Fairchild's A-10 Thunderbolt II
By Chris Banyai-Riepl
Want to chew up some armor and spit it out? Better climb into an A-10. Designed to annihilate armor with a huge variety of armament from missiles to an internal 30mm cannon, the A-10 made its first combat debut in Desert Storm where it performed flawlessly. Here are a few profiles of this famous tank killer.
Unfortunately, due to shaking earth around where I live, I was unable to find all my references on these, and so I haven't been able to finish the captions on a couple of these. If you're an A-10 expert, please e-mail me and fill in the blanks here, and I'll update the page accordingly.
A-10A, 79-097
354FW, Myrtle Beach AFB
A-10A, 81-064
55th FS, 20th FW, ACC
Late 1994
Sometime in 1994 the A-10 started to appear in a two-tone gray camouflage, as seen in this example. This particular A-10 carries a green star on the nose denoting a chopper kill during Desert Storm. This plane and one other A-10 were the only two to be credited with air-to-air kills. The 30mm cannon is not something you want to be on the receiving end of and it made short work of the Iraqi Mi-8 helicopter.
OA-10A, 80-140
55th FS, 20th FW, ACC
April 1994
The typical low-vis scheme of this Shaw-based OA-10A does an excellent job of hiding the unit badge, similar to the one carried on the two-tone gray 55th FS A-10 seen above.
