Flexman shared his insights with Captain John C. He realized that by firing in a continuous turn the aircraft could keep the targets in sight constantly. In his book, Deployment and Employment of Fixed Wing Gunships, Jack Ballard tells it this way: In 1963, Ralph Flexman, a friend of McDonald’s and an engineer at Bell Aerosystems, applied the side-firing gun idea to the new problem of transient targets in a guerrilla war. The military did not adopt the idea, and McDonald’s work languished for almost 20 years, until the early rumblings of the Vietnam War. Such an aircraft could orbit a surfaced submarine-Ī maneuver known as a pylon turn-as the gun kept up a stream of fire at the submarine, eliminating the need to dive, attack, pull off, then reacquire the target to repeat the attack. Coastal Artillery, who suggested one for anti-submarine warfare in 1942. The first person to come up with the problem the side-firing gun might solve was Lieutenant Gilmour McDonald of the U.S. As Terry puts it, most combat planners felt that “military aircraft should dive at the ground, drop bombs, shoot guns. 30-caliber machine gun on a DH-4 mailplane in the 1920s and the French mounted a side-firing 75-mm artillery piece on a bomber, but the side-firing weapon did not seem to offer any advantages over conventional mounts-it was an answer without a question. The idea of a side-firing aircraft has a long history. Colonel Ron Terry, a former fighter pilot who led the charge in the early 1960s to develop the AC-47 and its successors, the AC-130 and AC-119, points out today that the gunships have been one of the most “effective things the United States has had for engagements in Panama, Grenada, and Afghanistan.” Side-firing gunships are “one of the most successful developments arising from our experience in Southeast Asia,” General John Ryan, then Air Force chief of staff, concluded at the end of the Vietnam War. It evolved despite huge bureaucratic obstacles and intraservice fighting. Only the gunship, however, is a uniquely American weapon, conceived by a handful of determined individuals in response to a specific combat problem. To most of the world, gunships, along with Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), precision-guided munitions, and aircraft carriers, have become the ubiquitous symbol of U.S. Occasionally one of the 24/7 news networks airs a film clip showing a large four-engine aircraft identified as an AC-130 in a left turn, long streams of flame coming out of guns extending from its side, looking for all the world like a sailing ship from the early 19th century firing broadside. "Afghan resistance forces, in conjunction with American Special Forces and supported by AC-130 gunships, have begun their push today toward…” This quotation could have come from any of a hundred news stories on the war that broke out after September 11.
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