The Night of The Hunter
December 14, 2011 12:10 PM Subscribe
After
50 years of service, the
Lockheed P-3 Orion,
is standing down.
Based on the
L-188 passenger aircraft, it entered US Navy service in 1961, as a replacement for the aging
P-2V Neptune.
A year later,
Orion crews were
tracking Soviet targets during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Then off to Vietnam, to fly coastal patrol during
Operation Market Time.
It was at the
forefront of the
Cold War,
working with then classified SOSUS networks to
find,
indentify, and
prosecute Soviet ballistic missile submarines in the
Third Battle.
Just hours into the First Gulf War, a
classified P-3 variant coded named
Outlaw Hunter was overhead. As
ordinary as the plane might seem, Orion crews have always been whispered about for their
shady ops.
In April 2001 an
EP-3E Aries II variant from
VQ-1 was on a
routine patrol when
it was struck by a Chinese J-8 fighter near
Hainan Island,
creating an
international incident. The crew of 24 was captured, questioned, and
released after 11 days.
In its twilight years, the Orion has proven itself a
key player in the
Global War on Terror. It has found
pirates,
hurricanes,
drug smugglers and
survivors.
BRAVO ZULU my old friend.
My dad flew P-3's in the US Navy, and got to go to glamorous places like Adak, Alaska and Diego Garcia, Middle of Freakin' Nowhere. I didn't understand until adulthood exactly how serious their game of cat-and-mouse with Soviet missile subs was. Keeping track of those subs neutralized a potent first strike threat, and played an important role in the Cold War "mutually assured destruction" game theory.
My dad's squadron lost a P-3C that in the Bering Sea in the 70's. The incident was chronicled in the book Adak: The Rescue of Alfa Foxtrot 586. I remember playing Monopoly with one of the survivors in Okinawa when I was a kid.
Oh, and that Magnetic Anomaly Detector in the tail is pretty amazing for mid-20th-century tech.
posted by richyoung at 12:26 PM on December 14, 2011 [3 favorites]