Talking about C-119’s, AC-119 gunships were assigned to Nakhon Phanom RTAFB when I was there, but I didn’t get to ride on any. Military personnel can sometimes “hop” or travel, for free, on military aircraft as passengers. I think I remember doing that once on a C-119 which had landed at Ellsworth AFB, SD, and was headed for Dover AFB, DE.
I got to ride on the flight deck. The clouds and fog were so bad that the crew was considering going to the alternate – either Denver or Omaha – but the Lt Col aircraft commander was pretty sure he could find Wright Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH, the base where he had planned to land – without backtracking. Ellsworth, our base of origin, was also socked in by this time.
Now thinking about it, I don’t really know how much of what went on was for my benefit – flight crew playing tricks on a relatively young passenger – but it sure seemed real at the time.
Anyway, when we got there, the Lt Col asked his copilot to look for a particular light formation on the ground so he could land. He found it and we went down. All I could see was swirling fog.
We touched down and were taxiing when the crew suddenly put on the brakes and stopped. We got out and about 75-100 feet directly in front of us was a parked double-decker C-124 Globemaster (
http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/c-124_globemaster_ii.pl). Had we continued, we would have run into it.
We got back in the C-119 and the pilot called the tower and asked for transportation. He gave a general location and they came out and found us. We just left the plane where it sat and someone else parked it later. I continued on to Dover with the crew a day or so later. I think I ended up taking a bus from Delaware down to Pennsylvania where my family lived at the time. This was in the early 1960’s.
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