It's there. That Bird dog is a slightly modified older Cessna 172, the older ones had landing lights on the wings. They are easy to fly, even I could do it.
The pilot would be very vulnerable to small arms fire from below.
Well, the Cessna 172 had tricycle landing gear, whereas the 170 was a tail-dragger, as is the Bird Dog.
OTOH, the Bird Dog has the all-round-vision "canopy," as does the 172 and as the 170 didn't. But I understand that the Bird Dog was developed from the 170, and Cessna used the all-round-vision concept on the later 152 (the only Cessna I have flown), 172, and 182, which replaced the 150, 170, and 180.
Long ago and far away, in my first aviation assignment (1-17 Cav at Fort Bragg), we got assigned a Cobra-pilot captain who had inter-service-transferred from the Marines. He was a section leader in the attack helicopter platoon of our air cavalry troop, which was of the old design, commanded by a major, and as big as a current air cavalry squadron, which is commanded by a lieut. col. He quickly earned a bad rep by being quite obstreperous and by failing to pay any deference to the senior warrant officers (who represent the experience in nearly all Army aviation units). He treated them as if they were junior NCOs, wanting them to hop to attention whenever he entered the room and such. So they both hated and laughed at him. He came to realize that he was not going to make pilot-in-command nor inherit command of the platoon and
--I presume--that he didn't like aviation in the Army any more than he had liked things in the Marine Corps.
He bought himself a Cessna 170 and learned how to fly it, but apparently not how to land it in a crosswind, as he ground-looped it and tore up one of its wings. Last I heard of him he was trying to find a replacement wing and planning to get out of the Army and try his luck in the FBI.
I wonder if the Bird Dogs had any sort of seat armor. If not, the pilots probably figured out some way of providing protection--maybe by sitting on a flak vest or something similar. The seats in the OH-58s I flew had armor protection made of--I guess--Kevlar, which protected the back, the bottom, and, with a pivoting panel, the outboard-facing side of the seat.
