I have a story that many may find impossible, but I know what I saw.
I was assigned to the 483TAW stationed at Camh Ranh Bay, Vietnam and it was around June or July of 1971 that I had an encounter with a strange aircraft on the flightline.
I was a driver for a ground tug moving power units and light carts around on the PSP parking ramp. This particular afternoon, I was moving in between rows of parked Caribous and I came to a stop about midway up the line to wait for further instructions from the radio. I was basically loitering. Something caught my attention out of my peripheral vision. When I turned, I was staring down a straight-wing aircraft immediately behind me. It’s engines were idling as it was slowly taxing but I did not hear it come up behind me. It was very quiet. What caught my eye was the fact that it had two large engines mounted high on the aft fuselage, a twin tail, and a bubble canopy. This was no aircraft that I had ever seen before. I didn’t have a clue what it was. But with my duties on the flightline, I paid it no further attention.
It was years later that I saw the first pictures of the A-10 Warthog and realized that this was the aircraft that I had seen that day on the ramp at Camh Ranh Bay, but how can this be possible? The A-10 prototypes were not in existence back in 1971.
Was it a similar aircraft? I haven’t been able to find anything else that closely resembled the one I saw. It was the only time I saw one of these and so, I cannot explain it to this day.
I had TDYs to Bien Hoa when I was assigned to Camh Ranh Bay, 1970-71 and there were A-1s also assigned there. Talk about a real war horse. One of these Bien Hoa Skyraiders can be seen at The Lone Star Flight Museum where all their relics are airworthy and flown regularly.
Another way to think about the original question is, would there have been the perceived need, and institutional will, to build the A-10 before the early 70s? And I think the answer to that is probably no. Yeah the A-10 was designed and tested late 60s/early 70s, but I think it wouldn’t have come on line without the messy state of the US military and the USAF in the wake of Vietnam. The Air Force didn’t want it and still don’t, there’s another long thread about that elsewhere.
As for the OV-10, the newer Brazilian Super Tucano is a prop plane that seems to be much admired for a similar role:
I can’t see second link, but the Sea Fury MiG claim was made August 9, 1952 by 802 Sdn RN from the carrier HMS Ocean, usually credited to Peter Carmichael though this isn’t so clear from the original Britich accounts. The F4U claim was made Sept 10 of that year by Jesse Folmar of VMA-312 from USS Sicily. As far as confirmation though Chinese published accounts identify the units which attacked Fleet Air Arm a/c on August 9 as the PLAAF 52nd and 7th Fighter Regiments. They claimed two Sea Furies, and actually one made a wheels up landing on a UN held island due to combat damage, another recovered safely on HMS Ocean but damaged. The Chinese account doesn’t mention any MiG losses. OTOH the 1953 North Korean MiG defector No Kum-sok said that it was his unit, the KPAAF 1st Fighter Regiment, in the combat with VMA-312 and that Folmar shot one of them down. Folmar was also shot down but bailed out safely.
Those were piston fighter kills, or claims. The first piston a/c to shoot down a MiG-15 was a B-29 of the 98th BG on Dec 6, 1950. The gunners were only credited with a ‘possible’ so it doesn’t appear in the list of official USAF credits, however Soviet records show that a MiG of their 29th Guards Fighter Regiment was lost in the engagement.
Back from Korean air war trivia to A-10, as mentioned the original requirement for the A-X was for an a/c suited to the Vietnam close support mission but with greater resistance to ground fire than existing types. The idea of building the a/c around the 30mm gatling gun came in a later iteration of the concept looking to post-Vietnam requirements. Certainly a generally similar a/c to the original concept could have been built in time for service in the Vietnam War. It would have had less efficient engines than the TF-34’s eventually fitted, and again little reason for such a gun against typical targets of Vietnam CAS missions prior to 1972 (when the North Vietnamese first used armor on a large scale).
The problem though with such a/c dropping dumb munitions is another development in Vietnam combat from 1972, Manpads. The primitive ones used then were relatively easy to decoy, but caused serious losses for South Vietnamese A-1’s and the OV-10 (still in USMC service then) became an untenable a/c in the Gulf War on 1991 because of its vulnerability to such weapons. A-10’s are still viable now because they can drop smart weapons from above Manpads envelopes where necessary…as can any other strike a/c and this is a reason why the mythology and lore of the A-10 has gotten carried away. It isn’t really better at real world CAS missions than other strike a/c in the USAF, and too vulnerable to actually go down low enough to use the gun in a non-permissive environment. You can’t build a plane to withstand missile hits, you either have to defeat the missiles with countermeasures or stay out of their range.
