Zimmerdylan Posted November 24, 2015 Posted November 24, 2015 (edited) OK, so I had a short chat with my A10 pilot student this morning. We talked a little about Flight planning, Weapons training, and flying over Korea. I was a little surprised to learn that A10's do not rely all that heavily on programmed flight plans loaded into their AC. Otherwise, for most training (range) missions, and routine patrol missions, they do not follow specific waypoints on their H.U.D. Unless there is a very specific target, and a mission is planned for a very specific purpose. For the most part they are left to use standard navigational info to complete their task. They do rely on forward observers who mark specific points or targets quite a bit ,but they usually rely on visual sightings and a generalized, predetermined route that they are at liberty to deviate from at their discretion. They do a fair amount of target spotting with no aid from SPI's or forward observers also. I asked him if ground targets were difficult to spot. His answer was kind of a yes and no. It's not like they see something and just go attack it (on the battlefield and range). They have to get confirmation if they spot a potential target, and then get a "weapons free" response from ATC. He said that at times it can take a while to get some kind of confirmation on a potential target, and more often than not, it's a pass it over situation. I guess it makes perfect sense but I had this illusion that everything you did in a modern war plane was predetermined, hashed over, and planned to the meter. Goes to show ya........ This guy came to Davis Monthan from Korea. He told me some pretty funny stories about the lousy ATC methods of the N. Koreans. Told me that he almost went head on with a N. Korean 747 because no one said anything about it being in the area. He said that he could see the two pilot's faces as he banked up. He also told me that the N. Koreans are very quick to warn American pilots that they're getting too close to their air space. Said that it was pretty hard to understand them when they gave warnings that they were going to fire on you for being too close. Although he said that these warnings were a daily occurrence, no one that he had ever heard of has been fired upon. He also told me to get use to knots as the unit of measure for the sim. It's pretty much all the military uses any more (for aircraft anyway). I posted a thread about how confusing knots, MPH, and KPH was. He said that knots was much easier for pilots to convert to Imperial than metric, and that most pilots don't learn the conversions. They just go off of whatever the standard is for the application. I feel kind of weird asking questions so I just take what he gives me. I know that there are some classified aspects of the A10 and it's missions and I don't want to press the guy too much. Edited November 24, 2015 by Zimmerdylan 1
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