USAF Targets Its Legendary Close Air Support Platform
The A-10 was built on the mantra of being able to fly extremely damaged on ‘half of one wing, one tail, one engine, one elevator missing’. Of extreme importance for CAS missions is the A-10’s relatively slow speed which unlike fast-moving jet fighter aircraft allows the pilot to accurately acquire and engage targets. In addition, its turbofan engines give the A-10 increased fuel efficiency, significant loiter capability (on the order of several hours versus minutes for high-speed aircraft), time on station, and time over target, which are critical for on-call missions in support of ground forces. Most impressively, the A-10 excellently provides this lethal and effective capability at a cost of only $11-19 million dollars per aircraft.
Current trends again see the planned reduction of the A-10 fleet. Recent defense budget reductions have led the USAF to propose cutting five A-10 squadrons and ultimately reducing the fleet to around 240-50 aircraft (down from approx. 350), while more drastic plans call for getting rid of them altogether.
This looks to be a pretty good site, check out Marc’s other stuff.
Have always been impressed with the A-10. They regularly flew out of BDL, not far from here in northwest CT. I remember one particular Memorial Day when an A-10 did a low altitude, low speed flyover during the parade festivities. It. Was. Awesome. And scary, too.
Got firepower?
Got engine?
Its too bad our government can’t buy them, and a proper air superiority fighter, instead of the F35 that will do neither well.
Please ignore that baby being thrown out with that bathwater.
In other news the great O in move reminicent of ol Chamberlain, celebrates peace in our time because he gave up something for a bad faith deal with Iran.
Very cool plane to see doing the bombing loop. That measured turn followed by what the groundlings must experience as ugly firepower. Impressive.
how many billions did the f35 cost?
there aren’t many military expenditures I would want to prevent, but wow that f35 was a pointless waste.
The Hog was a great plane in its day, but that day is long gone. If you have to get in low and slow for ground support, then use helicopter gunships that can fly deeky-dan in the weeds.
There is no need to put pilots at risk anymore just to take out tanks. The F-35 sensors systems can detect and target moving tanks from 25,000 ft.
Watched them during various live fire demonstrations — always impressive.
There will always be a need for an aircraft that can get down and dirty with the grunts and this one fills the role magnificently. Choppers are important to be sure, but rotary wings are just inherently more vulnerable than the heavily armored fixed wing A-10. If they get rid of it, they’ll have to re-invent it.
Well, the Mayor of Sarnia Ontario will be very pleased. He goes apes#it every time one out of Selfridge MANG base overflies the city. Guess he thinks the city is being invaded or something.
Predictable because he’s a Liberal.
Super Impressive, especially in the hands of an honorable and intelligent government.
Hopefully they never fall into the hands of a lying Affirmative Action community activist with an honorary degree in Saul Alinsky Marxism.
That could be a disaster.
F35 is way to expensive to ever be used as a close air support aircraft. They would also have more important things to do.
I’m no expert on military aircraft, however I like to live by the mantra “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This thing is relatively cheap, gets good gas mileage and delivers one hell of a punch. What else could you want?
They’ve been a success, on a low budget.
So, they’ll find no friends in the current administration of B. Hussien.
Article dated 11/19/2013: “Debate on the Senate’s version of the fiscal 2014 defense authorization bill is underway, and lawmakers are considering a long list of amendments, including one that proposes to limit the retirement of the A-10 Thunderbolt.
The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), would prevent the Air Force from retiring or placing the A-10 in storage until the F-35A is fully operational — a milestone that Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh has said he hopes will happen in 2021.”
It certainly will be. They are already testing it for ground support. It can detect a mortar firing from 35,000 ft and then target and attack. Same for tanks, even ones moving.
When they say multirole, that means ground support.
Im with you . this is my favorite aircraft,in second place is the f-35 ,followed by the f-22.
The targeting system.
http://alert5.com/2013/02/12/youtube-anaaq-37-detects-hostile-ground-fire/
The test
https://www.f35.com/news/detail/f-35b-lightning-ii-completes-first-guided-weapon-delivery-against-ground-ta
At an airshow I got to point out to my wife that the A-10 was the ultimate American aircraft – I asked the pilot to flip down the front of the left gear fairing revealing (wait for it) the credit card holder!
That said, a great aircraft if someone is shooting from below the titanium bathtub the pilot sits in, but they roll inverted to attack and then the only protection is plexiglass…
One word:
Drones.
This is a big apples to oranges comparison but;
The A10 is only 2.4ft longer than a Twin Otter,
yet its empty weight is 12.5 tons compared to 2.9 for a Twotter,
An A10 will load up and carry 11 tons of fuel and armament for a CAS mission while a Twotter maxs out to 3.35 tons of fuel and payload.
This is just meant as a perspective issue for those not really mil geeks.
As far as an A10 vs a chopper for CAS,,,
You can hear a heavy attack chopper coming in from 4 miles out, and target it easier due to its relatively slow speed. And there really isn’t any “damage redundancy” in a rotor/tail rotor set up.
The A10 wasn’t really a compromise design. They got it right for it’s mission.
I’m sure it CAN do these, but will it? This is why both the army and marines have there own close support aircraft. The air force has a strategic rather than a tactical role (at least as they see it), which is why the air force has never liked the A-10. I’m sure that if they had an unlimited number of F35’s they would be used in the close air support role, but (assuming the enemy is China or North Korea, or Russia, as opposed to just sand monkeys with IEDs) every last F35 will be involved in air superiority, or long range strike missions against targets of strategic importance (enemy air defence assets, electrical grids, command control and communications targets etc. They will never send a multi billion dollar aircraft to help an infantry section that needs help to take out a tank.
It’s like the Canadian ADATS system (air defence anti tank). No commander is every going to take a very expensive, in very short supply missile he can use to take down an Su35, and shoot it at a T80. Its about making best use of the resources available.
Not one of you have mentioned its most awesome feature and the reason the a/c came into existence in the first place.The A-10 was designed around the GAU-8 Avenger, a 30 mm rotary cannon that is the airplane’s primary armament and the heaviest such cannon mounted on an aircraft.The GAU-8 takes up most of the length of the aircraft.The GAU-8 uses depleted U in its round.
Re my previous comment. The cannon came first and the plane was designed around it back in the early ’70s and I’m guessing before most of you comm enters were born.
love the warthog, but yes, it’s past it’s best before date. U can have 1-2 mil$ smart weapons do the exact same thing without a pilot being exposed to the extent that they are in an in close aircraft. I’m with Gord Tulk on the drones here, they can run silent and do the job at stand off distance.
Oh, and it is a flying lead balloon:-)))
The F-35 is a gee-whiz wonder weapon. Its systems operate on the hairy edge of materials physics. Take fer example the lift-fan drive shaft. That drivshaft in operation spins at 8,000 rpm and transmits 29,000 horsepower. That’s twenty nine -thousand- horsepower, not a fat finger typo. Top Fuel Dragsters produce under -two- thousand and break their drive shafts all the time.
http://www.aviationweek.com/Blogs.aspx?plckBlogId=Blog:a68cb417-3364-4fbf-a9dd-4feda680ec9c&plckPostId=Blog:a68cb417-3364-4fbf-a9dd-4feda680ec9cPost:d3c882b1-9bb6-4091-8262-a65f82cb171c
This drive shaft weighs about 100 pounds, is made of Unobtanium and is forged one at a time by Hephaestus himself with a hammer made from the horn of a unicorn. I bet you each one costs at least a million bucks. Just the drive shaft. Not the bearings. I don’t want to think about the bearings. Or the oiling system. Or the oil cooler. Or the oil pump. Holy freaking frack.
This is not an aircraft I want to be flying through a cloud of shrapnel, as often happens when you blow something up on the ground. Its a pampered hangar queen, to be taken out flying only when there’s a photo-op during an election year.
The A-10 by contrast regularly gets hit by shoulder fired missiles and RPGs, completes the mission anyway and flies home. They’ve been hit by full-up AA missiles and still flown home. Anything that comes under fire from that cannon gets shredded.
Somebody up above said “drones”. From the article, the A-10 cost “$11-18 million dollars per aircraft”. The Predator drone everybody is in love with costs about $4 million according to Wikipedia. Which sounds like a bargain until you compare the lifespan of the Warthog with the Predator, and the number of aircraft losses.
The Canadian and American military are currently engaged in wars with what amounts to punks with guns on the ground. Sometimes dug in, usually just running around. Close air support is a major asset in that kind of conflict. The requirements are cheap flying time with precision attacks and good survivability against small to medium arms.
That’s the Warthog.
Proof that the American defense establishment is not at all even faintly serious about the Middle East war is that the Warthog is no longer in production. They’ve been down there since 1996 blowing stuff up, almost a generation of warfare. If Islamic terrorists were an actual threat they’d be making more A-10s. But they are instead talking about scrapping them. So I can only conclude its a side show to suck in the rubes.
Our Royal Canadian Air Force has two missions. First, protect the second largest landmass in the world from invaders. To my mind the aircraft for that job is one like the Avro Arrow. A big plane with a big radar, lots of fuel and lots of missiles, fast enough to get someplace in the Arctic and blow somebody up. (I remind one and all at this time that the Russians are still flying the Bear.) Also great for heavy bombing, cruise missiles, and air superiority.
(Unlike the Arrow it would be nice if the engines could be swapped out in the driveway instead of needing three days in a fully equipped shop. Just sayin’.)
The other mission is shooting punks with guns overseas. The aircraft for that would be the Warthog, or even a bigger, fatter Hawker Typhoon or a Dehaviland Mosquito with turboprops. Think back to Vietnam and the Douglas Skyraider aka “Spad”. Long loiter time, huge munitions load, cheap like borscht, very durable.
Something we could design and build here in Canada, by the -hundreds-, instead of flying fifteen or twenty Wunderkraft from Boeing at a cost of $Billions. And maybe, Ghod forbid, a ship to launch them off. Imagine being the Canadian commander in Afghanistan with two hundred close air support planes instead of five CF-18s. Better, yes?
When somebody from the CPC proposes something like that, I’ll be able to assume they are preparing for something serious instead of the usual Ottawa Two Step we’ve been getting since John F’in Diefenbaker.
Put the sensor package in the A-10.
Duh.
Give it to the Army.
Nothing like a A-10 hanging in the AO for hours.
You see, the idiots on the other side “get” the A-10 . They freeze and you can maneuver against them or what ever you need to do. And on the ground, its slow.
So zoomies out of no where, hear and gone have no presence.
Besides its stupid to use a F1 type car to deliver dump truck loads.
You can turn an A10 or any other A/C into a drone with today’s technology.
In 1984 they remotely flew a Boeing 720 into a simulated crash.
Would it be cheaper or more cost effective?
Presently,and in the near future, I doubt it. You still need a crew to operate a drone.
If you want to risk a huge aw $hit moment when telemetry has been lost, in the fog of war, with a full multipurpose weapons load,go for it.
That’s not getting a bigger bang for the buck.
A MQ-9 Reaper drone costs $11.38 million. These prices are for UAVs only and does not include the cost of ground stations and other associated equipment.
For a 1.5 ton missile or bomb only payload
Awwwa. Pilot exposed.
( eyes roll )
Whatya think the gruts are doing, sunbaths and badminton?
Give the craft to the Army and they’ll have warrent officers lined up until judgement day to fly it.
Pilots don’t like drones because it makes them unemployed. To quote an old friend of mine who was an artillery captain working on drone projects twenty years ago – “if we left equipment choices up to the users the armoured corps would still be arguing the merits of black saddles verses brown saddles.”
I have “FAC”ed a couple of A-10 missions in my day during live-fire exercises.
A great piece of machinery.
It will be missed.
It is very sad watching the US implode. Top brass only looking out for themselves and buddies, but not the best interest of the US of A.
Once the A-10 is gone, Mussies and others don’t have as much to worry about. Like one poster said, you can hear the choppers coming for miles.
I like what Wikipedia says:
Criticism that the U.S. Air Force did not take close air support (CAS) seriously prompted a few service members to seek a specialized attack aircraft.[4][5] In the Vietnam War, large numbers of ground-attack aircraft were shot down by small arms, surface-to-air missiles, and low-level anti-aircraft gunfire, prompting the development of an aircraft better able to survive such weapons. In addition, the UH-1 Iroquois and AH-1 Cobra helicopters of the day, which USAF commanders had said should handle close air support, were ill-suited for use against armor, carrying only anti-personnel machine guns and unguided rockets meant for soft targets. Fast jets such as the F-100 Super Sabre, F-105 Thunderchief and F-4 Phantom II proved for the most part to be ineffective for close air support because their high speed did not allow pilots enough time to get an accurate fix on ground targets and they lacked sufficient loiter time. The effective, but aging, Korean War era, A-1 Skyraider was the USAF’s primary close air support aircraft.[6][7]
G said: “If you want to risk a huge aw $hit moment when telemetry has been lost, in the fog of war, with a full multipurpose weapons load,go for it.”
Strongly agree with your assessment. Of late I’ve seen several articles regarding methods for spoofing autonomous aircraft and remote piloted drones, anything from producing fake GPS signals to brute-force jamming. There’s nothing says the Bad Guys can’t put up some disposable jammers on anything from a Cessna with a suicide pilot to a hot-air balloon. Then your multi-megabuck drone fleet is grounded.
I’ve also seen some proposals for armed autonomous robots. These Pentagon nerds are seriously proposing to send a robot out to pick its own targets and shoot them without approval from home base. Morally that’s a more accurate V1 buzz bomb terror weapon with extra evil sauce and a side order of “Oh $h1t it blew up the wrong house!”
War is h3ll already with just Men fighting it. I don’t see the need to build actual demons and set them loose on the world.
Yep, they strapped an airplane to a cannon.
Sad to see it go.
The aircraft for that would be the Warthog, or even a bigger, fatter Hawker Typhoon or a Dehaviland Mosquito with turboprops. Think back to Vietnam and the Douglas Skyraider aka “Spad”. Long loiter time, huge munitions load, cheap like borscht, very durable. Something we could design and build here in Canada, by the -hundreds-,
Posted by: The Phantom
YES, well said. A turboprop Mossie with modern avionics and weapons would an awesome CAS platform, light bomber, recon….
Everything it did in ww2 but even better.
For a few squadrons of super high tech fighters, lease, don’t buy… and make the competition open to the aircraft world, not just the Yanks.
Phantom, you made all the points I was going to make. The A-10 is one of my favorite aircraft and have seen them close up at the Whidby island air show. Canada should buy every A-10 the US decides to retire as it’s a far cheaper way to provide close air support than an F-35.
My only concern is that the Chicoms have learned engineering from the Russians — one can only hope that they stole lots of bleeding edge tech from the US. Russian tech tends to use what works, not the latest fragile stuff that will get obliterated in combat. UAV’s are very vulnerable to GPS spoofing; that’s how the Iranians got their US drone. A pilot would realize that his GPS isn’t working and would switch to using a map whereas a dumb drone just goes where it’s GPS tells it to.
The A-10 isnt a plane. It’s a gun with wings!
As much as I love it, have to agree on its obsolescence. Helicopter gunships and drones now have standoff capability although the support isnt quite as close anymore. The best reason to have an A-10 in the sky is that it took all enemy attention away from the Infantry.
Unfortunately, that also made it a target, and enemy SAMs are getting better and cheaper. This eas a good call before we had a tragedy.
Is there one single thing anyone can think of that this Alynski-drone imposter squatted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has done, that is demonstrably not explicitly designed to weaken the last great repository of individual freedom’s defenders, and strengthen any and all violence loving authoritarians?
Get Ugly Early.
On drones:
If you can find it, Gregory Clark’s essay “The Baby” recounts how a flight of Sopwiths over the Western Front was attacked by German aircraft, who singled out a trailing plane thinking it was a new, inexperienced flyer. At the last moment, the “baby” did a gutwrenching dive, and turned back up to take out two Fokkers in one sweep. It was Raymond Collishaw. Clark’s payoff line: “you always have to have a man.”
Fred “There is no need to put pilots at risk anymore just to take out tanks. The F-35 sensors systems can detect and target moving tanks from 25,000 ft.”
Bulltweet. An infantryman is expected to take on tanks with his nose for armour. Just because an airforce pilot is afraid of breaking a nail is no excuse. Spending billions to save one airforce life is ludicrous when you are sending infantry against machine guns.
Got to wonder if the Avenger cannon on the A-10 isn’t going sway the debate for the ignorant. Depleted uranium? SCHREEEEEEAAAK! NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
They got no problem giving hundreds of civilians lead poisoning from collateral damage drone strikes, but risk giving a few enemy troops that survive a slightly increased chance of developing cancer? Unthinkable.
Despite whatever the latest high speed, low drag, übersexy wonder weapon is, there is always a need for rugged, reliable, inexpensive weapon systems. Seems the militaries of the world have to keep relearning this lesson.
No, F-35 can’t replace the A-10, it doesn’t have A-10s loiter time nor can it go low and slow to attack targets with gun in “danger close” situations.
Speaking of Drones… Rememeber Iran shot one of ours down.
As of today, we have never used a drone to support troops when they are being over-run in combat. At this time drones only carry two missiles.
Sorry Fred. The F-35 is a growing nightmare, to big, to heavy and losing it’s stealth because of it’s load requirements.
When troops call for CAS or Medevac, you know Sh@t has hit the fan. You need help now with ammo galore to kill the bad guys.
Been there done that. Nam 1971
Well, if I wanted to take out bad guys surrounding me then I’d go A10, but if I wanted to bring some buddies, beer and fishing supplies up to big fish lake then I’d opt for a Twotter on floats anytime. Mission tasking is what it is all about.
Was there ever a Twin Otter set up with a “Spectre” gunship arrangement? Interesting…
The Air Force doesn’t want it; it’s not sexy enough. But the Army does, because it’s the best CAS craft on the planet. By law, though, fixed wing aircraft are the AF’s toys. As a former Army grunt, I’d love to see the law changed allowing the Army to fly its own close air support missions. I mean the Apache kicks ass, but the Warthog is a flying arsenal-