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Aviation History
1976
1976 - 0473.PDF
fLIGHT International, 20 March 1976 ion FAIRCHILD A-10 Fighters past their prime are traditionally pensioned off to ground-attack jobs. An amazing variety have been put to work in this way but, as the Americans found out in Vietnam, they are generally square pegs in round holes. The USAF's Tactical Air Command, charged with the responsibility of protecting American troops across the globe, has taken the lesson to heart and designed an aerial gun, bomb and missile battery. It's called the Fairchild A-10 and will answer the field-telephone prayers of every soldier pinned down in a muddy foxhole. The TECHNICAL EDITOR reports from Farmingdale, Long Island. TODAY, March 20, the USAF's Tactical Air Command formally accepts the Fairchild A-10A close-support attack aircraft in a ceremony at its Langley AFB headquarters in Virginia, an event which also marks the command's 30th anniversary. TAG only last year began to take delivery of F-15s, its most recent acquisition, at Luke AFB, Arizona, and the first A-10 unit will be commissioned only a few miles away at Davis-Monthan AFB. The A-10 is the first USAF aeroplane designed specifi cally for close air support. It is the culmination of ten years' research into army co-operation, as the job used to be called, and will replace a variety of existing types in that role. It can carry every type of tactical weapon in the USAF's inventory under its large wings, but its primary job is tank-busting. For this purpose it carries a new 30mm rotating-barrel gun designed to defeat the heaviest armour. Tank movements are the most dangerous form of enemy penetration on the ground, and can be decisive, as failed uprisings over the years in Communist- dominated European countries have shown. Hard-skinned vehicles can be taken out by anti-tank weapons, tactical missiles (such as Lance, with cluster warheads), air- launched missiles such as Maverick, and cluster bombs like the BL755. These weapons are now about to be joined, for the first time in USAF history, by a special airborne anti-tank gun. Ad-hoc aircraft The United States military learned a lot about close air support in the mid-1960s. In particular, the strengths and weaknesses of a number of ad hoc adaptations helped to clarify the specification for a purpose-built aeroplane. At that time many types were being applied to the task in Vietnam. One of the best known was the piston-engined A-l Skyraider, a 1944 design for the US Navy which com bined long range and endurance with a relatively heavy bomb load. Despite its obsolescence it gave a good account of itself with US and South Vietnamese forces. At the other end of the scale was the A-37, an attack version of the T-37 trainer. But although the A-37 was well liked by the pilots it was not big enough to do the job adequately. An outstanding Mach 1 intercepter, the F-100 was widely used for ground attack but could hardly be expected to give its best when flying a completely different mission. The T-28 Trojan, a piston-engined trainer, was equivalent to a scaled-down Skyraider. Introduced later on was the A-7, which proved to fill much of the bill, though its mini mum manoeuvring speed of around 300kt was too high for really effective close support. The B-57 (a Martin-built version of the Canberra) performed well, but again had not been designed to assist armies in the field. Like so many of the other stand-in close-support aircraft, it was The A-10 rolls into a dive. An advantage of the heavy payload and large number of weapon stations is that the aeroplane can carry its own electronic countermeasures in self-contained pods on three or four pylons, leaving plenty of space and weight margin for the weapons themselves. This aircraft carries a Hobos television-guided bomb to port and a Mk 84 2,0001b laser-guided bomb to starboard
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