Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced on social media earlier this week that the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane will remain active until 2030. The aging, obsolete aircraft had a retirement deadline this year. The Air Force is stuck with the A-10 for another four years.
This announcement sparked an onslaught of misinformation on social media, most of it from uninformed A-10 fanboys. Of all the fanboys online, I find the A-10 fanboys to be some of the worst.
For example, this tweet:
Neither. It’s certainly not the most relevant aircraft ever built, nor is it the luckiest. It’s the worst aircraft the Air Force was ever forced to use. It was designed to be a single-mission aircraft. Not to perform close air support (CAS), but to kill waves of Soviet main battle tanks (MBT) with its GAU-8 30mm gun.
The live fire tests against simulated Soviet main line battle tanks
Live fire tests conducted on 14 August 1979 dispelled that idea. The test revealed it was incapable of killing an MBT with its gun.
The test used 10 combat-loaded M47 Patton tanks to simulate a Soviet tank company. The tanks were unmanned and stationary. The pilot flew at low altitude and used low attack angles to simulate movement through a hostile air defense system. That’s because Soviet tank companies operated with the 2K22 Tungusk, an anti-aircraft gun armed with a surface-to-air gun and missile system. When I was an Air Force electronic warfare systems technician in the mid 1980s and early 90s, it was referred to by its NATO designation, the SA-19 Grison.
The A-10 pilot made nine passes, firing a total of 565 rounds, of which 140 rounds impacted nine tanks. The pilot missed one of the tanks entirely.
The aircraft failed to kill a single tank. A tank “kill” is when the attack results in fire. Any resulting damage inflicted by the GAU-8 30mm gun was considered field repairable. Two of the nine tanks hit suffered no damage whatsoever.
If the A-10 was going to kill tanks, it had to do it with missiles, not its gun. In other words, just like every other fighter/bomber aircraft in the Air Force.
The Air Force was stuck with the A-10. No other country wanted to buy a single-mission combat aircraft that couldn’t perform the single mission it was designed for. Go figure. Even after the A-10 transitioned from a tank-killer to a close air support (CAS) platform, no other country wanted to buy them.
The GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm gun
Most of the love for the A-10 from its fanboys seems to be based on its gun. They love to recreate the sound it makes, brrrrrrrrrrt.
The gun is huge, fires a large number of 30mm depleted-uranium rounds, but is also extremely inaccurate. A total of 565 rounds were fired. Only 140 of those rounds hit a tank. That’s less than 25%. The A-10 should never have been tasked with conducting CAS missions, considering how inaccurate the gun is.
I contend the gun is the worst thing about the A-10. It’s so massive that including it on the aircraft impeded its overall design. For instance, it doesn’t have a radar system.
Without building the A-10 around the GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm gun, the aircraft would be much more mission-capable today. For example, think about how effective the A-10 would be today against drones if it had a proper radar system in its nose and eight small-caliber gun pods mounted under its wings.
It would be a genuine anti-drone death machine.