Convair 880 variant
Convair 880 UC-880
Unofficial designation of a single 880-M used by the United States Navy as a testbed and in-flight tanker. Acquired in 1980 after eighteen years of FAA service, it operated from the Naval Air Test Center at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland.
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- Units built
History
An 880 in uniform
The United States Navy acquired one 880-M in 1980 and modified it as an in-flight tanker. The aircraft had been bought new from Convair by the Federal Aviation Administration and had flown eighteen years in its service before changing hands.
Unofficially designated UC-880, it was assigned to the Naval Air Test Center at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, and employed in Tomahawk cruise missile testing and aircraft refuelling procedures.
The 1995 test
The UC-880 was damaged at Patuxent River in 1995 during a cargo-hold explosive decompression test. The subsequent analysis concluded that the aircraft would still have been controllable on its backup systems had the decompression occurred in flight: a useful data point for the structural certification of pressurised fuselages, and the reason this single airframe earns its own entry in the type's census.