Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: dela@ee.rochester.edu (Del Armstrong) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: A-10 Thunderbolt -- Who /really/ flys them? Summary: A-10 -> A-16 migration in progress already. Message-ID: <10139@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 12 Oct 89 03:18:42 GMT References: <10085@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Organization: University of Rochester Department of Electrical Engineering Lines: 77 Approved: military@att.att.com From: dela@ee.rochester.edu (Del Armstrong) In article <10085@cbnews.ATT.COM> shafer@drynix (Mary Shafer) writes: > > >From: Mary Shafer >The A-10s belong to the Air Force and to the Air National Guard >(which is sort of the Air Force). The Air Force, having destroyed >the tooling, shut down the line, and put Republic out of business, >is now attempting to convince the world that a light-weight fighter >(the F-16) can be made into an attack aircraft, the A-16. > >The AFTI/F-16 has been flying in support of demonstrating the attack >capabilities of the A-16. I think that it's OK in the CAS (Close Air >Support) role, in that it can carry a decent load of bombs and transit >the area rapidly. However, it doesn't carry the 30-mm cannon which is >so effective against armored vehicles. > >The attack pilot community is also _very_ fond of the Kevlar bathtub >that they sit in in the A-10. The A-16 will be very lightly armored, >on the theory that they'll be in and out so quick that no one will >shoot at them. (Yeah, right. :-) ) > >If the Air Force gets the A-16, they'll turn all the A-10s over to the >ANG, not the Army. At the NY State Fair, this summer "The Boys From Syracus", an ANG group based in Syracus had a display set up. The interesting part of the display was a 30-mm cannon in a HUGE pod, which they claim to use on their new (to them) F-16's. Until recently, they had been flying A-10's but now they're doing ground attack in F-16's. Being a fan of the A-10, I tried to pin down the ANG guy down on how much he missed the A-10's. But he claimed to feel safer in the F-16. The only argument he really had was that in a world infested with zillions of shoulder-launced SAMs, the A-10 was just too slow. He claimed that in the F-16, he could drop his load and be gone before anybody had a chance to shoot at him. He kept talking about lessons learned in Afganistan. I'll just observe here, that I've never gotten a military pilot to do anything other then swear that his plane is the only plane that can accomplish a given mission well. According to the guy I talked to, the cannon pod uses the same round as the A-10 cannon, although he mumbled something about a slower muzzle velocity (or was it firing rate?) and he mentioned that it carries less rounds then the A-10 could. For what it's worth, I think they traded one liability (slow speed) for a bunch of liabilites (poor survivability, poor loiter capability, poor accuracy?, need for long runways). With luck, we'll never know for sure whether it was a good trade or not. It seems to me that the Air Force is trying to replace some of it's single mission aircraft with variants of it's current fighter fleet. The F-111 is going to be replaced with the F-15E, and the A-10 with the F-16. I can only imagine that this is a response to the current budget crisis. A question: I've read that the fly by wire fighters have turned out to be unusually accurate ground attack aircraft, because they're such stable platforms. Is this really true, and how accurate is the F-16 compared to the A-10, especially when the F-16 is really taking advantage of it's speed (trying to stay alive). Del Armstrong Internet : dela@ee.rochester.edu UUCP : ...allegra!rochester!ur-valhalla!dela Twisted pair: (716) 275-5342 Last resort : Hopeman 407 Electrical Engineering University of Rochester Rochester, N.Y. 14627 +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+