Unique Beech Conducted Airborne Relay Mission During Vietnam
War
OK, imagine this. You're a young tiger right out of Air Force
pilot training, it's 1967, and the country's at war. You make your
three selections on your Dream Sheet. You want to fly Phantoms out
of Thailand, first; failing that, take the war to the north in the
F-105; and third choice, F-100s, dicing with antiaircraft guns to
protect American troops.
You get your assignment, and you're going to Thailand all right,
but to fly the QU-22. And as you realize the full implications,
your heart sinks... no glory for you. Just eight or nine hours of
flying holding patterns at altitude. And you're actually not even
first choice for that -- you're number two to a machine.
The QU-22, seen here, is a Beech Bonanza, but it's a Bonanza
with a difference. The tip tanks and geared engine (the geared
engine is responsible for the unsightly bump on the cowling) gave
the machine extremely great endurance. It was used to fly high over
the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and Cambodia, and was packed with
electronic equipment that relayed data from sensors all along the
trail back to Project Igloo White's operations building at Nakhon
Phanom, Thailand.
The sensors were an important part of Secretary of Defense
Robert S. Macnamara's vision of a high-tech "fence" preventing
North Vietnamese infiltration to the South. The entire project was
highly classified, and relatively few artifacts from it remain --
this unusual Bonanza is one of them. About two dozen QU-22s were
built. The original plan was for the machine to be flown as a drone
(hence the "Q" designation), but that part of the system was never
used operationally.
At least on Monday when these photos were taken, no one had
labeled the unusual warbird, and many passersby who didn't know the
arcane history of the type assumed it was some kind of modified
Bonanza and wondered what it was doing in the warbird area. But it
came by its warbird status quite honestly.
This machine has had a long restoration from its condition
several years ago (a bunch of parts indifferently piled up). Some
previous owner had been trying to modify the machine into an
ordinary A36 Bonanza -- the two rear windows on each side were not
original to the airplane, for instance -- but the current owner
appears to be putting the machine back into something closer to its
wartime state.
The original finish was a light grey overall with a black
anti-glare cowling (the part that's already black) -- an anonymous
cloak for a plane on a secret mission.