Free Drinks for the Pilots

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Two groups of Air Force personnel that never have to buy their drinks in any Army club: A-10 pilots, and Spectre crews!

DogBytes (Im a 50-something Bart Simpson!) @MarkDL66
Tweeted on March 17, 2023

I have nothing to add.

Share

10 thoughts on “Free Drinks for the Pilots”

  1. Absolutely wonderful pieces of military equipment for ground force cover.
    And their crews deserve to drink for free. They saved a lot of grunt-asses.
    Around or against an air born enemy they are pretty much flaming wreckage though.
    Thus, the reason the military has been trying to get rid of the A-10.
    World war III to cover the banking reset is going to be, “near-peer.” And just like surface ships in the navy, they’re just targets.
    So off to Davis-Moffett with them. Wonderful as they are.

  2. And in an A-10 bar, our trigger pullers also don’t need to buy!

    But the Air Force finally has said the quiet part out loud. They intend to divest the Close Air Support and Combat Search and Rescue missions. The ground guys will get no more support from the Air Force if we lose the fight to save the A-10

  3. The trouble with getting rid of the A-10 is: what would you replace it with? Also, given that your typical Warthog driver likes to fly below 200 feet, the “flaming wreckage” thing isn’t quite so obvious. It’s hard to shoot down something that flies to close to the ground. Not to mention that damaging an A-10 is likely just to annoy the pilot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_(pilot) An A-10 can fly — and can be landed if the pilot is good, as KC is — even if it has only one engine and no hydraulics at all. Big holes in the wing, including the loss of a wing spar, aren’t an issue either.

  4. The Department of Defense made a big mistake when it declared that the Army could not manage, acquire or control its own fixed wing ground support aircraft.

    • Imagine if this rule applied to the Navy and its aircraft!
      The DoD would still be trying to make one airplane work for everyone.

    • They could fix that in the usual .mil/gov way: declare that the A-10s fly so low and so slow, so they count as fast helicopters.

  5. Hey! Don’t pick on DOD Brass. They have press conferences and Congressional b____jobs to take care of. It is hard to get off your knees with all the “awards” that they have been given.

    • Hey,

      don’t be too hard on them. PowerPoints are time consuming to make

  6. A long time ago, the Air Force ran an exercise where F-5 fighters of the “aggressor squadron”, trained to simulate enemies, tried to simulate shooting down A-10’s. It did not go well for the F-5’s. The judges figured that the hail of metal coming out of the A-10’s Gatling would be deadly to an unarmored aircraft out to at least 10 miles, and there’s just no way to sneak or dash in from 10 miles away and not find the A10 coming around to face you.

    I don’t know how applicable that is now. There are standoff missiles now that can reach the A10 while the fighter launching stays 20 miles away. But they may be vulnerable to the countermeasures package carried on the A-10. (Those are highly classified, so all I know about them is that virtually every Air Force combat plane gets one.) If the countermeasures fail, then the missile flies straight in on an intercept course. It certainly won’t survive a head-on collision with a 30mm hunk of metal. Firing a long burst from that Gatling may be one of the most expensive missile defenses ever devised, but it should work at least part of the time. Finally, if the missile does get through everything and hits the A-10, is the warhead big enough to do the job?

Comments are closed.