The most important military transport within the U.S.’s arsenal can be considered one of the biggest planes on the planet—and its five many years of operation is value celebrating. With the power to swallow 50-ton foremost battle tanks and deposit them on one other continent, the Galaxy is a vital a part of the worldwide logistics system.
“[The C-5] symbolized the dimensions, power, might and majesty of america Air Force,” says Air Force Historian John Leland, and it still does to this present day. For a half-century, the Galaxy has kept America’s armed forces, allies, and far-flung scientists well supplied in essentially the most distant corners of the Earth, and it can proceed to do the job for the foreseeable future.
24,844,746 Ping Pong Balls of Big
It’s hard to wrap your head across the sheer size of the C-5.
Probably the most recent version, the C-5M, is 247 feet long. That’s twelve feet longer than an Airbus A380 superjumbo civilian jetliner. It has a wingspan of 222.8 feet, with each wing so long as a basketball court. The aircraft stands 65 feet tall, the equivalent of a six-and-a-half story constructing.
The Galaxy is so galactic it won’t fit inside many hangars. In some cases, the C-5 mostly matches inside, and the Air Force simply cuts a hole within the sliding doors for its whale-shaped tail to stay out. Other times, it just sits outside.
The C-5 was built to hold more cargo than every other plane. The C-5M can lift greater than 1 / 4 million kilos, and the roughly 34,000-cubic-foot cargo bay is large enough to contain one tank, six helicopters, or 24,844,746 ping pong balls. The gargantuan airplane can fly 5,524 miles with 120,000 kilos of cargo without refueling. With midair refueling, the C-5 has practically unlimited range.
Cold War Tank Mover
The C-5 Galaxy began with a requirement: The Air Force wanted a transport able to carrying all of the equipment obligatory for a U.S. Army division halfway internationally. While transports of the time, including the C-130 Hercules and now-extinct C-141 Starlifter, were big, they simply couldn’t handle a very powerful item: the brand new M60 foremost battle tank.
The M60 was 30 feet long, ten feet high, and weighed 50 tons. The Air Force issued a requirement for a brand new super heavy transport plane, CX-LHS, and set a performance goal of carrying 100,000 kilos a distance of 4,500 nautical miles at 440 knots. The plane that would do it will be not only the biggest airplane in U.S. military service, but the biggest airplane on the planet. It was a heady time in American history, when the country could easily fund a race to the moon, the Vietnam War, and construct the biggest airplane ever.
Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed competed for the contract. After a six-month deliberation, Lockheed won the contract to construct 58 of the cargo planes, while General Electric won the engine contract. In today’s dollars the C-5A would cost $268 million per plane. Boeing’s proposal didn’t go to waste. It could eventually develop into the 747 civilian airliner.
The C-5A was an ambitious airplane. Lockheed’s specs called for an aircraft able to carrying an out of doors load of 250,000 kilos, or 125 tons, for a distance of three,200 miles unrefueled. With a 100,000 pound payload, the C-5A could fly 5,300 miles. That was enough to fly from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to Torrejon Air Base in Spain, or from Travis Air Force Base in California to Yokota Air Base in Japan.
On this handout footage provided by the U.S. Department of Defense, Contingency Response Wing (CRW) porters support Hurricane Sandy Energy Task Force at JFK International Airport. Shots include rolling stock inside and out of doors a C-5 Galaxy, and interior and exterior shots of each a C-5 Galaxy and a C-17 Globemaster III. (Footage by U.S. Department of Defense/Milmotion via Getty Images)
The C-5 was projected to fly more and larger cargo, and do it faster and with fewer planes. In 1965, Gen. Howard Estes, commander of the Air Force’s Military Air Transport Service, said the C-5 would have radically sped up Operation Big Lift, an exercise that flew 15,500 soldiers from the U.S. to Germany.
“We used 234 aircraft [C-118s and C-124s], each flying one mission, and accomplished the lift in 63 hours,” Estes said. “By comparison 42 C-5As could do the identical job in just 13 hours.”
The C-5A could be able to landing on unprepared airfields now not than 4,000 feet. Following Lockheed’s tradition of naming aircraft after astronomical objects and bodies, the corporate named the flying behemoth “Galaxy.”
Hustling Cargo
The plane’s “cargo box” is 13.5 feet high, 19 feet wide, and 143.75 feet long. This adds as much as 34,734 cubic feet of cargo space, or what C-5 maintainers call a “warehouse with wings.” The cargo plane has outlasted the M60 foremost battle tank and might theoretically carry two M1A2 Abrams tanks, though only one Abrams is 50 percent heavier than the C-5’s maximum cargo weight. Alternately, a C-5 can carry 350 people plus equipment, six UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, and 6 M2 Bradley fighting vehicles.
Getting cargo on and off the Galaxy is rather a lot easier than it looks. The C-5’s bulbous nose is hinged, allowing it to stand up over the cockpit and providing full access to the cargo box. That is nicknamed the “knight’s visor.”
A ramp on the rear of the plane allows ground crews to drive vehicles directly onto the aircraft, where they’re tied all the way down to prevent load shifting in flight. The airplane’s landing gear—and 28 landing wheels—can hydraulically kneel to truck-bed height, allowing cargo to be offloaded directly from the plane to waiting trucks.
Despite its size, the plane carries a small crew: pilot, co-pilot, two flight engineers, and three loadmasters. The plane’s extreme range—it could possibly travel 7,000 miles without refueling—means it often carries multiple crews and has provisions for as much as 15 relief crew members. It might probably also carry 75 more passengers in airline-style seating separate from the cargo area.
A Humongous History
The primary C-5 Galaxy flew on June 30, 1968, and shortly began flying the transpacific run from California to Southeast Asia to support the Vietnam War. In 1973, C-5s were the backbone of an emergency airlift of supplies to Israel, which had been the victim of a surprise attack by its Arab neighbors. The airlift, nicknamed Operation Nickel Grass, saw the primary C-5 within the air ten hours after it began, with the primary plane delivering 194,000 kilos of supplies. Over a course of 145 sorties, C-5s flew a complete of 21,600,000 kilos of supplies, including tanks and helicopters, into the beleaguered country.
The C-5 flew cargo throughout the Cold War, particularly to Europe for annual NATO exercises. In 1990, it participated within the air and sealift operation supporting Operation Desert Shield, the hassle to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Months later, C-5s participated within the buildup that enabled Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait. Together the 2 campaigns formed the biggest airlift in history.
Along with Desert Storm and Desert Shield, C-5s took part in military and peacekeeping operations within the Balkans, Haiti, and Panama. After the attack on 9/11, C-5s ferried cargo into countries neighboring Afghanistan, after which the country itself, once an acceptable airfield had been secured. C-5s often accompany the U.S. president, carrying the vehicles of the presidential motorcade prematurely of Air Force One.
The C-5 could have carried the Space Shuttle. The Air Force converted two C-5As to C-5C status, modifying them to hold “space containers” that safely transported satellites and other payloads. The C-5C could also carry a complete Atlas IIA rocket and sections of the International Space Station.
The Galaxy has flown to Antarctica, too. In 1989, a C-5 flew to McMurdo Airfield in support of Operation Deep Freeze, the U.S. government’s annual resupply run for scientists studying the frozen continent. The C-5 carried 72 people and 84 short tons of cargo, including two UH-1N Huey helicopters. The ice runway, situated on the Ross Ice Shelf, was 10,000-feet long, 350-feet wide, and at the very least 7 feet thick.
Launching Missiles By Plane
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Lockheed’s super-heavy transport was even at one point evaluated as a launch vehicle for intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In 1974, aircraft Zero One 4 was loaded with a 43-ton Minuteman I missile. The Minuteman I used to be normally stored and launched from silo complexes within the Midwest, however the Air Force was investigating alternate basing schemes. Sooner or later, someone asked: What if we could air launch the Minuteman I? Unlike a silo, which is fixed in the bottom, an airplane flying over america was just about invulnerable.
On October 24, 1974 at 20,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, Zero One 4 opened her rear cargo door, and the long, slender missile slid out. The aircraft shuddered—the crew described it as just like “dumping a wheelbarrow stuffed with water.” A parachute slowed the missile’s fall, after which the solid rocket fuel motors ignited, sending the nuclear missile soaring high into the clouds.
The C-5 Galaxy also supported classified programs. The world’s first purpose-built stealth aircraft, the Have Blue demonstration plane, was airlifted out of Lockheed’s facility at Burbank, California in the midst of the night and whisked away for flight tests within the Nevada desert. The C-5 could carry the complete plane without having to disassemble it. F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters, the primary operational stealth warplanes, were also secret and flown from southern California to Groom Lake, Nevada.
A More Modern Aircraft
Perhaps the wildest version of the C-5 Galaxy never got here to be. The L-500 was envisioned as a civilian airliner with space for an astonishing 844 passengers, 50 percent greater than today’s Airbus 380. But as a military aircraft, the C-5 was built for performance, not affordability and fuel efficiency, and the aircraft would have been too expensive to fly as a industrial jet. Although there was some interest from the main airlines, the L-500 was satirically crowded out of the civilian market by the identical plane it beat within the military airlifter market—the Boeing 747.
Despite its limited industrial capability, the C-5 Galaxy goes strong, a half-century after its first flight. Even though it is not any longer the world’s largest plane (that distinction belongs to the Antonov An-225 “Mriya”), there are still 56 C-5s still flying.
Lots of these planes have been upgraded to the C-5M standard, with latest F138 industrial engines which have increased power, fuel efficiency and reliability, an all-glass LCD-equipped cockpit, a brand new autopilot system, GPS navigation and a hoop laser inertial navigation system, an all-weather flight control system, and latest flight and engine instrument suites.
The C-5 is such a giant airplane with a big historical role that it has develop into a flying representation of American military power. The C-5M “Super Galaxy” is projected to stay in service until at the very least 2040, at which point there’ll a requirement for a more recent—likely even greater—aircraft.
What’s greater than a Galaxy? We’ll discover.