I recently read a ny times AP feed and discovered that the A-10 was being used in Afganistan. No great surprise, but I understand that prior to the Kuiwait invasion, the A-10 was due to be phased out.
Does the AF intend to continue their use? Over what horizion? Are their plans to upgrade their avionics?
I don’t know the official lineon this but you are correct that the A-10 was due to be retired prior to Desert Storm. However, in Desert Storm the A-10 acquitted itself so well that it got a new lease on life. Ugly and slow it does some things better than any other plane in the inventory. IIRC it has the most powerful cannon of any plane for tank killing, it can loiter around the battlefiled fairly long compared to other jet fighters and it is armored like a tank (as planes go). Apparently it can take a good deal of damage and still fly while the pilot is protected in what amounts to an armored bathtub.
I don’t know if the plane will get an avionics upgrade but what does it really need given its mission? Also, why phase out a successful design? It may not be a glamorous plane but I’m sure the piolts appreciate its finer points.
Plus, it can fly so low as to confuse enemy radar. You’re gone by the time they’ve got any defenses on your tail!
I noticed a lot of older Vietnam and even Korean designs are very long-lasting. Perhaps they will remodel the design and make new ones?
bandit, I think jet fighter designs in general are long lasting. The F-14 is 30 years old now, and the F-15 is 25 years old or so. The F-4’s been around damn near fifty and they still use them. The F-16 and F-18 are pushing 20 or so and they’re not going to be phased out anytime soon.
I hope the Air Force does retire them, and the Marines pick them all up. Yummy, close air support with 30mm explosive rounds.
I thought the MArines had Harriers.
Hey, if it works, keep it. Remember how long the B-52 has been around…!..
Harriers are great planes, but they have nothing like the loiter time that the A-10 has, and they do not have the weaponry specifically designed for tank busting.
The Air Force (or some bunch of kooks in the Pentagon) is still trying to replace the A-10. Their favored choice is a “beefed up” F-16 (can you say F-104G?). While we like to hope that the military studies tactics with an eye to actually winning wars*, they are human and are subject to the same emotional pulls as the rest of humanity and there are a lot of flyboys who simply don’t think the A-10 is sexy enough. I don’t know who is currently winning the A-10 vs F-16 battle in the Pentagon, but both sides are present.
What a sad commentary this is. Sexy-shmexy…The A-10 has a charm all its own. I recall seeing interviews with A-10 pilots during Desert Storm and they were thrilled with their plane. They were the first to admit it wasn’t much to look at but it had the very real and more important attraction of getting them back home alive and well. One of the A-10s I saw was shot-up nice and good including missing a goodly portion of one wing and significant tail damage. The pilot was of the opinion that any other fighter wouldn’t have been able to fly with such damage.
Relatively cheap, reliable and it gets the mission accomplished. I’m not arguing with what tomndebb wrote but just ranting at the stupidity of the military mind.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
If you want to see some photos of damage sustained by A-10s follow this link: http://www.pats-world.com/gulfwar/abdr-home.htm
It includes a picture of an A-10 wing that had 300 bullet holes in it. The wing was a write-off I suspect but the pilot wasn’t and that’s what is most important.
Well, if it’s any consolation, the reports from the Pentagon in August 1990 indicated that we would scrap it.
In June of 1991 they said they were “rethinking” the replacement scenario.
It wasn’t until around 1993 that they started floating the “replace it” balloon, again.
And, here, almost ten years later, it is still in service with no official project to get rid of it.
The USAF is not staffed by idiots–but as with all human institutions, not all the members are optimal.
They do, and while those would be nice, the A-10 tickles my loins in a GOOD way. Kinda like the F-4.
I’m no engineer but I never saw the logic behind retiring the A-10. It’s not like the tank is going to be obsolete any time soon so neither will tank-busting. And the A-10 has no rival in this field.
Its only real drawback is its too slow. So make a faster one. I realize that’s not a simple task being how heavy it is, but jet engines have come a long way in it’s lifetime. Think of how vastly improved the Harrier II was.
I mean, why would anyone want to scrap an airplane that can fire 70 depleted uranium sabots a second?! 
Only airplane IMO to come close to maintaing the name “Thunderbolt” with the propper action and the only one I think the real “thunderbolts” would have accepted anyway. YMMV
Tough
Ugly
Do the job
Bring them home
Ground grunts love them
Pilots love them
Cheap for what they can do
Nuff said…
In a ground attack role, that slowness is exactly what they were after.
With a fast mover, there are a number of problems doing sustained ground attack.
If you watch a pair of A-10’s in action (and pairs is how they do alot of their work) doing figure eight attack runs, it is amazing. One plane is turning around while the other is on the attack run.
The guys on the ground have just seconds to run, hide, or whatever else they may want to do between each attack run.
In interviews of Iraqi soldiers after the war, the A-10 was a highly feared platform. Once the plane found them on the ground, things got ugly and stayed ugly.
The problem with the A-10 is that its slow and therefore horribly vulnerable to shoulder fired missiles and triple A. Sure, the armor can keep it flying, but going into combat planning to get hit isn’t a winning strategy.
If the balloon had gone up, A-10s making strafing runs into the teeth of mobile Soviet AA defenses would have suffered horrendous casualties.
As for those claiming that no other aircraft can do what the A-10 can do, well, bull. F-111s in the gulf would load up with a 12 500lb laser guided bombs and do a one-hit, one-kill. Nowadays, B-52s can fly at 40,000 feet and drop a bomb which is guided by lasers or other means to hit pinpoint targets.
Face it – its not a good idea to go attacking at relatively low speed into the teeth of the enemy air defenses, whether they be top-flight Soviet SAMs or low-tech Guys With Rifles Shooting Into The Air.
XPav, the A-10 has many features to prevent it from being hit in the first place:
Straight bombing cannot replace the role of ground attack, yet… but maybe soon.
Also, the A-10 can support troops on the ground in situations where you just couldn’t afford to drop bombs.
You also don’t send A-10s into the teeth of mobile AA. The effective AA is stopped with HARM missles before the A-10 gets to work.
For all the missles shot at A-10s, very few have hit. That leaves ground fire. Radar directed ground fire will not be radar directed by the time we send in A-10s either.
And, if F-111 could do what the A-10’s did, why didn’t they use them that way? Because, they can’t. An A-10 can’t do what an F-111 does. Two roles, two machines. Ground attack and close air support are easier to do with a slower, highly manueverable plane. Just what the A-10 is.
I suspect that every thing that is worth saying has already been said, but here is an old infantryman’s perspective.
The Air Force fighter jocks hated the Warthog—it had no glamour. It is as subtle as a dull ax and is not set up for aerobatics at supersonic speed. The Blue Angles do not fly Warthogs. Every fighter jock who ever had a cheap bourbon and water in the O-club at Ramstein wanted to fly in the Blue Angles. Warthog pilots do not even get on the waiting list for the Blue Angles.
“Slow” is a relative concept when it comes to jet aircraft. Anyone who has been harried down a tank trail by a pair of Warthogs will tell you that they clip right along. They are fast enough, especially when hurtling along 100 feet off the deck and they are after you.
As far a susceptibility to ground fire is concerned there is a big difference between hitting one and bringing it down. They certainly are much more robust that the rotary wing stuff that does the same sort of ground support and tank busting.
The Warthog is a special purpose aircraft. It does a job that more sexy planes can’t do nearly as well or as cheaply. When you are hunkered down in the woods or in a ditch there is something very reassuring about having a pair of these dumpy little aircraft passing overhead every few minutes. They are the Air Force’s interior linemen. God bless ‘em.
It is if the pilots & planes still make it back in one piece and they accomplish their mission. And the A-10s seem to have done this in Desert Storm.
As for other planes doing its job, the A-10 isn’t just any ground attack aircraft. Its specifically a tank buster. The entire airframe was designed around its main gun. Relying on fighters w/bombs (even smart ones) to do its jobs as well is questionable.
Again, not true. Look at the pictures of the hits the A-10s sustained in the Gulf. The Warthog was designed to survive this kind of stuff. And it does! And being that the enemy now is likely to be the low-tech guys with rifles rather than the Soviets, all the more reason to keep using it.
To interject some actual data into the speculation (Hail Ants’s damage photos aside). The Federation of American Scientists has a very good web site will all kinds of weapons system information. Amoung other tidbits on the A-10 page, I found this:
and
So, they are actively upgrading the inventory, and there’s plans to keep using them. At the end of the page there’s a “Joint A-10 Roadmap - New Capabilities” chart from 1998 (obviously a draft - see the note below the legend) This lists planned and funded upgrade programs running through fiscal year 2010.