CoolPix - Modern Military: 1960's Era OV-10 Bronco!
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 09:05PM 
(click pic for hi-res)
I woke up this morning with a craving for OV-10 Bronco! I started digging thru the internet and came across this sweet pic and thought: yep, that looks like a CoolPix to me. So I tweaked it a tad in photoshop and now here it is for you to open up nice and big and take a good look at one of the neatest little military aircraft ever made. And don't forget that CoolPix images make pretty nice desktop backgrounds as well, that's part of the reason I make them available like I do.
The OV-10 has a very interesting development history, as does the entire Light Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (LARA) project that took place in the early 1960's. You can see some detailed info and pix of many of the aircraft entered in that competition at this CombatReform.org page. The original concept for the OV-10 was for it to be a very small lightweight aircraft able to operate from roads in a jungle setting. A really small 20' wingspan was envisioned along with a 6.5' main gear stance, but as things progressed, pretty much everything changed. By the time a prototype was built, it was much heavier and had a 30' wingspan.
As the pic below shows, the prototype wingspan looks pretty short! The wingspan was increased to 40' for production aircraft which meant any ideas that related to operating off of roads in really tight locations was just a distant memory. However, the airplane still wound up being useful in a wide variety of roles in Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force, Marines, and Navy all had variants of the OV-10.
Comparing OV-10 production wingspan to the prototype aircraft
Boeing now has the manufacturing rights to the OV-10 and is actually considering putting a modernized version back into production as the OV-10X. Here's an informative Flightglobal story on the OV-10X from September 2009, and the picture below shows that visually it's essentially the same aircraft.
Boeing illustration of a possible updated Bronco - the OV-10X
Reader Comments (2)
sure is a cool plane the OV 10 X would be a first to re cycle as it were to bring back such a old plane but why not if they can make it work
Would be very nice!