[ARC5] A10 Warthog

[mkdorney at aol.com]

The thing is, the Army would have taken them.  The back seat thing was something the USAF tried to push to turn these aircraft into FAC aircraft.
 
73
Mark
WW2RDO
 
In a message dated 7/3/2018 1:36:28 PM Eastern Standard Time, jpwatkins9 at gmail.com writes:

 
They also tried to give them to the Marines, but alas, no tail hook.  Very difficult to land on a carrier without that.  The FM radios are to talk to the grunts on the ground that the Warthog supports.  
 
John WD5ENU

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 12:25 PM Mkdorney via ARC5 <arc5 at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
The USAF wanted to retire the A-10,  but the ARMY wouldn’t let them. You see, the A-10 isn’t a sexy, fast moving fighter like the F-15 or F-16 or any of the new stealth stuff. The USAF even fit 30 mm gun pods under the wings of some F-16s, but they just couldn’t do the ground attack thing quite as well as the A-10. When the higher ups in the USAF tried to push the matter, the higher ups in the Army said, “Fine, if you don’t want the A-10, give them to us. We’ll take them”. Not wanting to give up any part of the fixed wing combat sphere to another service branch, the USAF decided to keep the A-10, but moved most, if not all A-10 aircraft to the Air National Guard or Air Force Reserve. 

      At the US Army Field Artillery Officers Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, one of the things taught to the new Lieutenants is how to call in TACAIR ( although this is normally done by a USAF FAC ).   The planes I guided to target were two F4E Phantoms. The A-10 was brand new back then, and another Lt in our group got to call two of them in. The A-10s were painted in mostly green camouflage back then, and these two also had the “sharks teeth “ painted on the nose of the aircraft. We could see the aircraft in the distance behind us as they reached the IP of the bomb run. The pop up point was directly over our heads. The line up was 2 A-10s carrying 4 Mk 82 High drags each. ( 500 lb retarded bombs - retarded as in they had flaps that opened automatically on the back of the bombs to slow  their speed down so they wouldn’t explode directly under the aircraft that was performing a low altitude bomb run. No 30 mm for this run, much to our disappointment ).  The A-10s were flying “ Nap of the Earth “, down low in the valley behind us in order to avoid RADAR detection. Now I don’t know if any of you have seen the movie “ Dragon Slayer” , but these two A-10s sure as hell reminded me of the opening sequence of that movie, when you see the dragon fly up a  valley. These two planes just looked like death coming at you. 

 73
 Mark
 WW2RDO



 Sent from my iPhone

 > On Jul 3, 2018, at 10:42 AM, Bill Cromwell <wrcromwell at gmail.com> wrote:
 > 
 > Hi,
 > 
 > There is a National Guard facility a little north of my home. This morning a low flying jet passed over my home. I went outside to look and it was a A10 Warthog (two of them). I had thought that model was retired and *gone*. I looked it up and those are still in service and expected to remain for quite some time to come. I had it confused with a Navy airplane.
 > 
 > Relevance to the list..the A10 has military aircraft radios aboard :)
 > 
 > 73,
 > 
 > Bill  KU8H
 > 
 > 
 > -- 
 > bark less - wag more
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