Hi!
I normally build fixed wing aircraft, but now I am working on Special Hobby’s AH-1G the XM35 gun system. The kit includes this pod carried under the left stub wing (actually 2):
I couldn’t find a reference as to what it is!
Thanks in advance in identifying it!
Jim
The inner one looks like an SUU-11/A gun pod, the outer an XM-157 rocket pod.
That is correct. The inner pods are for 7.62mm miniguns.
Cool! Thanks for your help!
Jim
Army ships carried a similar pod called the XM-18 not actually an SUU-11. That is an early single gun TAT -101 turret however.
Hugh Mills
[:D[
Jim,
Looks like you got the info on the XM18 minigun pod. That bird is “Bearcat 15.” She was used by the Army Aviation Test Board to test many of the modifications later incorporated into the AH-1G. I provided the Special Hobby guys with the refs. Good luck on your build.
Ray
I remember seeing one of the Cobras and a Huey doing practices runs, double-teaming a small field near my house I was about 8 or 9 summers old at the time. Were I grew up back in the 60’s the Army uses to pay the farmers not to plant their fields. The fields were small with a lot of trees around them,“they said that it was a lot like a small country in South East Asia”. I was just a kid at the time, but I can remember those days well. I hope all of those young guys, made it back, but I know a lot of them didn’t “I know”. The War in that desperate land came into our living room every night at 6:30 PM. I was caught between the cross-fire of loyalties. I had grown up on world war two movies, and TV shows like Combat and 12:00 Clock High. Now it looked like our guys,“two of my older cousins were there”, were locked in a war with no beginning, no ending, it was just going to go on and on. Then I read a book, it was Len Detons’s ,(Bomber) . That book changed the whole way I looked a war. It was about a mistake made, just a small mistake. The kind of mistakes that always happen in war, It’s no one’s fault, it just happens.The wrong people get hurt, everyone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And you wonder why, why do we do this over, and over again. Is there a cause? is there a war gene, some were hidden in our DNA ? There are no good wars, but there are wars that must be fought. And somebody’s son has to fight them. I have come to the conclusion that in the case of Viet-nam, we went there to help, to do the right thing, we kept a promise, our guys fought bravely and honorably. They did the best they could do, the best that anybody could. They just got caught in a cross-fire, we all did, even kids like me, but no one could ask more of a nation of honorable people to do anymore than this nation did. We did our best and then we went home. There seams to be a few of those guys on this form, well welcome home, I am proud to be among you…bigscaledave