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The soldiers in the Air Force’s elite rescue corps trust their lives to a plane that’s old, ugly and slow.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II has been in service for nearly four decades, but the aircraft — nicknamed Warthog for its lumbering, unsightly appearance — remains one of the most feared tools in the U.S. military’s arsenal.
“Despite its clunky appearance, the A-10 is extremely maneuverable,”said Capt. Scott Redman, an Air Force attack pilot. “It can fly low, it can get slow and it can handle maneuvering.”
Since being introduced by the Air Force in 1977, the A-10 has been a vital component of combat operations — especially for pararescuemen, or PJs, the highly trained operatives who perform risky rescue missions in the most inhospitable of environments.
PJs rely on the Warthog for close-air support, which the jet — of which the Air Force initially manufactured 715 — was specifically designed to offer. After the operatives touch down in a destination, Warthogs can fire off precision-guided bombs or blistering rounds of armor-shredding shells from the massive Gatling gun each plane is equipped with.
"The bullets actually go faster than the speed of sound," Redman said. "You're going to hear two sounds: The bullets hitting the ground [and then] the gun firing the bullets out of the weapon."
That gun, a 4,000-pound, 19-foot-long behemoth, is the literal heart of every Warthog: The aircraft is built around the weapon, with the gun's firing barrel poking out from the A-10's nose.
For the PJs, the Warthog has become an irreplaceable part of rescue missions. But in the aircraft's early years, Air Force leaders weren't sure that the A-10 was up for the job, largely because of the aircraft's husky size and sluggish pace, and nearly replaced the planes with close-air versions of the F-16 fighter jet.
It was during the Gulf War, however, that the Warthog quickly earned its stellar reputation: A-10 pilots flew more than 8,100 missions and destroyed nearly 1,000 Iraqi tanks.
Since then, the Warthog has been an Air Force darling and a financial priority. Ongoing upgrades to the fleet, including new wing-sets, sensors and improved firing precision abilities, will cost the Pentagon an estimated $2.25 billion through 2013.
Those tweaks haven't made the Warthog much faster, but the aircraft makes up in durability what it lacks in haste.
With 1,200 pounds of titanium armor, self-sealing and fire-retardant fuel tanks and the ability to fly even after suffering partial losses of wings, engines and tails, this is one aircraft that — much like the PJs themselves — won't go down without a serious fight.
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