"End looms for US Air Force's 'Warthog' ground-attack jet" This is Ridiculous!

Yes, unreliable.

Problems plague Apache:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...-dVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=seEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5011,5391498

http://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP105.html

In fact at this link,

http://avery.home.mindspring.com/ApacheHelicopter.htm

 

All cluster munitions are designed to explode after dropping, even if they do not hit anything. And all cluster munitions have somewhere between 5-15% failure rates in detonation. The CBU-87 is designed to do the same thing, but roughly 10% of the time they do not. So for every CBU-103 that is used in combat (202 cluster munitions), they expect around 20 UXOs to be laying on the ground afterwards.

And following the same general rate, each of these contains 40 submunitions, which means around 4 will be left on the ground as a UXO. Certainly less of them then after the use of most cluster munitions, but I still would not want to pass through the area if I can avoid it.

The only exception I know of to this is the CBU-107, which has no warhead or explosive or propellant at all in the submunitions. But this is of very limited usefulness unless you are attacking massed troops, or ammo or fuel dumps.

 

I'd rather pass through that area that an area peppered with Depleted Uranium rounds.

 

Son of a gun, it sure the hell is! But the Apaches had tons of problems in desert storm with the sand, etc.

 

bumping an older thread

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of blocking the Air Force from retiring the A-10 next year.

The Republican-controlled chamber late Thursday approved a series of amendments to its fiscal 2015 defense spending bill, including a provision that would prohibit the Pentagon from spending any money to retire the fleet of Cold War-era aircraft.

The measure, which passed 300–114, was sponsored by Reps. Candice Miller, a Republican from Michigan, and Ron Barber, a Democrat from Arizona.

Source: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/06/20/house-votes-to-block-a-10-retirement/

I don't whether the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft has been spared in this spending bill or not....I hope so. The replacement Global Hawk doesn't have the same capabilities.

 

You can pass bills all you like, but metal fatigues out after a while. The planes will ground themselves, just as the F-14 and early F-15s did.

A replacement is needed going forward.

 

I agree, it would be a shame to see the A-10 mothballed. Some claim attack helos serve the same purpose but in a very hostile combat environment a A-10 is far harder to shoot down and provides more firepower. Always funny how the military cuts costs, they will kill of a good proven system while at the same wasting money hand over fist of useless projects.

- - - Updated - - -

Good news.

 

I'll disagree. The service life of much of the A-10 inventory can be extended to 2030. There is already a replacement, or I should say replacements in the form of multi-role aircraft like the F-35. USAF won't develop a single purpose attack aircraft along the lines of an A-10 again, from the drawing board; certainly not a manned version. Saving the existing acitve A-10s from retirement buys some time until the F-35 is fully operational and all the bugs have been worked out.

http://www.hilltoptimes.com/content/service-life-extension-program-10-wings-now-complete


http://www.afmc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123025101

I'll direct your attention to page 2 of the following A-10 Maintenance Management powerpont from Ogden air logistics center. The predicted service life at 2028 will be 16,000 hours which is what the service life extension program is shooting for.

http://www.sae.org/events/dod/presentations/2009/b6chrisdavis.pdf

 

The idea of a multi-role aircraft is awfully seductive but i remember a lot of multi-role aircraft that simply didn't work out. The old F-111 Aardvark was the poster child. It could do all sorts of roles, but none of them particularly well.

Multi-role aircraft tend to get flown to death (particularly in real combat) and when one is shot down of out of service several missions go begging. with a single-purpose aircraft. only one mission is unfulfilled.

Multi-role aircraft have a way of costing A LOT more than single-purpose aircraft as well. For the price of a single F-35, we could probably buy half a squadron of revised A-10s.

I know drones are the workhorse of the future but they lack the flexibility of a manned aircraft. Sooner or later somebody is gonna interfere with comm links and begin taking over RP aircraft. For air superiority, or deeper strikes, autonomous aircraft are A-OK, but a close support aircraft has to know the good guys from the bad guys.

I know that any aircraft that cannot be used for the air superiority role is looked at askance by Air Force types. Is there a pilot anywhere that doesn't want to be The Red Baron, or Saburo Sakai, or Gabby Gabreski? But there is no doubt that autonomous fighter drones will take over that role. No pilot could live throught the 15-G turns a drone can pull. Once the fighting algoithms are worked out you send the fighter to its assigned airspace with orders that "If it flies, it dies."

A 1980 plane in 2028 will only have been used 333 hours a year. Better have some very good simulators to keep pilots sharp.

Not every plane can match the B-52 and C-130 for longevity under heavy usage. The Tu-95 is back in the air but they were essentially grounded for two decades. How long they can be serviceable under constant usage is questionable.

My replacement would be a simplified re-design of the old A-10. Ditch the big GAU-8 30mm gun. The hordes of Soviet tanks are all rusting someplace. A 20mm or 25mmgun is the greatest of plenty. Better yet a modular weapons bay where you could have one of those cannon or even .50 caliber or .30 caliber machine guns for soft targets. Or a lighter loadout for when persistence is more important than burst firepower.

Put carrier-capable landing gear and tailhooks on them for Marine usage.

Weapons hardpoints are well developed.

Make drone and manned versions to tailor strike packages for a wide range of close support missions.

Use a militarized civilian engine to reduce aircraft costs.

My simple plane requires no technological breakthroughs. Other than carrier-capable landing gear the old A-10 was just fine but Uncle Sugar broke up all the airframe tooling. so we have to come up with a new plane.

My organizational reform is to make close support an Army?Marine Corps function. They simply care more about it than Air Force and Navy types.

 

We have KC-135 tankers built in the mid 1960s that have been retrofitted with new engines and avionics suites, but are essentially the same airframe. Some are scheduled to remain in the active/reserve inventory through 2040. This is pushing the envelope of the service life of an aircraft into truly unexplored territory for a military aircraft in an active inventory. One would think not much stress is placed on these airframes in comparison to a combat plane, however one of the primary causes of metal fatigue in an airframe is pressurization. Remember the A-10 is not a pressurized aircraft. If they can extend the service life of a KC-135 to 75 years, I don't think extending the service life of an A-10 will be an issue for another 10 - 15 years. Much of the service life extension work on the active A-10 inventory has already been completed.

 

Pretty sad.. I would like to see the A-10 kept in service and just kept modernised, even if that means building newer models. Why totally scrap something that works so well?

 

Taxcutter says:
My understanding what is killing the A-10 is the same thing that killed the F-14 and earlier F-15s. Fatigue in the "wing box." The "wing box" is the structure that marries the wings to the fuselage. It takes all the cantilever stress of those high-G turns under load. Everytime you bank and turn you stress up the wing box. Every loading and unloading is a reversal cycle.

Engineers design for fatigue. Usually combat aircraft are not designed for all that many reversals. Combat aircraft have that annoying tendency to get shot down. People who fly old world War II aircraft ("warbirds") run smack into this. A P-51 was not designed for but 25 hours of combat operation. Few lasted that long in real combat. Those nasty Germans and Japanese kept P-51 life short.

The only reason that P-51s and Corsairs are airworthy today is that they continued in production after World War II and the jigs and fixtures needed to make them were not destroyed. So part could be made (including wing boxes). Normally under the terms of the FARs, military aircraft manufacturing jigs and fixtures are routinely destroyed when production ceases.

Some aircraft like the C-130, DC-3, B-52, and KC-135 are in service today because key components can still be had. Wing spars and boxes are readily available. Further, on those four planes the wing boxes are readily accessible and easily changed. Not so on most combat aircraft. I understand that the B-1B fleet has a wing box fatigue problem. That sounds about right. It went into service about the same time as the A-10.

Aircraft used to be mostly made of aluminum. Aluminum is light and strong for its weight, but it's fatigue life is about a third that of steel.

I'm all for keeping the A-10 in service as long as possible but i don't want to see what is happening in china and India happen to US aviators. Old MiG-21 9and their knockoffs) can be had very cheaply. Problem is that these things unpredictably disintegrate in flight. They are old (mid-60s) and the whole airframe is fatigued out.

I would prefer to see an updated version of the A-10 produced to take over the close support role. Put catapult-capable nose gear and tailhooks on them to allow carrier operations. Build it around a smaller gun. (The GAU-8 is enormous) Allow either a modular design or both piloted and UAV versions. Use militarized civilian engines (keep the cost down) Keep the cost/complexity down and build plenty of them. Assign them to the Army and Marines.

Here's a thought for you: A flying wing design (like the B-2) does not have a wing box. The whole structure is wing. No wing box, no wing box fatigue problem.

 

BTW, as an aside showing the extremes of aircraft maintenance:

There are currently 12 airworthy specimens of the P-38. Five more are under restoration.
There are currently 14 airworthy specimens of the P-47. None are known to be in restoration.

In both cases a specimen was sacrificed to allow engineers and tool & die men to make manufacturing jigs and fixtures to make the critical airframe parts. Fortunately the engines - Allison V-1700 and Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp - were used in postwar aircraft and parts are still made for them.

 

Many of the active inventory of A-10s were mothballed prior to Op. Desert Storm. it is not as though they had been in continual service since they rolled out of the production hangar in the 1970s. I'd be more concerned about the aging F-15 than I would the A-10. The A-10 is a sub-sonic aircraft that does not see the high g-forces and wing loading a fighter aircraft will. In fact one of the design parameters of the A-10 was low wing loading at 40 lbs/ft2. Yes the A-10 is past it's design service life, many are on borrowed time no doubt about that. However I don't see a potential catastrophe down the road with them falling out of the skies, as some of the potential wing issues have been addressed in service life extension programs. The repeated pressurization and de-pressurization is often a more insidious cause of metal fatigue that extreme high g-force maneuvering. The A-10 doesn't have the pressurization issue to deal with.

 

Taxcutter says:
Even at low speeds, you can build up g-forces if you pull the turn radius tight enough.

 

I think the AF's feeling is that they can have one F-35 built for the price of maintaining 30 A-10s so they must go with the F-35. And then get 30 F-35s. It's always been a gravy train for the contractors and retired generals who now work for the contractors. There's no stopping those boys.

 

Alright, let's consider G-loads... th numerical ratio of any applied force to the gravitational force at the earth's surface

The maximum G-loads for the A-10 with a weight around 30,000 pound is +7.33/-3.0 G symmetrical and +5.80/-1 G asymmetric...meanwhile while I don't have the specifics for the F-15E it's around +9 G.

 

The big difference as I see it is that the A-10 can get to the battle about 2.5 times faster than the fastest choppers. That can be a life/death thang to fellas on the ground. The F-18 can get there faster yet, but it's not a good loiterer and it's pretty expensive to be exposing it to ground fire.

 

Taxcutter says:
Yeah the F-15 can pull more Gs than a A-10 but they rarely do. Anything over 7gs is murder on the pilot. They do (deliberately) pull 9g turns but are usually off the flight line for a few days thereafter. As a rule they stick to 7g turns if possible. The A-10 driver pull their 5-7 g turns without limit.

Still, they cannot fix wing box cracks on A-10s. When a crack is found she does a one-way ferry mission to Davis-Monthan to be cannabalized.

 

http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/modernization/Pages/box092506a10.aspx

http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/modernization/Pages/box092506a10.aspx

The issue was addressed in 2006.

 

All of that seems very reasonable and cost effective.

I agree also with your thoughts on multi-use aircraft.

 

You can't fold the wings on an A-10 (57' wingspan), it's not suited for carrier operations at all. It would take up too much deck space.

 

there would always have to be a friendly field for them to land at, however. Which sort of negates the benefits of carrier basing in the first place.