Shooting Illustrated Review: Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II

Rambo would probably be able to handle it!

 

I have posted this once before describing the shower of empty cal. 50 brass and belt links that rained upon or little house and yard after a gunnery run by P-51's that were practicing strafing skills. The leader of the string of 12 following students first fired a burst into the Gulf of Mexico in front of our house on Siesta Key. The trailing P-51's fired at the pool of foam just off the beach. The point at which they fired just happened to be above our house and the sound of six 50's going off was almost like the A-10. This exercise continued on an almost daily basis until the gunnery range was built at the end of Longboat Key. My mom's complaints to the air base about the noise and debris went unanswered. " DON'T YOU KNOW THAT THERE IS A WAR GOING ON!"

 

Empty 50 brass is worth about a buck each. Not sure about the links. Should have saved them.

 

I did save enough to make a belt about 22 feet long. Nobody else was interested in it but me. I didn't think that brass was worth a penny then and nobody cared about how much of it went to waste. Years later I could still find brass and links in the fields near the house. You could ocassionally find big chunks of wreckage in the brush when we were quail hunting. Astronomical waste of people and material

 

I'll say. Dad followed the island hopping in the Pacific destroying everything left behind. Lots of perfectly usable everything. Dig a big hole with heavy equipment left behind, throw in all the ordinance, everything else on top, push dirt over it, park the heavy equipment on top, go to the beach and blow it up. Island after island.

 

It is not just the weight of the GAU-8, it is also the weight of the ammunition. All up, a loaded GAU-8 with 1150 rounds of 30 mm weighs a bit over 4000 lbs. On a range in the UK when I was a range officer, the A-10s tore up all the target sensors and left furrows in the ground like somebody had used a plow. And that was with practice ammo with no warhead.

 

I was going to mention that. The magazine and ammo is heavier than the gun. The gun is actually quite simple but the magazine is the size of a Volkswagen. The ammo is about a pound and a half per round and that is with aluminum cases to save weight.

 

I would love to see an A-10 do its thing, seeing videos of it are interesting but I'll bet that seeing it in person is spectacular. The P-40's and P-51's sometimes would obliterate the targets if they got the p[oint of convergence on it. Frightening destructive power with even with six the cal. 50's. The P-38 was worse.

 

I have seen flight demonstrations. They can sure turn.

 

Thinking about the Civil War ammo, one of which hit my grandfather in the upper chest. A cal 58 Minie' measured .58" X 1.00", weighed almost 3 ounces, 1200 ft./ sec, and had the impact energy equal to 385 ft. pounds. I don't know how my grandpa survived but he told my dad that it was no different than getting kicked in the chest by a mule. Luckily, they didn't probe for the bullet and left him to die. He didn't, so they put him on an open flat car for the three day trip to a Cincinnati hospital. He somehow survived that journey and arrived at the hospital with his wound crawling with maggots and that saved his life.

 

Doctors may have killed as many as the bullets. Read up on the invention and inventors of Penicillin sometime. Fascinating story.

 

My late brother, a physician, said that Civil War surgeons DID kill a large percentage of the wounded when they probed around with instruments that had never been cleaned after working on numerous patients before. Their clumsy digging around also probably damaged a lot of blood vessels that weren't damaged by the wound. Speaking of penicillin, the Indians would use dried buffalo dung and certain mosses for compresses on wounds. I read that there were antibiotics in it, some of which was penicillin. The folks in the Amazon have all sorts of natural plants and juices that are extremely effective in staunching bleeding in women after childbirth, etc. Interesting.

 

No convergence issue with the P-38....

 

Surreal actually, and out of sync.

Watching the A-10 come it, then seeing the smoke from its gun, followed by a very loud crack sound (the ammo breaking the sound barrier). Then the bbrrrrrttt sound while the rounds are hitting the targets.

 

I use to do range officer duty at R2211 often just called Blair Lakes Range. It really was very cool. The helicopter would pick you up on Monday and you would stay at the range usually until Thursday evening. The complex was a bunch of atco buildings connected together by enclosed walk ways. There was a common area with a kitchen and you brought your own food for the week. The range offer has his own room and bathroom. To get up to the range tower there were multiple flights of stairs and then the last bit was climbing up a ladder. The tower had huge windows on each side. R2211 consisted of 4 straff pits, 2 on each side of the tower and two scored bombing ranges, one to the north and one to the south. Hearing the hogs straffing was an unforgettable experience. The time delay between hearing the bullets pass by and hearing the gun firing was especially long when we did long range straffing (shooting at around 6000' as opposed to 2000'), it's almost like you were hearing two separate events.
One of the great thing about being the range officer was just going up in the tower. We were in the middle of the Tanana flats and had unobstructed views of the Alaska Range to the south, including Denali and the White Mountains to the north. In the winter the views of the northern lights from the range tower were epic!

 

The range in the UK was not so dramatic or scenic. It was on the edge of The Wash, a large bay that varied from shallow water and mud around the edges, to deep water when the tide came in. On other ranges in The Wash, grounded ships were used as targets. Whole area is flatter than a flounder. We drove there in our POVs.

The 30 mm projectiles from the GAU-8 are doing around 3000 fps or Mach 3, so they get there long before the noise of the cannon is heard. The sensors we used on the range actually used the supersonic shock wave (sonic boom in miniature) to score the runs.

 

Some of my childhood photos from a time when cameras were big and photographs were small.

Who would have thought that one day we would all be carrying around a telephone that had a built in camera!

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Farnborough airshow in September 1982 where it seems I was not the only one trying to get up close.

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Over my childhood home in April 1985. This does not convey just how low these guys used to be. They were usually in pairs and seemed to use a big white water tank nearby as a turning point. The RAF CH-47s worried the farm animals much more though!

 

Likely only those inner stations have 1760 interfaces and the outboard wing stations are 1553.