Can the A-10 Warthog Hold Its Own In an Aerial Dogfight?
Everybody knows the A-10 can bring the pain to ground targets like few aircraft in history, but the aircraft’s tight turn radius and powerful gun can actually make it a force to be reckoned with in a dogfight too.
The first of those shoot-downs can be credited to Air Force Capt. Bob Swain, who managed the kill in perfect Warthog form, using the GAU-8 Avenger, rather than his Sidewinder missiles.
“I noticed two black dots running across the desert that looked really different than anything I had seen before,” Swain explained in 1991 “They weren’t putting up any dust and they were moving fast and quickly over the desert.”
As Swain realized the black dots were indeed helicopters, one peeled off to the North and got away. The other headed south with Swain following behind. Because of the low altitude the two were flying at, Swain couldn’t get a lock on the helicopter with his AIM-9M, so he switched the aircraft back out of air-to-air mode and lined the MI-8 up in the “funnel” displayed in the A-10’s heads up display. Under normal circumstances, the HUD funnel shows an A-10 pilot where his bullets will likely track, though it gets more complicated in a dogfight.
“I started firing about a mile away,” Swain said. “Some of the bullets ran through him, but we weren’t sure if it was stopped completely. So I came back with the final pass, hit it and it fell apart.”
“On the final pass, I shot about 300 bullets at him. That’s a pretty good burst. On the first pass, maybe 75 rounds. The second pass, I put enough bullets down, it looked like I hit with a bomb.”
Ultimately, the A-10 Thunderbolt II was built to do a job that had nothing to do with winning a dogfight, but the Warthog has been defying expectations since its very inception; finding new purpose after the fall of the Soviet Union, surviving retirement again and again, and most impressive of all, returning safely after being positively riddled with holes from enemy fire. It seems only fitting that it would defy expectations yet again in the realm of air-to-air combat.
Because winning a fight isn’t always about who has the fastest jet or the most powerful missiles. Sometimes it might come down to nothing more than one tight loop and a veritable laser-beam of depleted uranium 30mm rounds.
Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.
This piece first appeared in Sandboxx.