Lockheed C-130: The Four Horsemen Demonstrated the Power of the New Aircraft

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Billie Mills, a veteran 774th pilot who often flew with the Four Horsemen, also served with the 463rd at Clark. On May 12, 1968, Mills was one of a handful of C-130 pilots who braved devastating enemy fire to rescue allied troops surrounded by a larger enemy force at a Special Forces camp at Kham Duc, South Vietnam.

Today the memory of the Four Horsemen lives on in the 16mm film Lockheed produced. To make that 15-minute movie, a motion picture company hired by Lockheed shot thousands of feet of film of the quartet in action. The Horsemen themselves were not especially happy with the finished product once it was edited down. The voices of actors were dubbed into the film, including one with a nasal northern voice who claimed to be the ‘chief’ of the Horsemen. In reality, all the Horsemen were Southerners–Chaney and Moore from Texas, Aiken from Tennessee and Hatfield from Mississippi.

With the advent of the VCR, The Four Horsemen Story has been circulated through the C-130 community, though the VHS version leaves a lot to be desired in comparison to the film that inspired me back in early 1964. Airlift tactics have changed considerably since 1960, as the Tactical Air Command troop carrier squadrons became tactical airlift, then were transferred out of TAC to the Military Airlift Command after the end of the Vietnam War. By that time, close formation flying by troop carrier aircraft had already ceased, with TAC adopting the ‘in-trail’ formation as the standard for C-130s.

The Four Horsemen have been out of business for more than 40 years now. But the men who came up with a way to showcase the Hercules’ excellent performance and their remarkable aerial demonstrations are not forgotten, thanks largely to one short film and the lasting memories they gave everyone who witnessed firsthand their precision maneuvers in transport aircraft.

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Tags: Aircraft, Aviation History, Flight Technology

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