Three prototypes, three factories

Transall was a political aircraft before it was a real one. France and West Germany wanted to replace their piston-engined Nord Noratlas transports and to keep building aircraft together, as they had when Weser built Noratlases for the Luftwaffe under licence. They signed an agreement on 28 November 1957. Italy joined and then left for its own Fiat G.222. In January 1959 Nord Aviation, Weser Flugzeugbau and Hamburger Flugzeugbau formed the Transporter-Allianz, and each partner built one prototype: Nord’s flew at Bourges on 25 February 1963, VFW’s at Lemwerder that May, and HFB’s at Finkenwerder in February 1964.

Fending off the Hercules

Lockheed tried hard to sell the C-130 Hercules to Bonn instead. It failed, and on 24 September 1964 a contract was signed for 160 C-160s, 110 for Germany and 50 for France. Work was split by order size: Nord made the wings and nacelles, VFW the centre fuselage, HFB the front and rear fuselage, Dornier the fin, and each of the three partners ran its own assembly line. South Africa took nine and Turkey 20 ex-German aircraft. The first series of 169 ended in October 1972.

Kolwezi, Cyprus and the bush wars

The C-160 was built for rough strips: it could descend at up to 20 degrees, land in about 400 metres and kneel its landing gear so that vehicles could drive straight in. It earned its keep in other people’s wars. Turkish C-160s dropped paratroopers in the invasion of Cyprus in July 1974; French ones dropped the Foreign Legion at Kolwezi in May 1978; South African ones supplied the border war in Angola and once carried home a captured SA-8 missile system that would not fit in a Hercules.

Gabriel and Astarté

In 1977 France ordered a second generation, built 50-50 by Aérospatiale and MBB on a single line in Toulouse from 1981, with more fuel, an in-flight refuelling probe and half of them as tankers. Four became C-160H Astarté relay aircraft for talking to France’s submerged nuclear submarines, and two became C-160G Gabriel signals intelligence aircraft, one of which flew in the 1991 Gulf War. Indonesia took six. Production ended in 1985 at 214 aircraft.

One million hours

Life-extension programmes kept the fleet going far longer than planned. Germany’s Transalls passed a combined one million flight hours in 2011, served in Afghanistan, Sudan and Mali, and the last German wing was disbanded in December 2021 after delays to their replacement, the A400M. France retired its last in 2022. Three ex-Luftwaffe aircraft went to Australia in 2022 for conversion to water bombers.

المصانع

• Nord Aviation, Bourges · Bourges, France — Built prototype V1
• VFW, Lemwerder · Lemwerder, Germany — Built prototype V2
• HFB, Finkenwerder · Hamburg, Germany — Built prototype V3
• Toulouse line · Toulouse, France — Single assembly line for the second generation

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• German C-160 fleet passed one million flight hours, 2011