Geeze that thing is HUGE Mike!
How many feet off the ground are you in the pilot's seat when the mains touchdown on landing?
I've often wondered how responsive the controls are on jumbo jets as compared to smaller craft..
You would have to do some basic trigonometry, taking into account the distance from the main gear to the pilot seat, and the angle of the dangle of the fuselage in the touchdown attitude, which I'm wholly incapable of doing. Math in public is not my thing. :laugh:
I don't exactly know how high the pilot seat is when we're at rest; I've heard numbers like 35 and 42 feet, so it's somewhere in that neighborhood. Based on that, I'd guess it's about 80 feet from sphincter to pavement when the main gear touch down?
I was amazed at how responsive the C-5 was the first time I flew it. I came out of the C-141, which was like a half-ton pickup truck with no power steering. It was definitely a Man's Airplane. The C-5 felt like a big one-ton dually with power steering--it's quite apparent that it's much larger, but the controls are actually noticeably lighter and the roll rate seems faster. This is probably because the C-141 relied solely on ailerons for roll control, while the C-5 uses an integrated system of a pair of ailerons, and spoiler panels on the top wing.
When you turn a C-141, the airplane rotates about the centerline of the fuselage. You turn the yoke left, and the left wing goes down and the right wing goes up. When you turn a C-5, not only do the ailerons deflect, but spoiler panels go up on the inside wing, killing lift. So in a left turn, the airplane rotates around the #3 engine, and in a right turn, around the #2 engine. You don't really notice it when you're flying though.
Due to the high wing, high tail configuration, it is enormously stable on approach, and remarkably easy to fly. It actually handles exactly like a big, BIG Cessna 172. Get it all trimmed up, and you can just cruise down glidepath to landing. I used to fly the Boeing 757 and 767 for American Airlines (will be going back to the 737 about a year from now when my military hiatus ends), and in comparison, those things felt like balancing on a surfboard which is resting on top of a bowling ball. Not that they were bad, mind you, but they took rather more work, and thought.
I did a quick Google search, trying to find out the cockpit height, and couldn't find it. I did see that one person noted that the length of the cargo box is one foot longer than the distance the Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk. Also, the amount of 'wasted' fuselage space in the tail of the C-5 is actually larger than the entire cargo box of a C-130.
It's a lot of fun, and an enormously rewarding airplane to fly.
Our cargo load is always different--I've carried helicopters, giant boats, innumerable pallets of stuff (including, laughably, an awful lot of furniture for the state department as diplomats are moved from one overseas post to another), SEAL teams, jet engines, helicopter blades, armor kits for Hummers, armored vehicles, the President's limos and motorcade, and on and on and on. I've also been privileged and saddened to carry flag-draped caskets out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Japan (poor sailor got killed in a traffic accident...)
A friend of mine was tasked to fly one of the weirdest things ever--a giant rock-crusher. This was taken to Iraq to help expand the airfields there. Due to the huge overhang, it required huge wooden ramps to ease it up onto the airplane. The mission planners failed to account for the fact that those same ramps would be needed to offload it at the other end, so my friend had to do a LOT of coordination--imagine the circus that would have resulted if he landed in a war zone and they weren't able to get the cargo off!
The ramps were made of stacked plywood in sections, 40,000 pounds worth! So after this beast was loaded, they then had to break down the ramps in sections, and load them manually with forklifts. That made the airplane too heavy to take off with enough fuel to make it across the Atlantic, so they had to coordinate for a tanker for in-flight refueling, etc. etc.
It was an enormous undertaking, and unquestionably the biggest pain in the ass of his life, managing that whole thing. It put the whole mission in delay as it took something like 12 hours to load everything, and then they went to bed while a tanker was conjured up for the next day. He gave me these photos when I met him in Germany the next day on his way to the desert, and he was fit to be tied--he couldn't wait to be done with that mission!
BTW, notice that by sheer coincidence, this is exactly the same airplane as the one pictured above--70040, made in 1987.