This year Basler Aviation had a very unusual turbo-prop DC-3 conversion on display at the West Ramp. Although the critical equipment was missing, there was no ignoring the two massive machine-gun mounts, night-vision system under the noise, and cross-hair sights in the pilot's side window. This is a serious machine. Last year's display was nothing like this!.
Designed along the lines of the "Puff the Magic Dragon" planes in Vietnam, this plane has two fixed machine-guns aft of the wing. Aiming is accomplished by banking and turning the entire aircraft.
The semi-circle of flaps sticking out from the fusleage immediately in front of the cargo doors cover a series of exhaust vents. Just in front of the wing, two ram-scoops duct fresh air into the interior to blow away the smoke generated during firing.
For more information on this type of plane, here are a few references:
These photographs were taken at the 1998 EAA Oshkosh Fly-In (aka "AirVenture Oshkosh").
A note about the photographs: if a thumbnail picture is a link, clicking on it will load an image approximately 500x300 pixels large (~60Kb). Under some thumbnails is the word "huge". Clicking there will load the original scanned image of about 800x500 pixels at JPEG 75% quality (~200Kb).
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