Depends who you ask.
Lots of Air Force brass hate the fucking thing and have been trying to kill it for years but the guys on the ground and pilots who fly it love the thing.
The version they offer Ukraine will be some real old stock with outdated avionics and targeting systems.
Part of that is that the A-10 is great at shooting people who can't shoot back, but put it against people with modern AA and it's a flying coffin, which a lot of pilots learned the hard way in the first Gulf War when Iraq shot them down in the first day and they got pulled from front line operations (those operations were given to F-16s).
Modern Russia is not a valid target for A-10 ops. Giving them to Ukraine is just throwing them in the trash with extra steps.
yea but it is not a multirole fighter, it's a support platform that flies the way a lincoln continental with bad shocks drives and has a top speed somewhere between "lazy" and "undisturbed by being late for work"
the A-10 gets it's "prestige" mainly by being very effective at carrying a LOT of ordinance through airspace completely sanitized of potential air or ground threats and then dropping that ordinance on between one and five targets, then returning for refit and round 2
It's a good plane at providing close air support to ground targets and destroying enemy armor and it's pretty well armored for a plane, but any kind of air support requires air superiority to be effective and the A-10 is very bad at being a fighter.
i thought everyone thought the A-10 was a forever plane that should never retire?
Depends who you ask. Lots of Air Force brass hate the fucking thing and have been trying to kill it for years but the guys on the ground and pilots who fly it love the thing.
The version they offer Ukraine will be some real old stock with outdated avionics and targeting systems.
Part of that is that the A-10 is great at shooting people who can't shoot back, but put it against people with modern AA and it's a flying coffin, which a lot of pilots learned the hard way in the first Gulf War when Iraq shot them down in the first day and they got pulled from front line operations (those operations were given to F-16s).
Modern Russia is not a valid target for A-10 ops. Giving them to Ukraine is just throwing them in the trash with extra steps.
I've heard to the contrary, at least in terms of guys that have had the A-10 actually give them CAS instead of just watching it from a distance.
yea but it is not a multirole fighter, it's a support platform that flies the way a lincoln continental with bad shocks drives and has a top speed somewhere between "lazy" and "undisturbed by being late for work"
the A-10 gets it's "prestige" mainly by being very effective at carrying a LOT of ordinance through airspace completely sanitized of potential air or ground threats and then dropping that ordinance on between one and five targets, then returning for refit and round 2
It's a good plane at providing close air support to ground targets and destroying enemy armor and it's pretty well armored for a plane, but any kind of air support requires air superiority to be effective and the A-10 is very bad at being a fighter.
It won’t retire as along as the US is killing guys running around in the desert