd of May 2010, and I was at least a bit nervously buckling myself into the C-130. Why was I nervous? The C-130T that I was buckling into was “Fat Albert”, the support aircraft of the US Navy’s Blue Angels Flight Demonstration Team – and I was about to ride through the Fat Albert Airlines aerial demonstration at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point Airshow, in Havelock, North Carolina.

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It had been about a week since I’d been asked if I would be interested in taking the flight by 2nd Lt. Megan Long of the Cherry Point Public Affairs Office. I can’t remember my actual response, but do clearly remember thinking, “do people turn things like this down?!?” I’ll admit, it was a long week thinking of what was coming up the following Saturday. 2010 is the 40th Anniversary for Fat Albert, and I’d seen the demo from the ground at least a couple of times during at least thirty of them. It’s a short demonstration, right around ten minutes of flight time, but aggressive, down low and fast, with steep climbs, deep banks and tight turns – especially for such a large aircraft.

But now the day was here, and here I was – along with my fellow six passengers. After a quick introduction by our Flight Engineer, Gunnery Sergeant Ben Chapman, we were told that we had the run of the aircraft until the ‘crew show’, due in about fifteen minutes. I was laying on the ground looking up at the blue, white and gold C-130 through my viewfinder when I heard one of my fellow passengers address someone who had just walked up,

“So, you’re the guy in whose hands we’re placing our lives?”
Standing up it was handshakes and intros all around,
“I really wish you wouldn’t put it that way, I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, and I’m not even actually a pilot – but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night!”

I could see how this flight was going to go…

He asked us to come back to the cargo ramp for the crew and passenger briefing. The crew brief was fast and to the point – takeoff time, runway, weather and a fast run-through (and I do mean fast) of the whole demonstration including entry and exit airspeeds and altitudes for each maneuver, safety and emergency information – by NATOPS checklist – and that any member of the crew could call “knock it off” to abort the demonstration in case of an emergency. The passenger briefing went over much of the information of the crew brief, but at a slower speed, for those of us who hadn’t been through something like this before. I have to admit, standing at the foot of the cargo ramp and in the excitement of knowing that I was about to go flying, I probably caught about half of it. “Has anyone ever been airsick before? As you enter the aircraft, we’re going to hand a bag to each of you. Please take the bag. I’d really rather you had it and not need it, than need it, but not have one.”

We then received our seating assignments. I’d been hoping for a cockpit seat, there are two for passengers, but didn’t get one. I was going to be in the right-hand paratroop jump door seat, behind the wing, and just at the top of the cargo ramp, “you’ll get a better feel of the G’s there”. We had five minutes to engine start – time to load up.

“Seat” is probably a bit of an exaggeration when describing where I was sitting – it wasn’t actually much more than a metal stool mounted to the floor, but it provided me a great view of both the Hercules’ cargo bay and, via the large window in the troop jump door, the outside. We were told that “there is not a bad seat in Fat Albert” and they are right, although I was surprised to look up over my head and just forward, to the upper part of the fuselage, where there is a clear dome in the skin. Under the dome there was a seat belt mounted to a six-inch wide aluminum structural member at the top of a ladder where one of my fellow passengers, a Cherry Point-based C-130J pilot, was climbing. While I’m fairly sure that the aircraft manufacturer never intended it to be a PAX seating position, I can only imagine the 360-degree view that he was going to get!

“You can hang on here’ or here, or here”, says the Fat Albert crewmember, “you can hang on to anything except this”, as he points to the yellow painted door release handle. “It wouldn’t be a good thing if the door were to open…”

As our takeoff time approached the aircraft’s Auxiliary Power Unit came online and within seconds I could hear and feel the first of the Allison T56-A-16 engines begin their start sequence. There’s bleed air through the crossflow to the start valve, experience allowed me to almost count the RPM’s, there’s oil pressure coming up…fuel flow…ignition…RPM’s increasing…and up to idle.

Fat Albert isn’t a machine sitting on a parking ramp any longer, she’s alive, any Crew Chief will tell you that there’s more to an airplane than just a machine once the engines are powered up. There is life there, you can hear the engines breathe, feel the hydraulic heartbeat. She wants to fly, to be in her element…

Just the sound and the feel momentarily takes me to another place and time – this wouldn’t be my first C-130 flight – my last was nearly twenty years ago as a Sergeant in the Air Force in September of 1990. I was in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and it was incredibly hot and humid. I’d been awake for more than 36 hours. Listening to those same engines, we’d lift off, and I’d have the opportunity to watch from the cockpit as we flew across the Saudi desert, to Riyadh, and then back to the Persian Gulf – to Doha, Qatar, which would be my home for the next seven months throughout Operations Desert Shield and Storm. All through that time, in an era before e-mail and instant worldwide communications, C-130’s would come to mean a lot to us through the nightly Desert Camel and Desert Star flights. The big Herks meant contact with the outside world, supplies and equipment, friends coming and going, newspapers, and occasional orange bags of “Any Servicemember” letters, care packages and mail from home…

In an instant I was back to the present as the brakes released and we rolled forward and began our taxi towards the runway. The T56’s are loud, even through the earplugs, although not uncomfortably so, but they do sound powerful even at their current low power setting. We taxi quickly out to the runway with the rear ramp open, make a turn to the left, and begin our backtaxi. The ramp comes up and the upper door closes as we make a 180 degree turn on Runway 14. I can see out my door window that we are aligned down the runway. It’s time. I never liked roller coasters…

“Fat Albert, you are cleared for takeoff…”

The engine noise rises to a crescendo as the nearly 20,000 shaft horsepower is brought to bear – at 110,000 pounds takeoff weight we’ve got the same power to weight ratio as a 2011 Corvette ZR1 – and the engines are surging against the brakes. Suddenly we’re thrown backwards as the props bite into the air and were accelerating down the runway. In my mind, even above the incredible 110-decibel sound, I can hear the opening of Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train” that is played to the crowd on the ground during the takeoff. I’m surprised that the Fat Albert crew is braced, but not sitting or strapped in any way.

In barely seconds there’s a slight sensation of lift, and looking out the window, I can see that we’re off. “We’ll be climbing to between five and six feet at takeoff and accelerate to over 200 mph…” according to our pilot during the brief.

Wait, let me stop there for a minute – yes, you read that right – we’re in a relatively large cargo aircraft, weighing in at over 100k pounds, landing gear raised – now take a second while you’re reading this, stand up, and we’re AT THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD accelerating down the runway!

I know what’s next.

Out my window I can see us coming to the Blue Angel Hornets marking the show center, and PULL, the ground leaps away at a crazy angle, and I’m pushed down into the seat at 2G’s. We rotate to 45 degrees of climb, roughly four times that of an airliner, as the airshow rapidly descends away from my window. I can feel the aircraft slowing as we reach the apex of our climb, and then the nose goes over. I’d been told to leave my seatbelts loose to get “the full effect”, and I got it as we quickly reached zero G’s and I lifted six inches straight up off of my seat. Looking around, the Fat Albert crewmember who was braced during takeoff, was now holding a handle on the opposite troop door and floating probably five feet above the floor.

We were weightless and I’ve got a smile that just won’t go away.

For the next ten minutes we were hanging on. The flight was rough, but once again, not uncomfortably so. I’m not sure the engines left the firewall at all. Sixty-degree banks in all the turns – which felt like much more – pushed us back into our seats. For the most part, I was never completely sure where we were in the routine, although by looking out the window it was clear when we hit 370 mph at sixty feet altitude during the run-in to the high-speed flat pass. It was the lowest altitude – roughly half the wingspan of our C-130 – and the highest speed for the flight.

I spent a good part of our flight staring at our shadow flashing by over the airshow, buildings and trees on the ground, all the time being lifted up, and being pushed down into the seat, not even trying to lean into the banks – just riding with it, trying to take it all in.

All too soon we climbed to 1,200 feet, nearly our highest altitude for the flight, and I could see and hear the flaps begin to lower and the reduction in engine power. I lean forward as Fat Albert rapidly decelerates down to 110 mph. It feels like were almost hanging in the air, when a second later we are – weightless again, and more of a surprise this time – as the nose goes down in a 25-degree descent to the runway. We’re dropping alarmingly quickly, at eight times the rate of an airliner, and the ground is coming up quickly.

“We might land pretty hard,” says the Fat Albert crewmember, still standing, braced next to me.

At the very last moment our descent levels off and we touch down, believe it or not, gently. For the first time in the flight, I do brace hard with my legs and grab the doorframe, as the engines accelerate again to full reverse.

The deceleration is as dramatic as the acceleration was on takeoff, and we’re stopped in less than 1,200 feet – lifting the nose wheel nearly four feet in the air at the final stop. With a turn to the crowdline and a flash of the landing lights, up in the cockpit the escape hatch is now open and the American flag is now waving in the breeze. Once again the cargo ramp is opened and we taxi back to our parking area. We make one last turn, come to a stop, and with the throttles back to cutoff, the props wind down to a halt. Fat Albert, quiet now, awaits her next mission.

That smile from the takeoff is still there. What an absolutely incredible ride.

Seatbelt unbuckled, I happily hand my empty ‘convenience bag’ back to the crewmember and step back down the crew stairs and back onto the MCAS Cherry Point ramp.

“What? Nobody puked? We almost always have at least one!” the crew congratulated us. It was a good time for some questions and answers with the entire crew and some pictures in front of the big bird.

They explained that the airshow at MCAS Cherry Point is a homecoming of sorts for the proud Marine Corps Fat Albert crew. The Marines train all of their Hercules crews in Havelock, so they all start their careers here.

Too soon it’s time for final handshakes and thanks, and we’re back in the van – although I think all of our minds were still up in the airplane. Whenever I hear the sounds of T56’s winding to life in the future, I’ll have an entirely new unforgettable memory to look back on.

I have to sincerely thank 2nd Lt. Megan Long and all those in the Public Affairs Office at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, as well as all of the members of Blue Angels and especially those of the all-Marine Corps, Fat Albert Airlines.

Here’s to 40 Years of Fat Albert not only hauling the load around the world, but also entertaining the crowds. Best wishes for the next 40.

Mike Kopack, Jr.

To see the full sized photos, I invite you to visit:
http://www.lucky-devils.net/cherrypoint/ride.html