To test whether the more than 50-year-old plane still had some fight in it, US Central Command (CENTCOM) sent two OV-10s to Iraq, where they flew 120 combat missions as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, with a 99% success rate.... Capable of carrying 3,000 pounds of ordinance, the Bronco can carry an overwhelming assortment of firepower for it’s small size, including either four 7.62mm machine guns, four .50 caliber machine guns, or a pair of 20mm cannons in addition to a loadout of rockets, missiles, and bombs as needed for the day’s mission...Quite a bit of video at the link.
One more fun trick the OV-10 does it drop a 5-man Special Forces ODA out the back.
It lacks the A-10's survivability, but it does have a lot more flexibility. Boeing has been thinking about restarting production anyway, as it's cheap enough that lots of countries can afford it. As the initial article points out, it only costs $1,000 an hour to operate, compared with $40,000 for an F-15 (another fighter commonly bought by Third World American allies). For sake of comparison, the A-10 comes in at $11,500, and the F-35 at $39,000 an hour (well, or so they say -- when they get them working, we'll see what the cost really is). So the OV-10 is even cheaper to operate than a Predator drone.
10 comments:
Not bad. But where's the BRRRRT?
I mean, totally, but a pair of 20 mike-mike cannons isn't bad.
To the guys on the ground, the cost of close air support is measured in lives, not dollars.
How remote is the chance some air force hack is going to decide the risk to a $100 million dollar aircraft (or whatever the F35 costs) is not worth a platoon pinned down and taking flanking fire?
Maybe they should rebuild the Skyraiders with a turbo prop.. It is not an A10 but 4 x 20mm and 8,000lbs of ordnance is not bad.
See, and my first thought was "well, at $1k per flight hour, they could afford 10 OV-10s to replace 1 A-10, and I'd be ok with that calculus, were I an infantryman." And with those numbers (i.e. a 10 to 1 replacement ratio), we're actually talking about greater payload capacity than the A-10 has, more loiter time over the target (I mean, you could keep those things in a constant rotation if you had 10 of them to cycle through), and all around a nice plan.
The downside (because, of course there is one) is that ten pilots quickly eat through that $10k per flight hour savings. So the Air Force would never go for it.
I don't know. Every kid wants to be a fighter pilot, and yet we've been talking about the 'end of manned fighters.' Here's a chance for the USAF to turn that around, and put ten times as many pilots in the air.
It'd be a pretty cool job, and one that would allow women to be right on the front edge of the action if they want to be.
Truly multi-role. I had a squadron of them available to me in Germany; we used them for on-scene SAR command because of their loiter time capability.
Eric Hines
That there is no credible enemy MANPAADS makes it useful, I suppose.
Are we sure about that, EB? There were quite a few floating around after the fall of Gadaffi. I know we were trying to buy them all back, but...
I have not seen any evidence of their use. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Depends who you ask. No confirmations, but there does seem to be the possibility of some floating around out there. It seems to me it would be prudent to suspect the possibility, rather than assume there aren't any.
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