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A-10C Thunderbolt II (a.k.a. Warthog)
Last Wednesday I got tapped to run up the road to Hill Air Force Base and shoot some images of theA-10 Thunderbolt II (a.k.a Warthog) going through repair, refurbishment, maintenance and updating at the Air Logistics Center with the 309th Maintenance Wing. The point of the trip was to obtain images forDefense Technology, part of the Aviation Week group for an article with David Axe on the A-10 that is currently undergoing updating to the A-10C configuration. The aircraft itself is not a new one. Rather it was designed back in the 1960s as a close air support aircraft designed to support NATO forces against a large scale ground war against thousands of Soviet tanks in the European theatre. The A-10 took its maiden flight back in 1972 and was deployed five years later in large numbers throughout Europe, and thankfully The Cold War petered out and the A-10 found itself becoming more obsolete with every passing year. In fact, early on the Air Force never found favor with the A-10 and throughout the mid to late 1980s, was in the process of examining the A-10 for a phasing out in favor of more multi-role aircraft like the F-16 which some program managers suggested could subsume all of the A-10s roles. This was never really true of course given that the A-10 was specifically designed for a role that required it to be able to fly from unimproved runways and loiter low and slow while carrying massive amounts of ordnance in a platform the could take a tremendous beating from ground fire, protect the pilot and still survive. As capable a platform as the F-16 is, it could never fill this role.
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