Skyraider with 5" gun in the wing????

[One13]

Hi,

Came across this while surfing the web- Skyraider with 5" guns (http://sobchak.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/the-biggest-caliber-internally-mounted-weapons/)

Never seen this before

It looks like a recoilless rifle from the flames coming out of the bottom of the wing in the picture where they are firing the guns. I wonder if they were single shot only? You would have thought rockets would have killed this idea off before it started.

[horseback]

Not a 5" gun actually--those are 5" rocket projectiles, if I read the text correctly, and interpret the pictures right. Sort of like a big airborn grenade launcher.

As a former destroyer saior, I tend to think in terms of the hundreds of 5" projectiles we had to load into our magazines periodically; those buggers weighed in at 50 lbs, or around 22kg. When our 5" guns were fired, singly or both at once, the whole ship would shake.

Not even a Skyraider's wings would stand up to that kind of recoil.

cheers

horseback

[erco415]

Oh, I like that!

[Airmail109]

Yeah either recoiless or some sort of low velocity motar type round.

[Choctaw111]

Very interesting. I have never seen that before now. How much ammo for each of those "guns"?

[One13]

I posted this in another forum and I was told five rounds per gun.
It never got beyond testing stage though.

[TinyTim]

Interesting, mounting such weapon on an airplane in the times when rockets were very common and able to be mounted on an existing aircraft without major modifications. Thanks for sharing.

Russians experimented with recoilles big calibre rifles on airplanes back in thirties. This is a Tupolev I-12 prototype from 1931 with two 76,2mm (3in) recoilles rifles in the booms. Each gun carried two shells, and could be fired separately, so pilot had 4 shots. Project was abandoned after one of the booms exploded in an unsuccessful firing of the weapon. It must have been quite a lottery especially considering pilot had a difficult way out due to rear prop.

http://airwar.ru/image/i/fww1/i12-i.jpg

http://www.aviastar.org/pictures/russia/ant-23_1.jpg

[Art-J]

From info I got in one of my books, the project of using short 5 inch rockets (stabilized by rotation!) in Skyraider started in april of '45. The primary idea was to redesign a wing to find a place for a total of 40 such rounds, but tested airframe number 09094 was modified to carry just six per each "gun" (maybe it was five in the wing plus one in the breech?). The plane went through a series of tests (both on the ground and in the air) in Naval Ordnance Test Center in Inyokern CA, during 1946 and '47, but as One13 noted, this variant never went into production. Fancy looking concept though http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif!

Cheers - Art.