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Yup. Saw these when I was at Travis AFB in CA back in mid-late 70s. They were transient aircraft. Think they came down from McClellan AFB in Sacramento CA. Also saw them in the air shows back then. They were replaced, I believe, by a piston engine tandem trainer. Correct me if I am wrong.
Yup. Saw these when I was at Travis AFB in CA back in mid-late 70s. They were transient aircraft. Think they came down from McClellan AFB in Sacramento CA. Also saw them in the air shows back then. They were replaced, I believe, by a piston engine tandem trainer. Correct me if I am wrong.
The last Tweets flew out of Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, TX in 2009. Replaced by the turboprop T-6 Texan II.
The instrument panel of the was a real mish-mash of instrumentation, no real logic to where everything was located. Some of the Tweets I trained in back in the early 80s were older than I was. Wasn't very fast, was in fact underpowered, especially single engine, but was quite easy to fly. The engines took a LOOONG time to wind up, so it had a pair of thrust attenuators that deployed into the exhaust nozzles when at certain throttle settings, allowing the thrust to be reduced but the engine rpm to remain high enough so that if thrust was needed, it was available. There was a sound-on-slide lesson about the engines that reproduced the idle-to-mil (full power) time with audio of the engines... about 15 seconds.
As for the sound, I lived on-base during pilot training and the sound of the engines at night during engine runs is something I'll never forget. In fact, when a bunch of T-37s were running on the flight line during the day, it was obvious one was on a UPT base. When the crosswinds were too much (I think the limit was only 20 knots) only the T-38s were flying and it was so quiet.
I didn't do particularly well in the T-37, partly because of my own overconfidence in my abilities (I already had a civilian rating when I started UPT), and partly because of too many FAIPs (first assignment instructor pilots) that I flew with. In fact, I only flew my second ride and my night ride with an instructor with a fighter background, and 4 or 5 others with former B-52 pilots. All the rest were with FAIPs. In T-38s it was much different (yep, the T-38 was 10 to the 10th power higher in awesomeness) and my instruction was so different... it directly affected my class ranking at the end.
I believe they adapted the T-37 for the light attack role, calling it the A-37 Dragonfly.
They did, although the OA-37 did not have the same Teledyne engines of the T-37B. Instead, it had a pair of non-afterburning J85s (civilian version, GE CJ-610, found in early Learjets), with anti-FOD screens. I trained some guys from the Peoria, IL ANG who flew and loved the Dragonfly before their unit converted to the F-16. In Vietnam one of the engines was routinely shut down to save fuel... it wasn't very efficient (neither was the T-37).
In 1986 the Air Force retired the O-2 and the OT-37 was introduced to give the battalion ALOs/forward air controllers at Shaw AFB an aircraft to fly and maintain proficiency in. It was a line T-37B with the map case replaced with an FM radio. While I was flying the A-10 I flew support for the FAC course at Patrick AFB and that little jet was hard to see; its pilot-given nickname was the Chigger.
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