[Humor] hangar sale...

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by Adm.Lee

These are all fair questions, but an acquaintance of mine spurs me to ask: is there anything the A-10 *has* done that the A-7 couldn't have done?

The bombload, AFAIK, was equivalent, the speed isn't much different. The big difference is that gun, and the A-10's 30mm isn't that big a difference vs. 20mm over Afghanistan & Iraq. Both designs benefited from Vietnam experience. Neither might have been all that survivable in a very-hostile ADA environment, such as 1987 Germany or 2024 Ukraine?

To answer my own question: Oh, yeah, I was overlooking the '91 war, in which there were lots of Iraqi tanks to be shot up.

The traditional argument is that the A-10 is more capable of low-level flight for terrain protection from ground fire and is more likely to survive the inevitable hits. In practice, we'd need someone to do a deep dive into the respective designs' records of combat losses versus damaged aircraft returning to friendly tarmac.

- C.

[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

The traditional argument is that the A-10 is more capable of low-level flight for terrain protection from ground fire and is more likely to survive the inevitable hits. In practice, we'd need someone to do a deep dive into the respective designs' records of combat losses versus damaged aircraft returning to friendly tarmac.

- C.

I'll go along with "more survivable", not least for the A-10 having two engines vs one. I remember much being made of the A-10's redundant control systems, but have no idea, off-hand, if the A-7 had those, too.

"Low-level flight", to me, sounds more like a pilot-training issue, and with both planes designed for subsonic low-level attack missions, I suspect there may not be much difference here.

A quick skim of Wikipedia turned up that A-7s were well-regarded over Vietnam by the Navy pilots, especially for low fuel consumption. Air Force A-7s had only 6 losses for 12,928 sorties, lowest for any fighter in theater, and second only to B-52s for tonnage dropped on Hanoi. The Navy recorded 98 A-7 losses, no data on sorties given.


Wikipedia again: For ODS, 8100 A-10 sorties, 4 losses.

[Claidheamh]

I have loved the A-10 since I saw them on the flightline in the early 80s and my "uncle" (a Col in the Army) filled my head with stories about their badass-ness. As to survivability over a 90's battlefield in Europe, when I was entering in ROTC in 1990, I spoke with a pair of USAF analysts who were working at the school I went to. When I mentioned the A-10, their eyebrows went up. They said that the 'predicted combat lifetime' of a pilot in an F-15 (in a peer-peer European War) was expected to be 6-10 hours on average. An A-10 pilot average was predicted to be 10 minutes.

That was unsettling.