While flying C&C for LTC
Sidney "Hap" Hassard, I grew to know and appreciate the man.
Hap believed in leading from the front and was always trying to
get his C&C pilots to fly lower so he could shoot too. (His
M-79 exploites are another story... You havn't lived until a grenade is
shot through your rotor disk while in a steep turn..)
During this time he experimented with several ways to drop
explosives.
Hand grenades had too short of a fuse and would blow up far short of
the ground.
He tried putting a hand grenade in a jar and pulling the pin, but as
often as not the jar would not break.
He then discovered that the 250lb aerial bomb fuse and the 81mm
mortar fuse had the same size thread.
I don't know where or how he got them, but he scored a case of
bomb fuses.
Unfortunately, the small fins on the mortar shells did not offer
enough resistance to rotation, and would not arm when dropped.
This was overcome by hold ing the mortar shell out into the slipstream
until the fused armed and then was dropped.
(Did I mention that his nickname was Hap?).
So, in addition to placing skid or door mounted machineguns in
the XFB-23 we also had a bomb dropping mechanism.
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