A-10 Retirement?

[Pilotasso]

Retirement of the A-10 would be unwise, but the US has already demonstrated to stick with simpler low cost planes by adopting turboprop CAS aircraft.

[Flagrum]

Is that the videos from wikileaks?

 

Where those criminal are in reality a unarmed camera man and a journalist, and a ambulance trying to recover wounded people....

There are one or two others on youtube ......

[SkateZilla]

Retirement of the A-10 would be unwise, but the US has already demonstrated to stick with simpler low cost planes by adopting turboprop CAS aircraft.

 

A-10s are Dirt Cheap......

 

Arent they just now testing new external stores configurations to allow more Time over Target Area?

[OutOnTheOP]

lol.. choppers and drones replacing planes as CAS.. yeah i don't think so, one is too slow, the other is too clumsy for the job ..

 

Really? Have you ever been in a real firefight, in a real war? I have. I was a fire support officer; among other things, controlling CAS and combat aviation was part of my responsibilities. The AH64s were, universally, more responsive, and faster on target, than the fixed-wing aircraft. You clearly do not understand how FARPs work.

 

droping iron bombs and CBU's is not what is needed when you have a platoon of soldiers in a building being surrounded by 3 enemy platoons right near by.. you need a rocket or cannon attack.. anything else WILL kill your troops as well..

 

Funny, I had, on at least a dozen occasions, successfully employed Hellfire within 70 meters of friendlies in urban terrain. I also once employed a 500lb JDAM without even damaging the adjacent buildings (aside from broken windows) less than 20 meters away. SDBs only increase these capabilities, and the new generation with IIR sensors are additionally able to track and hit moving targets like tanks or APCs.

 

Drone cannot do that, and choppers are too slow .. we are talking CAS that is deployed across great distance and in urgent manner.. so far A-10 will outspeed AH-64 by a long shot.

 

By this logic, the F-35 is better than the A-10- it is faster yet.

 

A-10 not having small caliber fire? really? you checked all A-10's that came from battle?... Again, how is F-35 capable of taking damage is really news to me, the thing is designed not to take ANY fire whatsoever.. its not armored, it can't take small arms fire yet alone big caliber fire.. as such its not CAS plane.. dropping LGB's is not CAS, its ground attack.. those two missions differ greatly.. and result can be a platoon saved or platoon annihilated..

 

The damage in '91 was almost all 23mm and higher, hardly "AK47s". Also, the engines, fuel system, and other systems on the A-10 are no better armored than the F-35. It is also a moot point; the A-10 took such horrific damage because it's weapons employment capabilities and flight envelope FORCED it to fly into the heart of the AAA threat. The F-35 would not, and has no need to, fly nap of the earth through small arms fire to employ it's weapons.

 

When did the definition of CAS change to "the airplane must buzz right overhead of the enemy and strafe them"? Last I checked, CAS was "fires from aircraft in support of friendly troops in direct contact with, or about to make direct contact with, the enemy". If you can positively identify the enemy forces and friendly forces from 40k feet, and then deliver a PGM onto the enemy forces, you ARE accomplishing CAS.

 

The A-10 HAD to be low and slow, because with 1960s-1970s era sensors, navigation systems, and target location systems, they could not successfully ID targets from high and fast. Nowadays, the friendlies have GPS and can tell you within meters where they are, and where the enemy is. The aircraft can self-locate itself accurately, and the sensors are capable of being rapidly cued onto a target designated by grid coordinates.

 

Also, I would note that during the first gulf war, the aircraft with the most tank/ AFV kills was NOT the A-10. It was the F-111, flying high, largely at night, dropping 500lb LGBs- with less than half the airframes, flying less than half as many sorties as the A-10s flew. I suspect the F-35 will do just fine.