C-5 Galaxy: Cracked Wings, a $1 Billion Overrun and a Midair Minuteman Drop

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The Lockheed C-5 Galaxy's cargo hold is one foot longer than the Wright brothers' entire first flight. It began with the Air Force's CX-HLS requirement to carry outsized equipment such as tanks and helicopters; Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed all proposed swept-wing jets with nose and rear doors and a cockpit raised above the cargo deck. The Air Force preferred Boeing's design, but Lockheed won in 1965 with the lowest bid under the Pentagon's total package procurement policy. To hold weight down, its wing structures were thinned, and in a 1969 test the wing failed at 128 percent of limit load against a 150 percent requirement, then at 125 percent in 1970. The C-5 became the first program with a $1 billion cost overrun, whistleblower Henry Durham was forced to resign before the GAO substantiated his charges, and by 1971 Lockheed needed emergency government loans.

Crews nicknamed it FRED. Built in Marietta, Georgia, it has a 65-foot T-tail, a 121-foot hold that takes two M1 Abrams tanks, an 80-seat upper passenger deck, 28 wheels and landing gear that kneels, plus GE's TF39, the first high-bypass turbofan at 8 to 1. Boeing turned its losing design into the 747. C-5s airlifted supplies to Israel in 1973's Operation Nickel Grass, and in April 1975 a rear door lock failure during Operation Babylift caused a crash that killed 144 of the 313 aboard, including 78 children. In the 1980s a $1.5 billion program rewinged 76 C-5As and 50 new C-5Bs were built. A 2006 crash at Dover Air Force Base, where the crew pulled a good engine to idle, led to a glass cockpit and new CF6 engines in the C-5M Super Galaxy, projected to fly until 2045.

• Lamar Muse envisioned Lockheed's L-500 airliner version as a flying ferry with vacationers above and their cars below, but it was dropped for the L-1011.
• In October 1974 a C-5 dropped an 86,000-pound Minuteman missile by parachute over the Pacific, and it fired at 8,000 feet and climbed back to 20,000 feet.
• The C-5 has landed on Antarctic ice runways to supply McMurdo Station and secretly carried disassembled F-117 stealth fighters.
• The CF6 engines give 22 percent more thrust and need 30 percent less runway, with estimated savings of over $20 billion across 40 years.
• In September 2009 one C-5M set 41 records, lifting more than 176,000 pounds to 41,000 feet in under 24 minutes.