My rant/fantasy regarding the A-10(A&B) Warthog.

Most of you have ignored the obvious:

WHY WOULD YOU _WANT_ TO SILENCE THE "GAU-8 AVENGER" ???

A big chunk of what makes it effective IS the sound and flash.
Silencing it just does NOT make sense.



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Yep. Having been very lucky years ago to actually hear and see an A10 shoot off a short (?) burst at Edwards Airforce Base USA, why would they want to make the gun any more quiet?

Sometimes sights and sounds are very non heartening to the enemy.

I also suppose they already greatly tried to make the gun more user friendly to the actual pilot shooting off the thing during night time, including reducing the muzzle flash as much as practical.

Ensign Re-read wrote:Most of you have ignored the obvious:

WHY WOULD YOU _WANT_ TO SILENCE THE "GAU-8 AVENGER" ???

A big chunk of what makes it effective IS the sound and flash.
Silencing it just does NOT make sense.



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Oh i never bother with making SENSE of something like this...

HB of CJ wrote:Yep. Having been very lucky years ago to actually hear and see an A10 shoot off a short (?) burst at Edwards Airforce Base USA, why would they want to make the gun any more quiet?

Sometimes sights and sounds are very non heartening to the enemy.

I also suppose they already greatly tried to make the gun more user friendly to the actual pilot shooting off the thing during night time, including reducing the muzzle flash as much as practical.

Actually, formally the A-10 isn´t supposed to be out and about during nighttime.

A single 2-seater A-10 NAW was built for bad weather/night operations, but it was canned, along with the 2-seater training version(and that doesn´t even make any sense at all).

Making the common model a nightflier is an improvisation and not the greatest of such.
Thanks to the plane though it still works well enough most times.

Tenshinai wrote:Making the common model a nightflier is an improvisation and not the greatest of such.

One of the first improvisations, before they made them LANTIRN capable, was to load a TGM-65 (inert, Imaging-IR, AGM-65 Maverick training missile) along with the war-load. The pilots used the TGM video as improvised night-vision.

Weird Harold wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:Making the common model a nightflier is an improvisation and not the greatest of such.

One of the first improvisations, before they made them LANTIRN capable, was to load a TGM-65 (inert, Imaging-IR, AGM-65 Maverick training missile) along with the war-load. The pilots used the TGM video as improvised night-vision.

The above matches with one of my memories of text/evidence that I've read in the past.

However, it's my understanding that the electronics on board the current "C" model have largely dealt with the night time and bad weather flying issues, at least with the most current revisions there of.
(Can anyone verify this?)

Also, remember that the "B" model, the two-seater, was intended to take the role of the AO-10 (or something to that effect), which was an OBSERVER role with exactly the same hardware.

It's my contention that even if one pilot can do all the work, having an extra seat helps out with the brain's workload with observation of ground forces.

PLUS given the situation with ISIS/ISO, it would really help to have a translator in the back seat to help with non-professional "Forward Observers" that the A-10 might have a chance to talk to on the radio.

If more "B"s were to be built/rebuilt from scratch or old airframes, they could put all the current electronics and other features into it, and use it even more effectively at night, at day, in bad weather, etc....

It would probably be best to refer to such a current day two-seater as a "D" model. (i.e.: Look a the F-18 naming conventions for -A to -F & ignore the -G.)


[I haven't looked at the original post (top of page one) in a while, but I have a feeling that I've just repeated a chunk of it.]




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Ensign Re-read wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:One of the first improvisations, before they made them LANTIRN capable, was to load a TGM-65 (inert, Imaging-IR, AGM-65 Maverick training missile) along with the war-load. The pilots used the TGM video as improvised night-vision.

However, it's my understanding that the electronics on board the current "C" model have largely dealt with the night time and bad weather flying issues, at least with the most current revisions there of.

That's what LANTIRN is.
Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night, or LANTIRN, is a combined navigation and targeting pod system

Note: a brief scan of that wiki article doesn't reference the A-10, but the pod is very recognizable in pictures of operational A-10s and I know that they had begun fitting LANTIRN to USAFE's A-10 before I retired in Dec 1989.

ETA: My mistake, the pod visible in most pictures is a PAVE Penny pod, not LANTIRN. It is a laser designator receiver.

A-10 pilots also fly with night-vision goggles, which, IIRC, required a modification of the instrument lighting to avoid overloading the NVGs.

However, it's my understanding that the electronics on board the current "C" model have largely dealt with the night time and bad weather flying issues, at least with the most current revisions there of.
(Can anyone verify this?)

Sort of. The never built bad weather model would have been considerably more capable, but the C is good enough that it works.

It´s definitely not the best solution, but it seems to be yet another part of the campaigning against it, can´t risk allowing any radical new models that might restart actual production of the plane again.

Especially not models that might be great improvements on the original as that would make the F-35 look like a complete and utter joke.

Also, remember that the "B" model, the two-seater, was intended to take the role of the AO-10 (or something to that effect), which was an OBSERVER role with exactly the same hardware.

OA-10.

And yup, all the stuff you need to be top notch effective in bad weather, also means playing the eye in the sky becomes that much easier.

Not to mention how, by not carrying any warload beyond sensors and extra fuel, it´s going to have a very nice loitering time.

It's my contention that even if one pilot can do all the work, having an extra seat helps out with the brain's workload with observation of ground forces.

Totally. And a single pilot often can NOT do all the work, and when you add the extra weirdness of bad weather flying(which is difficult enough by itself) and the input from the extra sensors and all, it can get quite overloaded for the pilot.

PLUS given the situation with ISIS/ISO, it would really help to have a translator in the back seat to help with non-professional "Forward Observers" that the A-10 might have a chance to talk to on the radio.

Excellent point.

If more "B"s were to be built/rebuilt from scratch or old airframes, they could put all the current electronics and other features into it, and use it even more effectively at night, at day, in bad weather, etc....

That´s the thing, it´s not realistic to build proper B models from current airframes, so production would need to be restarted.
And the people who wants to kill the plane, they REALLY hate that idea.

Politics. In Australia for reasons lost in time the politicians didn't want to spend money on attack helicopters, but were able to be convinced that we needed reconnaissance helos to replace our aging Kiowa fleet. So we also got them to agree that it might be handy for these reconnaissance helos to be armed as well (for self protection). Project ARH87 was formed to purchase armed Reconnaissance Helicopters.
When tenders were let we lots of interest; and after evaluating Cobras, Apaches, and other similar brands we ended up with the Euro Tiger.
You can do recon with it and just possibly some shooting as well (30mm chin gun, hellfires etc).
Perhaps a similar approach could be used for the A-10?

From:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2 ... artho.aspx

In a statement on Feb. 2 describing the Pentagon's contribution to President Obama's 2017 budget request, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter confirmed Pentagon plans to "maintain more of our 4th-generation fighter and attack jets than we previously planned -- including the A-10, which has been devastating ISIL from the air. The budget defers the A-10's final retirement until 2022.

Fans of the A-10, take note.