The Commanche and the Albatross

[Langenator]

IT's the plane no one wants and everyone is going to get! Only in America!

The F-35...it's the Obamacare of warplanes.

[Aesop]

In America, everyone is always catching a plane.
In Soviet Union...plane catches you.

[Jericho941]

Heh.

Yeah, about that whole "The A-10 is definitely going away" thing?

LOL J/K

[Aesop]

AKA "House wrestles control of DoD from Executive branch as it heads towards cliff".

The news is promising, but wait until the Senate idiots vote, and we see what abortion comes out of committee, and whether HopeyDopey signs it.
This is just the first quarter of a football match that bears watching all the way to the final seconds.
The moves are promising, but far from binding on anyone. A-10 pilots should still be updating their resumes.

When the House starts paying for moves like this by equivalent cuts in implementing ObamaCare, it will signal that Boehner has finally found his balls.

[Johnnyreb]

How many combat pilot does the Air Force have any more? I think it is something like 600 naval aviators these days? How many in the air force.

The last time the Air Force tried to get rid of the A-10 the Army seriously asked for them and the A-10 jockeys seriously asked to be given to the Army, back during Clinton if I recall it right. The Air Force has a long history of working to ignore the fact that half its job is air support for the troops on the ground. Which is why the Army put guns on their helicopters in the first place.

I understand that the decline in the number of pilots in the military is now reflected in a serious pilot shortage in the airlines.

It is too bad the Air Force/Congress can't see reason and understand that if they bought something that cost less than 100 million each, they could buy a lot more of them, and have more pilots trained to fly them, and also improve the airline pilot supply down the line, since if there is a real war, it is to those airline we will turn for vitally needed additional airlift and supply capacity.

Not long ago I saw an article about, I think it was a Saudi owned company just started taking small helicopters and turning them into nice gunships for about 9 million a pop. The quote from the story was that it was because "not everyone has 30 million to buy an Apache." So, 3 armed helos, or 1 armed helo?

There's another company I remember from longer ago, I think Argentina, that is making a light ground support aircraft, with propellers on it. And selling it to people who didn't have the money for a fancy jet fighter, but needed good ground support, especially against insurgents. I don't know what the asking price for those things was, but I would not be surprised if 100 million bucks could get a squadron of them of them plus spare parts and ammo.

Then you would have more planes, and more pilots, that could be deployed and useful in more places, since most places we would need to send them don't even have an air force worth mentioning.. And if some Taliban shot one down, it would not cost the taxpayer 100 million to buy another one. But well, that might be a sensible thing to do for fighting the next war. Which is why we'll never see Congress or the military want to do anything like that.

[mekender]

Schwarzenegger was climbing around on a mock-up of one in True Lies way back in 1994!

????

The only aircraft I recall Ahhhnold being in in that movie was an AV-8 Harrier.

Yup... and it wasn't a mockup. James Cameron actually bought two harriers and chopped them up to rig them for filming.

It's one of the reasons the movie was the most expensive in history to that date.

I think Aesop is thinking of the ridiculous scene from one of the "die hard" movies a few years ago.

I knew one of the SFX guys that did the bridge explosion scene on True Lies way back in the day... Damn thing was a thing of genius, they used a pair of real harriers and they fired actual, albeit not explosive, missiles at the bridge. The explosions were set off by vibration/impact sensors on the bridge. Closest that a movie has likely ever come to showing a real aircraft strike without using actual exploding ordinance.

[NVGdude]

There's another company I remember from longer ago, I think Argentina, that is making a light ground support aircraft, with propellers on it. And selling it to people who didn't have the money for a fancy jet fighter, but needed good ground support, especially against insurgents. .

Probably thinking about the Super Tucano.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EM ... per_Tucano

[Johnnyreb]

That's the one. And from the wiki the US Air Force is buying 200 of them. Or at least they would if the runner up hadn't yelled for a lawyer and went to court over it. It said the court case would be heard in 2012. Since when can the thing you don't buy take you to court to force you to buy it anyway?

Wiki says Beechcraft lost in court in 2013, so I guess that means the Air Force bought the Super Tucano, some of which are supposed to go to the Afghan Air Force and I bet some to Iraq too.

[Aesop]

Not long ago I saw an article about, I think it was a Saudi owned company just started taking small helicopters and turning them into nice gunships for about 9 million a pop. The quote from the story was that it was because "not everyone has 30 million to buy an Apache." So, 3 armed helos, or 1 armed helo?

All of which are toast in about 30 seconds when someone pops open an SA-14, at far less than $38K@ we pay for Stingers, and then it's either three piles of scrap, or a pissed off Apache swinging around to make a pass on you.

If you're going to send people out in sub-par a/c, you need to pack the things full of explosives, and issue the pilots rising sun headbands before they take off.

Never having fought anyone since 1916, the Saudis can buy whatever they damned want.
Military hardware for them is like polo ponies: just something for 200 princes to play with besides themselves.

When it comes to mixing it up down low with AAA, the only way to win is not to play.

[NVGdude]

Wiki says Beechcraft lost in court in 2013, so I guess that means the Air Force bought the Super Tucano, some of which are supposed to go to the Afghan Air Force and I bet some to Iraq too.

I actually got to work on the Beach AT-6B for a couple of days down in Tucson. I ran the night vision lighting cockpit lighting test for the Air Force.

Honestly it was one heck of a slick little bird they built. They stole (er borrowed) a mission computer out of an A-10. Great visibility, good control layout...