PIREP: Cessna T-37
cessna t-37 tweet Cessna T-37B Tweety Bird
cessna t-37 tweet Cessna T-37B Tweety Bird
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PIREP: Cessna T-37
Cessna's Six Thousand Pound Dog Whistle
Considering that I was a small town kid, brought up during the hey-day of fighter development, the '50's, I somehow wound up with different tastes than all my peers. While the rest of the neighborhood kids were gluing photos of F-lOOs and F-15's on their walls, I was busy ferreting out 8 x lOs of Hawk 75s or CW-21s. I still carry that same perversion... I just don't like jets. I can't get starry-eyed over F-14s or Phantoms. Somehow, I just don't seem to be able to identify with them. I put them in the same category as Gemini Capsules and Titan II's. They belong to another age, another way of thinking, another era of technology.
And then there's the T-37. Cessna's little dolphin nosed bird with the barn door wings has been tugging at my heart strings ever since I watched my first one grease it on somewhere in South Texas. The T-37 seems to be a combination of lines and numbers my archaic mind can handle. It looks like something the average rich guy could own and the average pilot could fly. Besides that, the T-37 gives the feeling that it "flies" rather than being propelled by an overbearing bottle of thrust and flame. It's an innocuous, unglamorous little toad, at best, but it still has a case of the tailpipe cutes that endears it to me, if nobody else.
Currently, the T-37 is the bottom rung of the USAF's training ladder. After a few hours in a T-41 (hopped up C-172) to eliminate the barf bag specialists, the USAF pops their boys right into the T-37 and makes them into jet pilots. They've been doing it that way for a long time, a hell of a long time. The T-37 first flew in 1954 and Cessna is still cranking them out today, a fact that tends to go unnoticed in an age that is seeing the F-4 already relegated to National Guard and static display duties.
It's been around such a long time that logic says that sooner or later bits and pieces of less fortunate T-37s are going to begin showing up in scrap and surplus yards. When that happens, the same thing that hap-pened to T-34s is going to come about. Somebody somewhere is going to start putting them together as toys for well heeled boys. Look what is happening to F-86s and T-33s. The precedent has been set, so even the mountain of certification obstacles certain to be part of the FAA's game plan will eventually be scaled. You can't keep a good plane down. But is the T-37 a good plane? It must be or the USAF wouldn't be so committed to it. There was an obvious way to answer that question, so I exercised my prerogative as a tax-paying aviation journalist and went wrangling my way into a training command T-37.
At first my requests were met with a certain amount of question. "Are you sure you mean T-37 and not T-38, our new hot one?" No, I wanted the -37. The next question was usually short. "Why?" The T-37 is apparently nowhere near the top of the list of airplanes used for impressing civilian types on PR flights.
