O-1 Crashes at NKP
On the afternoon of 27 January 1967 at 504th
Tactical Air Support Group Headquarters, while a sergeant typed up my new
orders for the 23rd TASS at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, I read the
chart on the wall behind him. It
showed that already in the month, the squadron had lost 2 aircraft and had two
crashes at the base. Considering
that the 23rd TASS had only about 40 pilots assigned, those
statistics looked pretty grim. During
a briefing we were told that in 1966, 20 pilots, 2 passengers, and 59 FAC
aircraft were lost in the War in Southeast Asia.
The Group expected to lose 50 FAC birds in 1967 and already had lost 5
in less than a month. That meant
that the 23rd TASS had lost two FACs and the other four FAC
squadrons had lost three aircraft and maybe three pilots.
Obviously the 23rd TASS had a dangerous mission.
A couple of years ago, Keith Taylor sent me Xerox
copies of pictures of the two O-1s that had crashed at NKP in January 1967.
This first one spread the gear and bent the prop, so perhaps it was a hard
landing. The fuselage seems to be
intact, so this one probably wasn’t a ground loop.
