Love of C-130 shared from father to son

Photo By Patricia Dubiel | Col. Thomas Hanley (last man in right column), Senior National Guard Advisor for the JRTC, approaches the C-130 J that will fly him and other paratroopers into the Geronimo Dop Zone July 11.  

LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES

07.19.2019

Story by Patricia Dubiel 

Fort Johnson Public Affairs Office

That was the case for many jumps made by Senior National Guard Advisor for the Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Polk Col. Thomas Hanley.
“My father, William Barrett Hanley Jr., worked as a test pilot and engineer in the Lockheed flight test community for 40 years, and flew nearly every notable C-130 variant,” he said.
“Back in April, there was a plane coming into the Geronimo Drop Zone that Keith Morrow (G3 Air) recognized as an older model C-130, and he told me about it,” he said. “I was going to be jumping that day, so I looked at it and saw that it was a C-130 H-model, a 1993 plane, and I took down the tail number — it turns out my father did fly the functional check flight for that aircraft, for Lockheed production delivery to the Air Force,” he said.
Hanley’s father kept exceptional detail in his aircraft log book, for every test flight he made. When Hanley joined the Army, his father told him to make note of the tail numbers of the aircraft he flew in, and he could look up whether or not he had flown it. The practice became a habit that Hanley has continued through three decades of service.
When Hanley made his first jump after Airborne School in 1989, the plane he jumped from was one his father had tested. On April 3 of this year — 30 years later — Hanley jumped again from an aircraft his father tested.
“My father passed Nov. 23, 2018,” said Hanley. “It is a great privilege for me to still touch an airplane that he flew during a flight test. I jumped from that aircraft at Geronimo Drop Zone April 3 in memory of my father. From time to time it’s nice to reflect and see his fingerprints in the sky.”
Hanley, who is also an aeronautical engineer as his father was, said the two of them would often have long discussions about the evolving design and mission of the C-130. Before he joined the military, Hanley spent a few months working with his father on some aircraft projects.
“That was a great opportunity for me,” he said. “It was nice to be able to work on the aircraft with him.”
He explained that during the heyday of NASA’s space program, an important purpose of the C-130 aircraft was to find and retrieve astronauts from their space capsules that landed in the ocean or remote areas.
“During NASA’s Gemini Programs (missions to put the first humans on the moon), there was a concern for flight crews becoming stranded in the middle of the ocean. The HC-130H program was created with two aspects to address the recovery of these flight crews — one was the direction finder that could pick up a signal from the downed pilots and hone in the rescue aircraft to that signal, and the other was pilot retrieval.”
Pinpointing a locator signal with the direction finder was cutting–edge technology for its time, according to Hanley, and a slew of aircraft (C-130 variants) were developed keeping this concept in mind, like EC-130Q, EC-130H (Compass Call), MC-130Hs (Combat Talon), KC-130R tanker and WC-130 weather airplanes.
“My father was a test pilot for all of these,” said Hanley.
But the HC-130H was not just a locator plane — it was also tasked to retrieve the personnel, and it did so using the Fulton Surface to Air Recovery System.
“The aircraft finds the downed pilot, then drops a raft and balloon system. The pilot gets into the raft, puts the balloon up on a long tethered cable, and when the HC-130C comes back for another pass, the pinchers mounted on the front of the aircraft catch the cable. A hoist then pulls him up into the aircraft,” he said. “The person in the raft will ascend at a speed of about 1G (equal to the force of gravity at the earth’s surface, or 9.9 meters per second).”
The pincer move was never needed to recover astronauts as originally planned, but the Special Forces community saw it as a potential method for personnel extraction and subsequently adopted the procedure as a regular practice, said Hanley.
Another application tested in C-130s was finding radio signals, either to gather information or pinpoint an enemy for targeting. That technology was developed to create a system of broadcast radio signals capable of keeping lines of communications open for U.S. forces (fleet to fleet) across oceans, in the event of electromagnetic impulse from nuclear attacks. This flight tested concept, then evolved to be useful for radio jamming enemy signals and attacking enemy networks.
“All these C-130 programs can trace their lineage back to the original model,” said Hanley. “My career sort of follows that same path because of the connection with my father.”
Using the C-130 family of aircraft at JRTC perpetuates the history of the aircraft, and acknowledges the lineage of its technology, said Hanley.
“Every rotation at JRTC demonstrates the capability of the aircraft,” he said. “But when we test different ways of using that aircraft — a new way we want to conduct airdrops or aerial delivery, configurations or with pallets — we are furthering that capability. The more you use something, the better the practice becomes.”
For Hanley, seeing one of his “pop’s” aircraft at JRTC is always a nostalgic experience, as he recalls the many conversations they had about the aircraft through the years, as well as life-long friends in the Lockheed flight test community.
“It’s neat to have had this connection with him,” he said. “Here was my father, an Air Force pilot-turned defense contractor to be a test pilot for Lockheed, and me — a paratrooper and infantryman — jumping out of his airplanes.”

• Date Taken: 07.19.2019
• Date Posted: 07.19.2019 11:47
• Story ID: 332147
• Location: LOUISIANA, US