C-130 Hercules in the RAF

The Lockheed C-130 Hercules has been in service with the RAF for over 50 years, providing outstanding service and versatility. It was designed to carry a wide variety of cargo over long distances and has played a key role in humanitarian missions, conflicts, and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With an expected retirement date of 2030, the Hercules has a service career lasting 64 years of continuous operations.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 15 May 2018
Publisher: Amberley Publishing

From its inception in the mid-1960s, when the first aircraft were delivered, through the various humanitarian missions, the Falkland Islands conflict, and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, right up to the introduction of the J version, the Lockheed C-130 Hercules continues to provide outstanding service with the RAF. With an expected retirement date of 2030, this would total a service career lasting for a staggering sixty-four years of continuous operations. Designed with an internal hold the same size and dimensions as the American railroad boxcar, the Lockheed C-130 Hercules could carry a wide variety of cargo over distances of up to 2,950 miles. It offered a great improvement over the eclectic mix of its predecessors, the Blackburn Beverley, Handley Page Hastings, and Armstrong Whitworth Argosy, all of which continued to provide support, albeit in a secondary role, within RAF Transport Command once the Hercules was introduced to service. This gave an advanced leap in transport capabilities that the RAF had never had at its disposal until the Hercules joined the active inventory. This book tells the full story of one of the most important aircraft in RAF service over the last fifty years. A workhorse that is also astonishingly adaptable for a range of specialized operations, the Hercules is capable of carrying troops as well as vehicles, moving men from one location to another in peacetime training or inserting special forces teams on clandestine operations in time of war.

Weight: 278g
Dimension: 235 x 169 x 8 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781445652078