For reasons I still do not understand, the Air Force has been trying to kill of the A-10 Warthog for, well, it seems like forever. Their latest bullshit excuse was that they needed to phase it out so that the maintenance personnel can be used to work on the F35. If that makes no sense whatsoever to you, good. You are a thinking human being. At any rate, the A-10 has an unlikely hero:
Sen. John McCain says the Air Force won’t be able to retire the A-10 Warthog ground attack jet now that he’s in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
McCain said Thursday the A-10 is the best close-air support aircraft ever made and there is “no doubt” Congress will prevent its retirement. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson has 80 of the twin-jet planes and trains A-10 pilots.
McCain says there’s no replacement for the jet’s close-air support mission and pointed to a June friendly fire in Afghanistan where a B-1 bomber mistakenly targeted American troops, killing five.
Even if he is just motivated to save the Arizona jobs, this is decidedly a good thing for soldiers on the ground.
Amir Khalid
I know the US Air Force is run by fighter jocks, but just why do they hate the Warthog so?
Ripley
And Chris Christie is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Bobby B.
I’d always thought of McCain as the Angry Warthog.
The Other Chuck
Why is the USAF even doing close air support at all? Seems like the kind of thing you’d expect the Army and Marines to do themselves.
Oh, and having John McCain as an ally usually means he’s just looking for a place to stick the knife later. He’ll probably find some way to both mothball the program but keep the money coming in.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
There’s a first time for everything.
Warthog for life.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Other Chuck: Marines do it themselves, but when the Army Air Force was siphoned off to form a separate Air Force, it took all the Army’s fixed wing aviation with it. Since that time the Air Force has fought tooth and nail to keep the Army from reacquiring anything. The AF insists that it can and will do the job, but, at the same time, it wants to play with fighters and be glamorous rather doing CAS. The Army has its own choppers, but basically anything else it needs comes from the AF.
Joel Hanes
The Army can’t have the A-10 because of a generations-old deal, originally made to put a clear line in inter-service rivalry arguments: the Army can have rotary-wing aircraft, but if it has fixed wings, the Air Force owns it.
The Air Force hates the close ground support mission, and Air Force pilots hate flying low and slow and exposed to ground fire. The A-10 is completely sexless — boxy, ugly, not a jet — unless your a pinned-down platoon of grunts, in which case it’s God and His Angels made manifest.
Positions in the inter-service rivalry war are as entrenched and immovable and futile as anything seen during WW I’s trench warfare.
Therefore, the obvious and easy solution will not be even mooted — breaking the silly deal, and giving the A-10 and the entire close ground support mission to the Army.
JustRuss
@The Other Chuck: The Army isn’t allowed to have armed fixed-wing aircraft, but attack helicopters are OK. Because reasons, obviously.
My understanding is there’s a school of thought that cheap, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weaponry has rendered the low and slow A10 obsolete. Whether that’s true or not I’m not qualified to say
Felonius Monk
The A-10 is an awesome machine, but I also agree it would probably be better if the Army owned it.
Mike in NC
The A-10 actually works, so of course it was never acceptable to USAF brass.
RP
Isn’t the F-35 the one that still doesn’t work right after 15+ years of development and costs $100M per plane?
Felonius Monk
With McGrumpy becoming chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, anyone want to wager on how long before we start bombing Iran?
Roger Moore
@The Other Chuck:
When the Air Farce was created, they were split off from the Army and demanded control over essentially all of the Army’s fixed-wing aircraft. The Army got a limited exception for some lightweight artillery spotting planes- what I’ve seen described as box kites with engines- but everything else went to the USAF. Unfortunately, USAF seems to be even more dominated by selfish careerists than the rest of the military, so they’ve built themselves into an organization devoted primarily to advancing turf battles and providing career opportunities than to fighting wars. Meanwhile, the Army has developed a series of attack helicopters, which they’re allowed under the agreement, to make up for their lack of support from the Air Force. The Marines are slightly better off because they’re officially part of the Navy, but Naval Aviation has at least some tendency to focus more on what gets promotions than what wins wars, which has left the Marines similarly short on air support.
Seth Owen
Shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles have been around for decades and were available to opponents in several of the recent wars that the A-10 has served in without making it obsolete. In fact, the A-10 is designed to survive being hit my one.
The A-10 would be vulnerable if we ever fought a war with an opponent bald to contest our air superiority, but avoiding that scenario is what all those expensive f-22s are for.
Scamp Dog
One thing to keep in mind, though: having wrecked five American planes, John McCain is an enemy ace.
MattF
Bear in mind that McCain was Navy Aviation– so he has to particular love or respect for the USAF. In this case his prejudices line up with correct policy, but it would be an error to try to generalize this instance.
Citizen_X
@Joel Hanes:
But then people would ask, “Why do we have an Air Force anyway?” And that can’t be allowed to happen.
Tim F.
Thanks John. I have belabored this topic enough. It drives me to irrational places because it represents literally the best and the worst of what government procurement can do, all wrapped up in an endless and ghastly expensive soap opera of egos and incompetence.
@Amir Khalid: The Air Force is run by glory hound fighter jocks who chase shiny objects like seven year olds running after a soccer ball. The ‘hog looks like shit, flies like a brick, tends to get dirty and have holes punched in it, and does nothing flashy except its job which it does exceptionally well. Of course the swollen head USAF jerkoffs hate it.
Roger Moore
@JustRuss:
The A-10 was designed specifically to make it hard to shoot down with shoulder-fired SAMs. For example, the engines are located above the tail because it makes it harder for heat seeking missiles to lock on to their exhaust. This seems to be born out by experience, since the A-10 has been used heavily for CAS without having too much trouble from man-portable SAMs. If anything helicopters are a lot more vulnerable.
KG
@Seth Owen:
Old “joke” I heard from a friend that served went that the Air Force had all the best stuff because when they’d build a base the last thing they would build would be the air field/landing strip. The idea was basically, “if we run out of money, there’s no way congress will turn down more money for landing strips.” I don’t know if it’s true, but it seems truthy enough.
The Other Chuck
@Citizen_X: USAF would still have SAC and Space Command. Transport too, I guess, though I don’t see a reason to have a separate branch for that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tim F.:
Spot on, except that you missed one thing. The Army loves the A-10; therefore, it is bad.
@The Other Chuck: Fighters too.
Roger Moore
@RP:
I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s working exactly as designed; it’s by far the best MIC welfare project in history.
Belafon
@Citizen_X: That would be part of my military reorganization: Ground support flying goes to the Army, the rest goes to the Navy. Let those Air Force pilots compare themselves to the guys who land on a moving runway.
RSR
Love the A-10. (PA ANG used to fly them out of Willow Grove, and they’d circle low over our house entering the pattern to land almost every Fri, Sat, Sun. Miss those days.)
And the F35 may end up ranking at the top of military flusterclucks.
But here’s some thoughts from the perspective of a drunk predator drone:
Leave the A-10, Take the Cannoli
C.V. Danes
Cancel the F35 and send the maintenance personnel to work on the A10…
Botsplainer
@JustRuss:
Those things can take a hell of a pounding and still fly.
Wonder if you could remove pilots altogether and fly them as drones?
RSR
@The Other Chuck:
Also from @drunkenpredator:
Amir Khalid
@Tim F.:
Thanks. Also, if any plane should have the plug pulled on its development, it’s surely the F-35. It is simply amazing to see the US DoD, the most experienced defence agency in the world at such projects, make such a drawn-out and expensive mess of this one. At some point, losses surely have to be cut.
GregB
Newsmax sidebar is reporting that a Russian tank column has invaded Ukraine.
Looks like the massive Republican takeover of the US government has emboldened our enemies.
Citizen_X
@The Other Chuck:
The SAC has been the most troubled command in the entire military lately.
We should go back to having an Army Air Corps. They can take all land-based aviation and rocketry. Army, Navy and Marine aviation can split strategic bombing and CAS. Strategic nuclear bombers? Been outdated since the ’60s.
And SPACE Comannnnnddd (sorry, that’s how I hear it) can be split between AAC and the Navy.
Trollhattan
@C.V. Danes:
There ya go! F35 may become the most expensive weapon in history, with a program cost exceeding a trillion (with a “t”) over its lifetime. Mindboggling from any perspective, but the idea a fighter program could exceed, say, a nuke sub program budget is beyond my comprehension.
Becuse the procurement people are clever sorts, F35 production is spread across most states, creating built-in congressional support. “Hey y’all, I done brung you the F35 brake pad production facility, Yee-haw!”
Let’s not forget the ongoing embarrassment that is the ICBM command. I’m with Farley: ground the Air Force.
Derelict
The Air Force goes through this sort of thing in regular cycles. There’s a constant drumbeat within the service that faster is ALWAYS better. So, as the years go by, the service tries to do away with all slower aircraft, only to discover that there are certain roles and missions that you just can’t do effectively with fast airplanes.
The CAS mission is one of these things. After WWII, the Air Force tried doing CAS with the first jets (F-80s and F-86s), as to the Navy. Both quickly found out that F-4U Corsairs and P-51 Mustangs were far superior because they WEREN’T zipping past the target at 450 knots. Nonetheless, the Air Force stuck with the “faster is better” doctrine, while the Navy learned its lesson well.
When Viet Nam cranked up, the Air Force was trying to do CAS with F-100 Super Sabres and F-106 Delta Darts. They were lucky to get the bomb within 100 feet of the target. The Navy spent some time and money developing the Douglas A-1 Skyraider, a massive piston-engine fighter-bomber. It was a tremendous success.
As Viet Nam staggered to a conclusion, the Air Force’s answer to CAS came to life–The A-10 Warthog. It, too, was an immediate success. And has been since its acceptance flight. It has also been the target of Air Force brass since its acceptance flight. It’s just not fast enough for them! So, they’re now pushing to have ANY faster fighter do the CAS role–F-16, F-15, F-22, F-35. So long as it can break Mach 1, they’re happy. Can it hit the target without killing the friendlies 50 yards away? Eh, who really cares.
You see this same “gotta be faster” cycle in Air Force trainers. They demand faster trainers until the accident rate becomes unacceptable. At which point it becomes obvious that a novice pilot can’t keep up with an extreme high-performance aircraft. And then it’s back to looking for something slower. Past progressions went T-6, T-28, T-33, T-37, T-38 OOPS! Slingsby T-6, etc.
raven
This is a hell of a headline
Osama Bin Laden’s killer? Robert O’Neill’s claim challenges code of silence
Publicity around shooting of al-Qaida leader goes against ethos of ‘quiet professionals’ and undermines Obama’s military coup
CONGRATULATIONS!
Good, because with the new model of urban Southwest Asian/ME “brushfire wars”, the A-10 is the only place equipped to actually do anything useful. If the Air Force doesn’t like it, they can amend the “fixed-wing” agreement and let the Army or Marines fly them. They’d rather die than do that, of course.
The F-35 is a disaster and will not only never be able to replace it, it may very well never fly.
For once and with zero sarcasm, good for John McCain.
Gin & Tonic
@GregB: That’s been building for some time, and is entirely driven by local factors.
If anyone is interested, here’s a map of the region showing military activity, prepared by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. The column of 32 tanks and 16 artillery pieces reportedly entered via Izvaryno, southeast of Luhansk, by which a lot of Russian materiel has entered in recent months.
Linnaeus
@Trollhattan:
But if someone pays for something other than bread and cat food with a SNAP card, we’ve got to cut it because wastefraudabuse.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Coup in the sense of a triumph, I think. Per the first listed meaning here.
Trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
That’s just Patriots being Patriotic. BBC is cautiously reporting this by quoting the Ukranian government, but has yet to verify.
Let’s all chant “HODOR!” thrice into a darkened bathroom mirror and see what happens.
JustRuss
@Linnaeus: Oh yes. And of course, Obamacare was the worst thing in the history of ever because the website was glitchy for a few months. But a trillion dollars for a cluster of a plane that may never see service? No problem!
Cacti
@Trollhattan:
The MIC did a brilliant job of making the F-35 the program that was too big to fail, spreading it out among 1,300 suppliers in 45 different states.
boatboy_srq
@Felonius Monk: No bets. And why do I suddenly hear Beach Boys?
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: True that. Also explains why the second powerplant for the thing was such a big deal.
samiam
Cynical Cole is cynical. The guy is just not happy unless he can find something to be cynical about. Now he is an expert on the A10.
He must have been multi-orgasmic on election day. A cynics wet dream!
Just waiting for him to post a 1 week snapshot of the stock market as proof of some cynical point he is trying to make about whatever the shiny cynical object of his masturbatory thoughts are that day.
kindness
While the A-10 is hated by the Air Force I think the reason the AF has wanted to kill it off so much is all the new fighter jets the AF has produced are so damned expensive (and suck so bad) that the AF didn’t want to spend $1 anywhere other than the moneypits they now have.
My 2 cents – Fighter jets shouldn’t be Swiss Army knives where one does everything (mediaocrely). But I’m not a big wig general.
Topics like this are covered really well over at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Eric U.
the recent Air Force acquisition programs seem to all have been a disaster. The last one I remember that went ok was the B2. C17, F22, F35 have all been a mess.
They really are going to have to go all drones all the time, because a man-capable airframe is going to be way too expensive to field. The F22 was a real mess too, but an acquisition program that takes that long is bound to have problems because there are too many opportunites for management interference. Not sure if you can do the A10 mission with a drone, but it would be worth it to try
@kindness: the F35 was a joint service aircraft basically because of the success of the F4. I thought it was a good idea at the time until it started to be 3 airplanes in one. The Air Force should just use the Navy version and get over the weight required by the aircraft carrier landing requirement. Like they did with the F4. I think they should have been forced to fly F18’s instead of the F16, but that never went too far
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sure, although aiming for that sense while writing “military coup” borders on the illiterate.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes: Oh, I agree that it is poorly phrased at best. I wonder how it got past a copy editor – or have they all been made redundant?
RaflW
A better thing for soldiers and taxpayers is cancelling the freakin’ F35. Its a shitshow.
The Pale Scot
@Amir Khalid: It doesn’t go WHOOSHHHHHH…..
Tokyokie
@Amir Khalid: fLY@Amir Khalid: Flyng the Warthog is like driving a minivan instead of a Porsche. If the Air Force were still part of the Army instead of being a separate branch, such attitudes wouldn’t prevail.
Roger Moore
@Eric U.:
The underlying problem isn’t the cost of developing airframes, it’s that the projects are designed to be inefficient. The airframes can last decades, and with extended production schedules the production can be spread out over a decade or two longer than that. The result is that an airplane project can last longer than the working life of the engineers who designed it. That’s a huge problem for the MIC, because it means that if we develop new planes only when we actually need to, there won’t be any experienced engineers and manufacturers left by the time production for the next generation ramps up.
That means we wind up with a lot of programs that are basically welfare for the MIC. We aren’t trying to produce planes as cost effectively as possible; we’re trying to maintain our engineering and manufacturing capability for something we don’t really need right now but might possibly want in the future. The result is stretched-out development and slow production. Because our old planes are actually perfectly good for their intended purpose, and because the schedule stretches out for so long, there are plenty of chances to go back and change requirements late in the game. It’s a horrifically inefficient way of producing airplanes, but it’s an effective way of providing work for aerospace engineers.
Lee
Earlier when the AF wanted to scrap the A-10, the Army said ‘Great! We’ll take them” and the AF never said another word.
My guess is if the A-10 ever gets close to actually being scrapped by the AF either the Army or Navy/Marines will quickly volunteer to take it over. Thus ensuring the AF continues the program.
Chris
@Lee:
I take it the big fear is that if the Army was allowed to operate their own close air support planes, people would start wondering why we even need an Air Force anymore?
jon
The solution I see is to take out that titanium bathtub, insert some computers and one or two more big guns, and turn the Warthog into a drone. That way the Air Force (the branch that ISN’T EVEN IN THE CONSTITUTION! AMIRITE!?) can keep its shiny toy, pilots won’t have to deal with a slow, uninspiring (and frankly, dangerous) job of ground support, and some videogamers in Vegas can do the job remotely.
I’m sure there’s some reason that can’t be done, but I’m not sure what it is.
david miller
But the B-2 was also a mess. 21 planes total built out of a planned 132, for a unit cost of nearly a billion dollars each. And there was also the A-12 debacle and cancellation, probably the only sane thing Dick Cheney ever did in his life. The F-35 should also have been cancelled, back at the beginning of Obama’s first term.
Luthe
We made it through 56 comments without someone saying this was good news for John McCain?
Oy gevalt.
NCSteve
@The Other Chuck: Because in 1947, there was an epic, byzantine mother of all turf battles that resulted in the demotion of the War and Navy Deparments to sub-cabinet level and folded them into a new Department of Defense (initially, and bizarrely called “The National Defense Establishment” before someone realized how fucking creepy that sounded and changed it). During that turf battle, the Marine Corp became a coequal service with the Navy, with both answering to the Secretary of the Navy rather than the Commandant answering to the CNO as before and the Army Air Corps finally got its long sought absolute divorce from the Army and became the USAF under its own secretary and department.
And in the course of those negotiations, divvying up the air mission. and all the resources all of them foresaw a century dominated by aviation would receive from Congress, was a bitter, protracted struggle, with the services themselves and members of Congress and the MIC in general all drawing their knives. The result was an agreement that naval aviation would be split between the Navy and the Corp with the Marines allowed to have their own air force as long as it was putatively dedicated to the close air support mission. Because, frankly, the Marines knew the air-supriority fighter jock mentality all too well from decades of dealing with the Navy and believed the only way they could be sure there would be carrier-based pilots who were specialized in close air support, and thus could be trusted to drop most of their bombs on the enemy rather than Marines, was to own them.
The Army-Air Force divorce, however was more hard-fought. The Air Force insisted that it must be given control of all fixed wing land-based combat and transport aircraft and it had the backing in Congress to get its way, and that included control over the close air support mission. And it did this knowing full well that close air support was universally hated by its pilots and deemed the most lowly and unworthy form of combat mission. And then, having won the bureaucratic death match to obtain the mission, it proceeded to spend the next seven decades trying to kill it, to demote it to just a thing that fighter jocks are supposed to be able to do with their sleek, sexy fighter planes. They have loathed and hated every close air support plane Congress forced them to buy and, above all, they have hated having the loathsome Warthog and its ground combat specialist pilots when the could be flying sleek sexy fighter planes instead.
And so, here we are. The Army covets those A-10’s and their pilots like a miser covets another miser’s gold because it can’t have them while, for the Air Force, the only thing worse than having to keep flying A-10’s is the prospect of surrendering them to the Army.
Cervantes
@Luthe:
But not 57.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Worked on systems on the Warthog for years and retired from D-M. Arizona wasn’t quite as batshit back then. Whoever in the Air Force is trying to kill the A-10 is a freaking moron (or a collection of same).
mclaren
The Air Force keeps trying to retire the A-10 warthog because it’s slow. subsonic, inglamorous, not Mach 3, without thrilling ECM (electronic countermeasure) or sexy hi-tech missiles that can kill an enemy plane or ship from 110 miles away. The A-10 doesn’t have an operational ceiling of 80,000 feet and doesn’t make a thrilling blast of sound when it roars past the control tower at twice the speed of sound.
The A-10 is slow, boring, mostly filled with 100 depleted uranium sabots, and worst of all, the A-10 is not designed for dogfighting. It’s a ground support plane. The Air Force hates that. Hates, hates, hates with a vengeance not being the sexiest most hi-tech most glamorous most pants-wettingly gorgeous airframe in the sky because that’s what the Air Force is all about: being the best and most hi-tech and fastest and most powerful airplane in the world.
Instead, the A-10 putters around low to the ground and knocks out tanks. And bunkers. And any damn other thing you can think of, because a depleted uranium round goes through anything. Steel, concrete, reinforced underground bunkers, you name it. A single A-10 can take our a hundred tanks and there’s no defense against it.
So why doesn’t the Air Force just dump the A-10 on the Marine Corps and get on with its business of dogfighting in those sexy sexy sexy super-hi-tech Mach 3 jets? Because the United States hasn’t had a pilot in a dogfight since the Korean War. Dogfights are over. Everything is ECM and satellite scans and missiles that get launched before the pilot can see anything and then the missiles make a kill 110 miles away.
Air superiority is all about drones now. Human pilots are going away. Today’s jets have so much acceleration and such a fast turning radius that human pilots are a disadvantage because they’d get turned to raspberry jam if you used the full capabilities of the airframe. So in a desperate bid to avoid disappearing and getting turned into a bunch of corporals sitting around in trailers guiding drones with joysticks, the Air Force finds itself compelled to cling to its last useful mission which requires human pilot: close air support of ground troops. The A-10 is a champ at close air support. Nothing else comes close.
And you’ve gotta have a human pilot because, despite all the hype about cameras, the cameras in those drones are really shitty. You don’t want to launch depleted uranium sabots at enemy tanks 20 yards away from your own troops without real live human eyes on the scene in real time. Some kid twiddling a joystick while squinting at some blurry crappy fuzzy picture on a computer monitor 3000 miles away from the battlefront won’t cut it. That’s a great way to kill scads of your own troops by accident. Plus, in close air support, you need split-second responsiveness, and drones have a big timelag due to the time required for the control signals to go all the way up to a satellite and all the way back down to the drone.
There are serious issues with the A-10 maintenance, by the way. This thing was designed back in the 1980s and the airframes are problematic now. They were never designed to hold together that long. The avionics are antiques and while they’ve been patched and partially replaced, it would require a full redesign of the plan’s guidance and control system to upgrade it with modern parts. The single biggest problem with the A-10, as with all U.S. military weaponry, is that replacement parts cost a fortune because the original contractor didn’t build enough spare parts. In some cases the original contractor has gone out of business. So replacement parts have to be reverse-engineered, often using antique technology, and this costs a ton ‘o bucks. To give just one practical example, take a look at the price on an adapter for an older CGA video card like the one on a 1987 Atari ST to a modern multisync flatscreen monitor. You can buy ’em, but they cost like $600. Why? Because the old antique 80s-vintage video card is analog and has a ridiculous resolution of 320 x 200 — the modern monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and is all digital. Getting hardware to convert that without drivers is a surprisingly complex kludge. That’s the kind of thing you have to do in all the subsystems of a 30-year-old piece of weapons tech like the A-10. The rudder controls, the displays, the ECM, the guidance system, everything on that plane used 1982 technology originally. Just imagine trying to take, say, a Kaypro CP/M computer vintage 1981 with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a 40-column character-only greenscreen monitor and upgrade it so it could use modern flatscreen monitors and modern hard drives and modern USB drives. That would cost a fortune.
That’s the problem you’ve got with the A-10 Warthog.
Roger Moore
@mclaren:
Not true at all. The US had plenty of dogfights in Vietnam. We actually did relatively poorly at first because we had assumed that dogfights were a thing of the past and had neither designed fighters to dogfight well nor trained the pilots to do so. Overcoming that was the main reason the Navy founded Top Gun. We haven’t had much in the way of dogfights since then, but then again, we haven’t fought against a really serious Air Force since then, either.
And I think you’re wrong about the USAF’s attitude toward the A-10. They’re using them because they’re being forced to, not because they want to. If they were really supporters of human piloted CAS planes, they’d be pushing for a next-generation dedicated CAS plane to replace the Warthog, if only to prove their dedication to the mission and try to claim some turf. Instead, they seem to be pushing some mix of drones and the F-35 as the long-term answer to our CAS needs, i.e. anything but what we really need.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
Because they do not have the slightest fucking clue as how warfare is actually conducted. They’re shitheads. Zoomie shitheads.
My god, fucking Finance Corps clerks are more attuned to actual fucking warfare than Zoomie General Officers.
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X: PIGS IN SPAAAAAAAACE!
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Counterpoint by Robert Farley at LGM (from last year):
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
We can look down at A-10s from our winter camp in the AZ desert. The valley floor is at 4100′ elevation, and our camp is at 5500′ elevation. The mountain range behind (west) of us is 8500′ on the high spots. The Warthogs come across that ridge as low as they can, and they come down the mountain range as close to the hillside as they can, and once they hit the valley they seem to be shooting to fly maybe 500′ above the ground.
Which puts them down below us quite a ways. There are more foothills east of us and they either jump up over those hills or squeak between them. They routinely drop magnesium flares and chaff as they train to avoid the dread shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons.
The main gun, a 30mm gatling cannon is the size of a Volkswagen, with a big pipe, er, barrel sticking out of it. The front 6 inches of the cannon sticks out under the nose of the plane. Those rounds are the tank busters. Or any armored thing buster. The airframe is designed around the cannon, which appears to be between the engine and the cockpit.
I can see why fighter jocks would prefer fast and high, they get way above the range of most ground-based anti-air weapons. As some one said above, they launch an air-to-air weapon and shoot down another air-superiority fighter a hundred miles away. Thnik that makes them a hero, while the Warthogs are working down on the deck with ground-pounders to win a battle, or even a war.
Watching those birds training just above the desert floor is pretty amazing. Slowed down the construction some days, I’ll tell you. I never saw the cannon being used, bet that’s a sight to see! Especially for a bunch of grunts pinned down…
Tom
Lots of misinformed comments on here. As a current Air Force pilot, I can assure you all that we all like the A-10. We also don’t think the F-35 is a valid replacement. And we know how to kill our enemies at every level, from the mud to space.
david miller
Out of curiousity, I’d like to hear what you (and your fellow pilots) think of the F-35 overall, Tom.