Newsgroups: sci.military Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!cbnews!military From: Chip Mayse Subject: A-10 vs. AV-8B for CAS Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Date: Fri, 19 Oct 90 03:23:43 GMT Approved: military@att.att.com Message-ID: <1990Oct19.032343.12171@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military-request@att.att.com Lines: 35 From: Chip Mayse I can think of a few reasons why the A-10 might be better than the AV-8B for its particular mission: 1. The A-10 is primarily an antitank aircraft, with general CAS a secondary role. The 30 mm gun system and its ammo drum are enormous, and probably wouldn't fit inside an AV-8B. The AV-8 might be able to carry an external 30 mm gun pod, but aiming accuracy and ammo capacity generally suffer with those things; perhaps ballistics do also. (The GAU-8 has a slant range of something like 6000 ft; I've never heard anything like that claimed for a gun pod). 2. The A-10 is designed not only to absorb 23 mm, small missiles and such and keep flying, but also to be easily repairable back at bases. Its materials and construction techniques facilitate this. The AV-8B makes substantial use of composites, and probably isn't easy to build in the first place, let alone repair in forward areas. 3. Tanks are a high-value target and likely to be defended by accompanying, dedicated anti-aircraft units. The A-10's design features and suite of gimmicks are likely to have taken more thorough account of this threat than could be done on the AV-8B, which has to cover a more general forward-area environment (including possible aerial combat). It seems reasonable to me to suspect that each of these planes is better than the other for its particular mission. These, however, aren't quite the same in the two cases. By accounts that I've read, both pilot groups are enthusiastic about the suitability of their planes (though pilots seem to be like this generally). Chip Mayse cmayse@ncsa.uiuc.edu