|
Description
| Manufacturer: | Lockheed | |
| Base model: | P2V | |
| Designation: | P2V | |
| Version: | -5FS | |
| Nickname: | Neptune | |
| Equivalent to: | SP-2E | |
| Designation System: | U.S. Navy / Marines | |
| Designation Period: | 1923-1962 | |
| Basic role: | Patrol | |
| Modified Mission: | Anti-submarine | |
| See Also: | ||
Specifications
| Length: | 78' 3" | 23.8 m | |
| Height: | 28' 11" | 8.8 m | |
| Wingspan: | 104' | 31.7 m | |
| Wingarea: | 1,000.0 sq ft | 92.8 sq m | |
| Empty Weight: | 39,900 lb | 18,095 kg | |
| Gross Weight: | 72,000 lb | 32,653 kg | |
| Max Weight: | 77,850 lb | 35,306 kg | |
Propulsion
| No. of Engines: | 2 | ||
| Powerplant: | Wright R-3350-32W (& 2x J34-WE-34 @ 3,250lb) | ||
| Horsepower (each): | 3500 | ||
Performance
| Range: | 3,195 miles | 5,144 km | |
| Cruise Speed: | 207 mph | 333 km/h | 180 kt |
| Max Speed: | 353 mph | 568 km/h | 307 kt |
| Climb: | 2,620 ft/min | 798 m/min | |
| Ceiling: | 26,000 ft | 7,924 m | |
Examples of this type may be found at
| Museum | City | State |
| Historic Aircraft Restoration Projects | Brooklyn | New York |
| Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum | New York | New York |
SP-2 E on display
Historic Aircraft Restoration Projects |
Recent comments by our visitors
| glenn shirer coronado, CA | I was attached to NATU Quonset PT R.I. 1959-1963. Flew on P2V-5F Buno 127780. What an exciting Powerful piece of machinery. Loved that plane. Moved a lot of 40 oz cc from Argentia NF to Stateside. Anyone from those good old days please contact me.
LT Glenn Shirer Jr LDO SEAL RETIRED 02/24/2008 @ 11:50 [ref: 19770] |
| Ernst T> E> Ypsilanti Mich., MI | 4 years in V P 5 P/c on LA 6 LA 11 the best plane i ever worked on. Tango Echo Echo 10/13/2007 @ 14:17 [ref: 18175] |
| Walt Edminster Scottsboro, AL | I was an AT1 in Crew 12 of VP6 in Hawaii back in the mid Fifties. We were flying the P2V5F 124, 128 and 131 series. I was discharged in 1956 and shortly after that the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite. I was at the right place at the right time and sort of fell into the space industry there in Huntsville, Alabama. I soon realized that I missed those long boring 10 hour patrols so I went over to NAS Atlanta to see about becoming a weekend warrior. Much to my surprise I discovered they had three of the same P2Vs we had just retired from VP6. The electronics officer twisted my arm a little and talked me into coming aboard for two years as a station keeper to teach ASW operation and ASW equipment maintenance.
The flight crew training went quite well but the radio operators kept forgetting to reel in the trailing wire antennas and it was costing us a lot of lead weights. One weekend we were making a training flight to Panama. Our trailing wire antenna was without a weight and we had none in stock so I rigged up a quick makeshift weight out of a Schlitz beer can. We landed at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico for an overnight and the skipper of the base came out to great the PPC, an old friend of his. The first thing he saw was the Schlitz beer can hanging out of the bottom of the aircraft. He shouted, “Get that beer can off of that aircraft immediately!!” When we got back to Atlanta I designed a modified beer can trailing wire weight with a swivel to keep the wire from twisting and painted the beer can soft black. It was still on that aircraft a year later when I was discharged from the Navy. 11/20/2006 @ 18:08 [ref: 14796] |
| John Arendall Mobile, AL | The Army also flew the SP-2E Neptunes, we had them at Cam Rhan Bay, Viet Nam. I flew on 131531 most of the time, we brought it back to Norfork for overhaul in the summer of 1968, we stopped at every Island we came to, blew a prt between Wake Island and Hawaii, had to make a quick stop at Johnston's Atol for repairs. We had six P-2's in our unit, five where mission birds and one was a slick ship, one of them 131485 is in the Army aviaton museum at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The other five where dismantled in Japan after the unit was deactivated. We flew top secret missions, which are still clissified today. I guess you can see that the P-2's made their way around to all branches of the service. 12/12/2005 @ 01:50 [ref: 11958] |
| Douglas B. Jacques Canton, GA | Boy, you guys are quick! I just got a phone call about the not-uncommon trailing-wire-left-out-on-landing syndrome, asking didn't we have some sort of low-altitude warning system to guard against such things... Well, yes & no: we had a warning light when the gear was extended with the trailing wire still out. The trouble is, we got so many false positives (warning light on gear down even though the trailing wire was properly reeled in) that it wasn't any surprise to see the light... or NOT because half the time it didn't work at all, wire in or wire out. The best safeguard we had was the Radioman's memory, and after a 10-15-hour hop none of us was in much shape to remember anything. It didn't happen that often, maybe once or twice a year (total) in our squadron of 12 P2V-5FS's. Or so. 10/16/2005 @ 23:55 [ref: 11492] |
| Douglas B. Jacques Canton, GA | The P2V (Bureau Number 147946) photo uploaded by Paul Woods (Gallery Page 521) is misidentified: it is a P2V-7 based both on the bulging "greenhouse" cockpit (unique to the -7) and the Bureau Number (the highest-numbered P2V-5FS's were 131xxx-series.)
I have hundreds of hours in both the 128xxx series and the 131xxx series of the P2V-5FS. Memories include: *...sleeping (we pulled up to 20-hour hops... and no mid-air refueling either) on the wing beam or in the nose tunnel (those P3 wussies with their pressurization, air conditioning and bunks to sleep in just stare vacantly at us when we talk about sleeping on the wing beam)... *...the smell of the old radar as it laboriously hummed its magnetron to life after takeoff (we were forbidden to fire it off on the ground for fear of sterilizing our shipmates and/or microwaving various rodents and/or seagulls or pelicans who might be in the area)... *...going so low to drop smoke or Practice Depth Charges (PDCs) on a submarine that the Ordnanceman reported taking spray through the aft-station windows... *...dropping eggs on Soviet "trawlers" (you don't need 3000 antennas to catch fish) when their crew lined the rails for us off Cuba in '61 with a single-finger salute as we "rigged" them ("rigging" a ship involved 5 low passes to photograph the ship from all 4 cardinal aspects plus one overhead shot) *...the Radioman going "Ahhh, SH**!" on short final, by which we all knew that he had forgotten to reel in the trailing wire HF antenna, whose little bomblet-shaped lead weight had apparently taken out another mobile home or back yard treehouse... *...the wonderful aroma of steaks cooking in the aft station on the way home from a difficult ASWEX (yes, the local breeze in a P2V blows from aft-station to cockpit)... *...the indescribable smell of someone using the Honey Pot, which could not (legally) be emptied in-flight, together with the anticipation and certain knowledge that whoever was making that horrific smell would be buying beers for all hands later that night... *...the outrage of the U.S. Nuke-Sub skipper (and his spectacular "crash-surface!" maneuver 10 seconds later) when we wired four PDCs together and dropped them on him because even though we had nailed him 3 times, perfectly, dropping a single PDC right down his conning tower and re-checking and verifying our accuracy, he refused to give us a "kill"... he gave us a kill on the last run, though... we heard later that we had fried a couple of his hydrophones with the blast, not to mention his newly-deaf sonar operator... stingy bastard'll give the next aircraft a "kill" when he deserves it, we bet... *...our embarrassment after prosecuting a "disappearing radar contact" (normally indicative of a snorkel target) at night in the Med from about 100 miles out and finally descending and lighting up the target with our bazillion-candlepower searchlight (in the nose of the starboard tip tank) only to find that we were about 10 feet lower than the bow-on aspect of the flight deck of a CVA (U.S. carrier) and we had just destroyed their night vision... I never knew a P2V could "egress" that fast (26-46 & balls to the wall! Miltary Power!) before that night, while we heard "UNIDENTIFIED AIRCRAFT! UNIDENTIFIED AIRCRAFT! THIS IS THE UNITED STATES NAVAL WARSHIP [XXXX]! IDENTIFY! IDENTIFY!" on Guard channel, knowing that they wouldn't be able to launch any pursuit for about 10 miutes because nobody who had been on deck or in Pri-Fly when we burned-em-up with the searchlight could see anything... we had the radar fixed when we got back, and I would imagine, since they obviously hadn't seen us coming, so did they... God! What great times. 10/16/2005 @ 21:10 [ref: 11490] |
Recent photos uploaded by our visitors
