A-10攻撃機、通称「ウォートホッグ」は、その巨大な機関砲を搭載した「飛行機付きの銃」として知られています。実は、この機体が重心を維持するためには、使用済みの砲弾ケースを機内に戻す必要があるそうです。
A-10「サンダーボルト」の弾丸を機内に戻す衝撃の理由ｗｗｗ
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挿話
挿話A-10攻撃機、通称「ウォートホッグ」は、その巨大な機関砲を搭載した「飛行機付きの銃」として知られています。実は、この機体が重心を維持するためには、使用済みの砲弾ケースを機内に戻す必要があるそうです。
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It’s absolutely unhinged. The gun was conceptualized before the aircraft. Basically the military said “I want a machine gun that eats tanks. Oh, know what? While you’re at it, just make it fly too.”
My favorite bit of trivia is that the A-10 has 2 listed ground-turn-radii. One for left, one for right.
Because the gun requires the front landing gear to be off-set, which means that one side of the triangle has a longer distance from the pivot wheel to the front wheel.
“She may have flaws, but she has teeth.”
The B-1 Lancer has to reroute fuel just before dropping it’s payload to maintain its center of gravity. The pilots say dropping bombs feels like driving over squirrels.
>spent shell casings from it is massive forward mounted autocannon to maintain it is center-of-gravity
Cool fact though!
Ejecting that much freedom from the aircraft would make it unflyable.
This is the norm for US military jets. they all use linkless ammunition. rounds fired are recycled back into storage during flight. ejecting brass at high speeds poses a pretty big risk of damaging yourself, plus the weight and balance shifting. Like, literally, all US military fighters use this.
Well, that’s part of the story. The other is that ejecta would pose a formidable FOD risk.
Doesn’t it also have a special system for dispersing the smoke from the fired rounds because it would choke the engines
Looks like a puma.
When I was a 16yo kid in Civil Air Patrol, we had a guy in our squadron who previously flew A-10s in the Middle East. He had some WILD stories. Some highlights (from my terrible memory) for me:
– The gun was too accurate. They widened the horizontal spread multiple times over his service to make it better at hitting one target in a single pass if you were slightly off center
– They were often ordered to fly super low and slow to draw attention and fire, laughed while dodging unguided RPG’s, and were hit by small arms regularly
– His favorite part of a mission was dumping all the 30mm he had left into Iraqi ammo depots on the flight back to base, so they could land as light as possible. Logistics and ammo supply were non-issues.
– In social settings around ground ponders, he never paid for anything if they found out he was an A-10 pilot. The troops LOVED the A-10 drivers. But the pilots also loved the troops, and felt quite protective of them.
– After that one A-10 took down helicopter, his group of pilots all had bets to see if one of them could do the same.
– The commonly repeated “the gun firing slows the plane” was way overblown and not really an issue, but was partially true especially with how much it shook the airframe. Soot ingestion by the engines was a much bigger concern.
That guy by the time I knew him was happily retired flying 747’s. Hope you are doing well Major T!
I can’t comment on the center of gravity of the A-10, however the M61A1 and M61A2 20mm cannons also retain their spent casings. This isn’t a unique feature.
Long time Army ground-pounder here, chiming in with a slightly different perspective.
I’ve had the luxury of getting close air support near by a number of times in my career — Air Force F-16s and A-10s, Navy F-18s, even once a B-52 and B-1. Setting aside the unique case of the strategic bombers, I’d only ever want to be supported by A-10 drivers. It’s not about the airframe — which is both great and oversold at the same time — it’s about the culture. (Aside: I never had the privilege of having USMC air support, but I suspect I’d feel the same way about the Marines as the A-10 guys.)
What about the culture? The A-10 community knew their reason for existence was Close Air Support. And they were good at it — they knew what the ground guys were doing, what they needed, and could read the situation. Plus they had the endurance and ordnance to hand around for a while. The other communities? Well, they stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. Too many missions — Offensive & Defensive Counter-Air, SEAD, Battlefield Air Interdiction … CAS was generally far down on their priority lists.
I led an armored scout platoon for a couple of years, which gave me some good experience. I’ll share two illustrative examples:
First one. We had participated in a major multi-week high level exercise that included live fire with all out Joint supporting arms. After we got back home, the unit leader got to go visit our supporting air wing — a composite USAF wing from Moody AFB who had supported us. They had a squadron of A-10s and one of F-16s. We toured the flight lines and ready rooms; the A-10 guys put on a flight demo. In each of the ready rooms the squadrons did a talk about their operations and showed strike video from the exercise.
At one point an F-16 driver was explaining a couple of Maverick engagements — hot spot on the FLIR about 10 clicks out, cleared hot, missile off the rail, boom, that sort of thing. I stood up and asked the question: “What target did you just engage?” Pilot: “Dunno. A hot spot.” I was a scout — our mission was do go deep, in some cases in and behind the opposing defense. While our higher headquarters knew exactly where we were, a minor mistake in communication and I could have been that hot spot on the receiving end of the Maverick. In the A-10 ready room — no such issue. They could ID every vehicle, tell us what it and the ground force were doing, and why they took the shot in the way they did. Major training and cultural gap between the two squadrons, who were in the same wing!
Second one. I often had USAF Terminal Air Controllers attached to me to guide in USAF aircraft. My job was to provide security and get them into position where they could see the target area and prosecute engagements. Given the breadth and depth of the battlefield, though, and the fact that the enemy isn’t always were the intel said they were, sometimes they couldn’t see the target and I could, so on a couple of occasions I found myself passing the nine-line and talking directly to aircraft. Not the strike aircraft, luckily — we had Misty FACs, airborne Forward Air Controllers (FAC-As), overhead who would take the info from us, and since they stayed in the area they’d then put the strike aircraft on target.
Our Mistys flew one of two airframes: OA-10s and F-16s, and it seemed random what we’d get on any given day. What I observed, though, was that the OA-10 FACs flew lower, slower, and we overhead much longer, and had far better situational awareness to what was going on on the ground, which made communicating with them much simpler. The F-16 FACs always seemed to be up higher, and we struggled much more to get them on target. It was probably my bad luck, but on a couple of occasions when we finally got the FAC talked on, and were ready to bring in the strike, the FAC would report “Bingo fuel” and we’d be back to square one — which with fleeting targets usually meant no strike.
The F-35 is slated to replace the A-10, and I have no doubt that bomb for bomb, missile for missile it can be more effective at delivering ordnance than the A-10, so on paper it’s better for the CAS mission. It’s total weapons carriage and endurance is significantly less than the A-10, though, and as a multi-role aircraft the pilots are not going to be CAS experts. The cultural shift concerns me — it’s telling to me that, as I write this, I’m tracking that no F-35 squadrons have been certified in the Airborne FAC role, and I’m told that no USAF resources have been allocated to certify F-35 FAC-As.
So I don’t think I’m crazy to be concerned about what happens when some future me needs close air support.
Former AF weapons system guy checking in:
ackshually something something war thunder something something why are the police here
One day this gun will fly!
Do you mean strap it to a plane? We could definitely do that.
No, I mean strap a plane to the gun, the plane is the accessory!
While I was driving the other day, 3 of these flew over my head coming in for a landing at the nearby Air Force base. Seeing them above you makes you shit bricks regardless of where you are or what you’re doing.
My husband who is an aerospace engineer (and that is pretty much his career) told me it’s the only plane that wasn’t designed around the landing gear but instead around the gun.
Almost every aircraft with guns retains the rounds once they are fired. After they land, crews will go out and download the expended rounds, and my job goes and picks them up, then we account for the expenditures and track stock levels.
All aircraft that have guns do this. It’s not just because of weight. Spent casings can get sucked into the engines or damage the plane in other ways.
WWI aircraft collected brass for the same reason
I just googled this thing— it’s *meaty*
This feels like click bait. No internal gatling system on aircraft expels spent casings from the system. They head back from the gun via the conveyor belt system back to the drum where most of the ammunition is stored. The aircraft designers would have picked that location to keep the CG within the envelope of the aircraft whether it is a round or a spent casing.
Most U.S jets retain casings from fired rounds. I know cause I had to count expended rounds when they return. But yeah the front landing gear isn’t centered either to compensate for that heavy ass gun.
So this is the ‘gun’ that makes all the ones I use in videogames “””mini”””
and god dam they are right thats a big gun
The warthog is the best plane ever, just because it apparently has an endless well of little trivia bits like this.
I don’t believe any modern fighter spits out spent casings. For example, when loading new 20mm rounds into an F16, the old brass came out at the same time. We knew when it was full when fresh rounds started coming out. The devise used for loading the fresh rounds also collected the spent rounds.
Story time. I was in the Army for 10 years with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. When I got out, I went back to work in Afghanistan for D.O.S.(State Department). I worked right along side a platoon of Infantry. We were based out of Bagram airbase for 3 days and than would make the long, sketchy drive in Humvees(small convoy of 4 vehicles and 2 ANA vehicles) to an ANA compound in the Tagab valley. On one of these days about an hour into the drive, we had to maneuver through a narrow dirt road(20 feet end to end). On the left side of the road was 10 foot tall mud walls preventing us from being able to acurately see over. It was always a shady area and on this particular day, we were ambushed. I was in the lead vehicle,and the first indication of an attack was an rpg that they shot at us. it completely missed right off the front of my vehicle(Very lucky). Luckily my .50 cal gunner was able to swing around and immediately return fire along with the rest of the convoy. We were starting to get outgunned and the ANA were pinned down(their vehicles weren’t up armored unlike ours). We were sitting ducks and couldn’t move by this point,which seemed like an eternity. Our TC (Troop commander) called for danger close with the A-10 who were in the immediate area. These pilots came in and just nailed the bad guys. I’ve been around A-10’s quite a bit throughout my career,but never that close to the receiving end. WOW! My whole body shook when the rounds hit the ground. They did 4 total bursts( 2 different passes) and just destroyed everything. QRF(Quick reaction force) was also called and ended up arriving once everything was done. Once everything was cleared, a sweep was made of the area. The carnage from the A-10’s were unreal. It was estimated to be roughly 10-20 fighters( there was just hardly anything left). I will always talk highly of not only the A-10’s, but especially the pilots.
It also avoids having the spent shell casings go flying into the engines. It aint a P-51.
Of all the aircraft built, the A-10 is still my absolute favorite. I worked with a guy who used to work on them in Germany and Saudi Arabia and said that they would have some come back with half their tail missing or severe damage to a wing from getting shot at during a mission. The fact a pilot could limp an aircraft back after severe damage and land it safely, is a testament to the engineering and effort put behind that aircrafts design. Hands down one of the coolest planes ever built.