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The Most OVERPOWERED Warplane to ever Exist: A-10 Warthog
During World war 2, the whole concept of warfare was changed and all sides of the conflict found out about the importance of air force and air support and the role it’s going to play in the future.
Here’s also where the first true CAS aircraft were born - a close air support aircraft. On the Soviet side, this was Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik.
It became one of the best-known aircraft of the war and the most produced plane in the history of aviation. Over 40k built. Crazy stuff.
On the other side was - and now you’re all probably thinking about the Stuka - well its not the Stuka, at least not yet, but rather Henschel Hs-129. This was a true tank killer of the war and some of the ideas were borrowed from it in the creation of the A-10.
For example, this aircraft was defined by its boom stick. Normally armed with 30mm cannon or twin 20mm ones, it could pack a serious punch and destroy almost any armoured vehicle at the time of its early to mid deployment.
The Germans went on to install the 75mm full auto variant of Pak-40 cannon on Hs-129B-3 by the end of the war, but it proved to be very difficult to operate, although extremely effective, being able to destroy virtually any tank of the era.
Now we get to the Stuka. Have you ever asked yourself what does Stuka actually mean?
Well, it’s short from Sturz kamp Flugzeug which could be translated roughly to “dive bomber” in English. But this is not a German lesson, so let’s move on!
The Junkers Ju-87 proved to be another legend of the war and it was actually Hans Ulrich Rudel, the best dive bomber pilot of the war, credited with over 500 kills on the ground who is interesting for our story.
Although an amazing pilot, Rudel was a shitty guy and a Nazi, so we don’t want to glorify him, rather talk about his feats and how that affected the A-10 development.
It’s the Ju-87G variant that’s interesting for us because it was developed, specifically as anti-tank aircraft and it was Rudel himself who suggested mounting twin 37mm cannons in underwing pods because of the previous success of the 20mm cannons against the Soviet tanks.
He flew this variant of the aircraft in the battle of Kursk and had a lot of success in destroying Soviet armour.
Now the story of direct Rudel’s influence on the A-10 design is a bit of a grey territory and we’d like to stick to the facts here, some say that he actually participated in the development, but that was never confirmed.
The only thing we can talk about with a dose of certainty is what Pierre Sprey, one of the consultants on the design and development of the A-X program which gave birth to A-10 said and that is how the program was largely influenced by the experiences from both the Vietnam war and Rudel’s with the Stuka during the Second world war.
It was deducted that a powerful gun and robustness in combat scenarios would need to be the basis for this new design, which early Hs-129s lacked because of the exposed fuel tanks and so did Ju-87 to a degree.
It’s also interesting to note how the A-10s design has almost an inverted gull wing, just like the Ju-87 and the F4U Corsair did, which helps the pilot have better visibility of the ground, allow for the larger external bomb load and carry a big gun
Thats right, lets talk about the thing which made this aircraft so popular - the GAU-8.
9 июн 2024
