Quote:
And from what he knew of with the pilots he knew was that is the Skyraider had one problem it was that the only limiting factor for use during combat was the idea that it carried enough fuel and burned it fast, but that the engines consumed oil faster and that was the limiting factor to their combat and loiter time over a target. Does anyone know if this is a true statement ?
I can only speak about my Skyraider in answering this question. My A-1E holds 380 gals in the center tank. I think the most common fuel configuration for combat was an additional external 300gal tank on the centerline. So, you have 680 available for your "mission". The Spad burns 330 gph at climb power, 100 gph at normal cruise, and 70 gph at very low cruise (16 squared). So let's just say in this config. you get @ 9 to 10 hours for a pure loiter mission, no combat/attack profile.
Oil- Holds 38gals, mine uses 2 gals per hour, but my understanding from speaking to a number of SPAD pilots that the Vietnam era aircraft were obviously flown much, much harder and leaks were not chased down as vigilantly as we might today. So let's say in this era 4 gals per hour. Using 16 gals as a bingo, you can see that oil could have limited a mission to 5.5 to 6 hours.
The problem with all of these calculations is because of the extreme versatility of the Skyraider there really wasn't a standard config. and mission profile. You could have flown the aircraft with three 300gal externals and had 1280 gals onboard, then you could have had a oil limitation for sure. Not realistic but possible.
The Sandy mission could have had very long holding/loitering periods. A close air support mission might have been a high cruise run in, with an attack and normal cruise home, probably 160 gph average.
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