The first of its kind
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The C-130 Hercules was created to address deficiencies in the US Air Force fleet during the Korean War.
The U.S. military recognized the need for an aircraft that could take off from shorter runways and transport more soldiers and supplies on and off the battlefield. At the time, no aircraft could simultaneously achieve all the objectives the Air Force needed.
The Air Force requested designs for an aircraft capable of transporting large and bulky equipment over long distances, landing in tight spaces, slowing to 125 knots for paratrooper drops, and flying with a single motor if necessary.
Boeing, Douglas, and Fairchild submitted designs for this new type of aircraft, but Lockheed’s proposal ultimately won the bidding in 1951. To this day, Lockheed still manufactures C-130 models and their improved versions .
In a 2017 interview with Popular Mechanics, Lockheed Martin historian Jeff Rhodes said the design team took the largest piece of equipment the Army needed to carry, “drawn a circle around it, and this defined the diameter of the fuselage.
“The basic C-130, aft of the cockpit and forward of the ramp, is the length of a boxcar,” Rhodes said.
Three years later, the YC-130, a prototype of the later C-130, made its first test flight from Burbank, California to Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California. It took off after using only 855 feet of runway, a fraction of the 5,000 feet of taxiing required by most other planes its size.
The US Air Force has not stopped production of the C-130 class aircraft since its invention in the 1950s, making it the longest continuous production of the aircraft in history.
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