What news about A-10's from across the Big Pond?

the idea is basically the same though

Anyway, the idea is not bad

reply to post by pacific_waters


Correct. The P47 was a superb ground attack aircraft and excelled in that role. The P39 Airacobra with the 37mm nose gun was the tank buster that the Soviets really liked. The B25G and B25H had 75mm nose guns but these fired slowly.
My uncle was in the USAAF and flew in a joint US/Canadian unit during DDay in a Mosquitos. He said that they had 4x20mm cannon in the nose and were exceptionally fast. The orders were simple: fly parallel to the beaches and shoot anything that looked German. He told me that he flew at treetop level down the roads and shot up truck convoys. The 4 cannon really did a nice job at the low angle of attack and the Mosquito was going too fast for much return fire as everyone was trying to find a place to hide that was far from the burning trucks, anyway. After he ran dry, he returned to England, a short hop at 300mph, landed, and was given 5-10 minutes to get ready for the next sortie. Refueled and rearmed planes were waiting and pilots got the next plane as soon as they were ready to go. He said he flew missions continually and was not in the same aircraft twice.

A-10C program will extend service life to 2028.

US Air Force Technology

Originally posted by Silver Shadow A Apache helicopter gun ship with a Gatling gun would be far more effective against people hiding on the side of a hill.

You don't need the rate of fire or the armor piercing capability of the A10 to shoot at civilians on the ground.

To the best of my knowledge, A-1os do not"shoot at civilians on the ground!" at least not intentionally.

The very idea of the vulture mentality, "Patience my ass, I'm gonna kill something!" has, in my opinion, long gone.

CAS is an extremely dangerous operation for all involved and we Brits take it so seriously, that the course held up in Yorkshire and Scotland has a very high failure rate.

But thinking back to the Viet Nam era when you had helicopter gunships, I have often wondered why the Marines specifically, have not reinvented the gunship.

The original Huey-Cobras with their twin machineguns and 2.75 inch rocket pods on stubby wings ably supported by a chin turret sporting a 40 mm grenade launcher was, IMHO, the dogs dangly bits.

As somebody said, the A-10 was designed to take out an en masse attack by the dreaded Russian Bogeyman. The same can be said of the Apache.

Perhaps it is time to reconfigure the A-10 and remove the existing Vulcan gatling gun, with the 23mm chain gun found on the Bradley or our Warrior ICFVs; fit some type of 40 mm grenade launcher pods on wing pylons next to 7.62mm gun pods.