Roden 058 Fairchild NC/AC-123K Black Spot 1:72

In the middle of 1967 two planes, designated NC/AC-123K, at first transferred to South Korea for training flights, and at the end of 1968 finally came to Vietnam. Their military career lasted about half a year, during which time they embarked on 186 combat missions, destroying 415 trucks and significantly damaging 273 more. Every second flight was effective - a very high figure for the time, given that the onboard equipment was unreliable and constantly broke down. In the summer of 1969 the machines were returned to the USA, where they completed a full renovation and modernization of equipment, and from December of that year until the middle of the following year they returned to the sky of Vietnam again. Now, their goal was the destruction of boats in the Mekong valley, and the airplanes coped with this task quite successfully, destroying about a hundred targets on the water and off the coast. Their success rate had improved to 77% in the ratio of flights to targets destroyed.

The military were satisfied with the Black Spot program, but did not follow up with production orders. By that time the AC-130 had already appeared, the most powerful gunship in the history of such machines, so before very long in the summer of 1971 the NC/AC-123Ks were again converted into transport aircraft.

At the outset of the program no military applications of the NC/AC-123K had been planned. Even so, the success of the two military missions was impressive. The C-123 had written its own unique page in the history of strike aircraft.