- 6/19/2025
For educational purposes
The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, also infamously known under the nickname A-10 Warthog, is a single-seat, twin-turbofan, straight-wing, subsonic attack aircraft developed by Fairchild Republic for the United States Air Force (USAF).
In service since 1977, it is named after the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt strike-fighter of World War II, but is instead commonly referred to as the "Warthog" (sometimes simply "Hog").
The A-10 was designed to provide close air support (CAS) to ground troops by attacking enemy armored vehicles, tanks, and other ground forces; it is the only production-built aircraft designed solely for CAS to have served with the U.S. Air Force.
Its secondary mission is to direct other aircraft in attacks on ground targets, a role called forward air controller (FAC)-airborne; aircraft used primarily in this role are designated OA-10.
The A-10 was used in combat for the first time during the Gulf War in 1991.
The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, also infamously known under the nickname A-10 Warthog, is a single-seat, twin-turbofan, straight-wing, subsonic attack aircraft developed by Fairchild Republic for the United States Air Force (USAF).
In service since 1977, it is named after the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt strike-fighter of World War II, but is instead commonly referred to as the "Warthog" (sometimes simply "Hog").
The A-10 was designed to provide close air support (CAS) to ground troops by attacking enemy armored vehicles, tanks, and other ground forces; it is the only production-built aircraft designed solely for CAS to have served with the U.S. Air Force.
Its secondary mission is to direct other aircraft in attacks on ground targets, a role called forward air controller (FAC)-airborne; aircraft used primarily in this role are designated OA-10.
The A-10 was used in combat for the first time during the Gulf War in 1991.
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LearningTranscript
00:00For more information, visit www.fema.org
00:30Designed for ground support, the A-10 Warthog is simple and rugged.
00:38But in the Persian Gulf, commanders send Warthog pilots against the most lethal threats in modern war.
00:47I don't know if scared is the right word, but certainly living in a state of higher awareness, if you will.
00:57January 19th, 1991. Two days after the air assault against Iraq is launched, Saddam Hussein rains down Scud missiles on Tel Aviv.
01:21It is part of an effort by the dictator to incite Israel into entering the war.
01:30Panic is widespread. Many fear that the Iraqi Scuds will carry biological or chemical warheads.
01:38The prospect of poison gas being used against a nation born of the Holocaust is too much to bear.
01:49But if the Israelis enter the conflict, the Arab states united against Iraq will pull out of the war and the threadbare U.S.-led coalition will fall apart.
02:04The entire Scud crisis was something that drove politicians crazy. It drove planners crazy.
02:13The missile is not a greatly accurate missile. It's kind of like a V2 from World War II that the Germans built. Not much different than that, really.
02:19But the potential terror capability of this weapon demanded we go get them.
02:25But unfortunately, there were many, many cardboard tubes out there painted that looked like Scuds.
02:31Well, are you going to send a $60 million airplane against something that might be really just nothing but garbage?
02:40Excuse me?
02:41That was the problem.
02:46Instead, the Air Force sends the $1.5 million Fairchild Republic a tent.
02:57Called the Warthog, this mean, ugly plane has long been the brunt of jokes throughout the service.
03:03With a top speed of 375 knots, the Hog is very slow.
03:10Supersonic fighter jocks like to say that the A-10's airspeed indicator is a calendar.
03:16And that the aircraft takes bird strikes in the rear.
03:22But compared to modern fighter jets, it is an incredibly rugged machine.
03:26Just one-thirtieth the cost of an F-16, the Warthog can absorb fire that would bring down a squadron of Falcons.
03:38When pilots climb into the cockpit, they are surrounded by a titanium bathtub
03:44that in early tests withstood direct hits from 57-millimeter anti-aircraft guns.
03:49The Hog's twin tail serves to mask the infrared signature of the engines and provides great low-speed control.
04:04It is the consummate close air support weapon.
04:07The Hog's two GE TF-34 engines are mounted above the wing
04:12so that when taxiing on primitive runways, they do not suck up rocks or dirt.
04:16External to the fuselage, they are built so that if one is hit, it can burn, fall off, and the Hog will still fly.
04:26The aircraft is built around a vicious 30-millimeter cannon that fires depleted uranium rounds
04:44able to penetrate enemy armor from up to two miles away.
04:48Hog pilots are trained to cater to the needs of ground troops.
04:52They are the closest thing the Air Force has to GIs in a cockpit.
04:58And in recent years, Army leaders have made clear their desire to command the Warthog as their own.
05:04In an Air Force fascinated by high-tech fly-by-wire technology, the Warthog has always been the bastard child.
05:25In fact, when General Horner's own son chooses to fly hogs, his father claims that the boy has died of brain damage.
05:38Just months prior to Desert Storm, the A-10 was headed for the chopping block in the Arizona desert.
05:45Matter of fact, it had to be shoved down the Air Force's throat to some degree.
05:54When the A-10 was proposed, the Air Force really didn't want it because it wasn't a gimmick box that you could stuff all these goodies into.
05:59The Air Force likes the high-tech option, and they like complex gear. The A-10 is certainly not complex. It's a simple, straight, easy-to-fly, rugged airplane.
06:14Despite their questionable status, when the crisis in the Gulf breaks out,
06:23hogs are some of the first U.S. warplanes ready and able to head to Saudi Arabia.
06:33Squadrons of A-10s are rushed from Europe and America to the Kingdom's northern desert strips.
06:39If Iraqi troops push on from Kuwait towards the Saudi oil fields, the hogs will be sacrificed until additional forces can be rushed to the theater.
06:53As we parked, I remember popping my canopy, and I immediately got hit with a blast of hot air.
06:59So I started looking around, trying to figure out whose jet wash, you know, who had their airplane parked and was blowing their exhaust over my cockpit.
07:08And, uh, I couldn't find anybody. That was just the, uh, the wind and the heat.
07:17Wow.
07:18You may be wondering what this compound is here, and it just happens to be, uh, our temporary home until we can get a really nice tent.
07:25As summer gives way to fall, it becomes apparent that the Iraqis are content with defending occupied Kuwait.
07:38For the next six months, nearly 200 warthog pilots will make a home in the Saudi desert.
07:45One of these men, Major Scott Hill of the 353rd Fighter Squadron, will create a video diary of their experiences there.
07:53Got to hope they're real toilets.
07:58They're not! They're the holes in the floor! Oh, no!
08:01Here's a real one.
08:05Initially, no beds or furniture or anything like that associated with it, but as time went on, and not too much time,
08:10we ended up with bunk beds in there, and everybody went to the task of building their own furniture out of building materials they could find laying around.
08:18Now these shells or those shells? Those are shells. Check it out. Homemade shells.
08:22This is just like a mess, I love it.
08:24Hey, man! This is just a place!
08:26Here's the foot, man.
08:27You see the beach outside? We have a, you know, a beach here, right there.
08:31Yeah, a wall.
08:41This is a live special report from AP Network News. Crisis in the building. The deadline passes.
08:47We view this situation with the utmost gravity. We remain committed to take whatever steps are necessary to defend our long-standing, vital interests in the Gulf.
09:01Nearly half a year after the 353rd's arrival, the deadline set for Iraqi troops to leave Kuwait finally comes to pass.
09:10The Americans stationed in the Gulf now realize that war is inevitable.
09:14Early on, they are told that unlike Vietnam, there will be no rotation home.
09:21They are in for the duration.
09:25Some spend the final hours taking one last look at video messages from their families.
09:30Most of us stayed up the night before the war and either wrote a letter home, and I wrote one that I sent home, one to my parents and one to my family.
09:45And then I also wrote another one that I kept in my footlocker there in case I didn't come back from a mission, and it was just more or less instructions as to, you know, how I wanted things to happen if I wasn't going to come home from the desert.
10:00Really foul.
10:04On January 17th, the air assault is launched.
10:11Everybody and their brother was coming to this one area because they heard that there was armor out the ass, and there was.
10:18The initial strike includes over 750 Allied planes.
10:23At first, warthogs are limited to attacking Iraqi radar sites along the border.
10:29But by the second day of war, Saddam Hussein embarks on his Scud terror campaign, and the hogs' role changes dramatically.
10:39Seven Scuds landed in Israel.
10:41They say they weren't chemicals.
10:43They said small bombs, maybe seven inches.
10:46As Iraqi missiles fall indiscriminately on Tel Aviv, Israeli patience evaporates.
10:53Within hours, IAF F-15s stand ready to strike Iraq.
10:59They will have to pass over Saudi or Jordanian airspace, and if they do, the Allied coalition will fall to pieces.
11:06Well, at the time, we thought they were very close.
11:11As I recall, there was one night when they had their planes ready to go, and they asked us to get permission from the Saudis for them to overfly Saudi airspace, which the Saudis were not at all interested in doing.
11:24We really didn't want them over there either.
11:28It is decided that the ugliest bird in the fleet will take on the Scuds.
11:32In this task, her slowness will be an asset.
11:39On average, an F-16 can spend just 15 minutes T.O.T., or time over target, in searching for the enemy missile sites.
11:49The low, slow, and fuel-efficient Warthog can loiter for more than an hour.
11:57And although it is a job for which A-10 pilots have never trained, years spent learning to distinguish real targets from decoys will play perfectly into the Scud hunting mission.
12:11It was an unusual mission, but for an A-10 guy, it was really kind of neat because I knew exactly where the target was.
12:29I even had some photographs of that target.
12:32They told me exactly what to shoot.
12:34I was able to pre-plan the mission and actually decide how I was going to execute that mission before I ever walked out the door.
12:45With Vietnam 20 years in the past, most American aviators are young and new to combat.
12:52Why don't you go to work?
12:53Our jets were parked in close proximity to the squadron building where we did all our briefings.
12:59And I've got to admit, that was probably the longest walk I've ever taken from the front door of the squadron all the way up to my airplane.
13:05I don't know if scared is the right word, but certainly living in a state of higher awareness, if you will, because you felt every eye on you, every crew chief on the line looking at you.
13:17And you really felt uncomfortable thinking, oh my gosh, here we really go.
13:22I always had asked myself, hey, am I ready for that?
13:26And the answer you always get back is, yeah, sure am.
13:28And now it's put up or shut up time.
13:30And once I strapped in and started running through my pre-flight checks, etc., then it was back to road again.
13:40Before the war, the plane was destined for the scrap heap.
13:44Now it sets out on one of the most important missions of the conflict.
13:49This Air Force stepchild does not carry the infrared guidance pods and other navigational systems that more favored aircraft have.
14:00Instead, pilots fly with a map on their laps and navigate according to the roads and watties below.
14:08Intelligence photos and data are rare to non-existent.
14:12I know one particular guy that was sitting in what we call hot pit, or the ICT, the Integrated Combat Turn, getting the bombs loaded up.
14:22And the intel officer climbs up a ladder, shows him a huge scale map, a one to two million map, a little red dot on it and says, see that?
14:29He says, yeah. He says, that's where you're going.
14:32Okay.
14:33They set out on northwest flight paths in their stick and rudder aircraft, some 30 planes in all.
14:43They will search for the 20-foot missiles hidden somewhere in 300,000 square miles of desert below.
14:50The A-10 was built to hunt Warsaw Pact tanks.
15:04Warthog pilots were trained to fly low and to avoid radar detection using the cover of the hills and valleys of Central Europe.
15:11But over Iraq, the textbook is discarded. Flying over a flat, trackless desert means no cover at all.
15:21Instead, hog drivers fly high to avoid ground fire while being ever watchful for Soviet-made SAM missiles.
15:30But the aircraft is far from helpless. In the great scud hunt, the Warthog packs one of the biggest punches of any ground attack aircraft in history.
15:46The Gau 8, 30-millimeter Gatling gun.
15:51Very, very nice shot.
15:53We love the gun. There's never been an A-10 driver that just didn't get a big smile on his face when he knew he had a lot of rounds to shoot.
15:59It's a very, very viable weapon system, and it works for virtually any target.
16:04It can take out anything from hardened armor and tanks to tearing up an artillery pit to strapping a command post to just taking out a convoy of trucks.
16:13Here we have your 30-millimeter gun system.
16:24The system persists of a drum assembly, which stores the ammunition, a drive assembly that would be located approximately between the two units, and your gun assembly.
16:34The entire system holds up to 1,174 rounds of ammunition.
16:41The firing rate for the gun is 3,900 shots per minute, which equivalents to 65 shots per second.
16:47If the pilot had to at any one time hold the trigger, he would have approximately 18 seconds worth of firepower.
16:53But at which time the barrels would melt.
17:01The Gau-8 gun was really a kind of philosophical extension of the 30-millimeter cannon in World War II, particularly those that were hung on Ju-87 Stukas in the German campaign in Russia.
17:12But that gun was built to kill tanks. That was the idea. And the gun is extremely effective for the depleted uranium round. It truly can melt a tank.
17:30Being made of depleted uranium means that the foot-long 30-millimeter rounds are much denser than the steel armor of the tanks they're built to penetrate.
17:40The lessons learned out of those previous wars where we hung guns on airplanes were applied to putting a gun inside.
17:49And as a result, the gun is aimed by the pilot just pointing the airplane.
17:54You can, as one pilot said, point it like a garden hose. You just push the trigger and all of a sudden the ammunition is coming out and you move the stick and you can do whatever you want with it.
18:03It doesn't require a very fine sighting system because the gun itself becomes a sighting system.
18:08So the idea was to put the pilot straight on the center line of the gun, put his eyeball right in the middle, and then he just gets in the middle of the fight and hoses whatever he can find.
18:16The gun will be used against scuds, SAM missile sights, and armor. With a hard sight similar to that used on a hunting rifle, the GAU-8 can shoot much further than pilots can see.
18:33Still, those with keen eyes can kill enemy tanks at over a mile, and armored cars from more than two.
18:42In the mission to destroy Iraqi scuds, however, both gun and aircraft proved nearly useless.
18:48Despite claims of success by American commanders, claims meant to placate the Israelis and keep them out of the war, the enemy missiles were almost impossible to find.
18:59It turned out it was very hard to find those launchers in the desert, the mobile launchers that they used to fire at Israel and Saudi Arabia.
19:09There's no evidence at this point. We haven't been able to confirm that we actually killed any mobile scud launchers.
19:14We thought at the time we had, but going back and reviewing the evidence now, there's some serious question about whether or not we ever actually knocked out any scuds on the ground.
19:21Military commanders and pilots alike expressed certainty that the mobile scuds had been hit. Pentagon reviews now show that this was not the case.
19:40Most of Iraq's 30 hard launch sites were destroyed in the first few days of war.
19:45But these were really just decoys, meant to divert air assaults away from the enemy's true threat.
19:54The problem was that the Iraqis never intended to use these stationary sites.
20:00They had mobile scud launchers that could scoot out into the desert, fire their missile, and then hide somewhere, perhaps under a highway covert or some other place, make him very difficult to target.
20:12Does this mean the pilots lied? Does it mean Schwarzkopf lied when he told us, as he did during his press conferences, that scuds had been killed?
20:20I don't think so. What I think happened was these pilots were going up.
20:25They were doing a lot of these operations at night. They were seeing vehicles in their infrared scopes and they were killing them.
20:31They were probably fuel trucks from Jordan.
20:33Whether the scuds were hit or not is immaterial. You know, all you have to do is get the enemy to think you're going to hit them and you start moving them.
20:45Just the idea of hunting scuds kept them ineffective.
20:48The rate of scud firings on Israel decreases dramatically, and soon after the scud hunt begins, Israeli forces stand down.
20:59The A-10s can take much of the credit for this, and with the warthog's help, the coalition holds together.
21:08Eventually, I think they came to recognize the wisdom of not responding. It was a very hard thing to do. It was a courageous decision on their part, I think. It was the right decision.
21:17But you can imagine, if the United States were attacked to make a decision, have a government make a decision, that they would not retaliate.
21:25A very hard thing to do, but it was the right answer.
21:27Despite the ferocity of early airstrikes, a crucial set of enemy targets remains, Iraqi surface-to-air missile sites.
21:46These Soviet-made systems are state-of-the-art, but early on, wild-weasel F-4Gs using harm anti-radiation missiles and cluster bombs destroy them with lethal regularity.
21:59But after the first week of war, Iraqi gunners learned to strobe their radars, hoping to get a quick fix and shot on Allied aircraft without being detected.
22:22Air Force leaders soon turned to a less sophisticated means of eliminating enemy SAM sites, the trained eyes of warthog pilots.
22:45These men, men well-versed in spotting ground targets without the aid of sophisticated technology, are put to work in the wild-weasel mission.
22:56We certainly could carry some good weapons to attack SAMs, but we're really surprised, it's probably an understatement,
23:06we're surprised when they started tasking us to take out surface-to-air missile sites.
23:10The weasel mission, going after SAM sites, is one of the most feared missions in the Air Force, there's no doubt.
23:16Guys who do it are highly motivated.
23:19You're looking down the throat of the fiercest threat the enemy has to put against you, a surface-to-air missile.
23:25You're going to have to go down the throat of this missile's envelope and disable the radar so that he can't fire back at you.
23:33And he also can't fire at the strike force, that's the whole idea, to kill the radar site so the SAM is ineffective.
23:38Thus, the wart weasel is born.
23:43Hogs do not pull SAM duty alone.
23:48Every A-10 strike force is accompanied by F-4G wild weasels trailing not far behind.
23:56The warthogs fly low and root out enemy SAM sites with Mavericks and Mark 82 bombs.
24:15Should the Iraqis attempt to turn on their radar sites to track the hogs, the F-4Gs will blast them with harm anti-radiation missiles.
24:25I don't like that.
24:26Despite this effective teaming of Phantom and Warthog, surface-to-air missiles are the most frightening threat any pilot can encounter.
24:34They were always called flying telephone poles.
24:41And they almost looked like a Saturn V launch.
24:44You could acquire them from quite a ways off once you were looking in the right direction.
24:48And it looked like they were launching a space ship at you.
24:52Over to you, it's going to SAM launch.
24:55That is 5-0.
24:56Oh, it's fixed.
24:58Last, last.
24:59Right now.
25:00Okay, your first move is to find it and then to get your nose headed downhill so you can go ahead and build up airspeed.
25:06And this has its pluses and minuses.
25:09One, you're getting a lot of airspeed, but at the same time this is all going on.
25:13I'm watching the AAA erupting below me.
25:15Okay, that initially at the beginning of this engagement, I'm above its effective range.
25:19It's really not a threat to me.
25:21But what this missile is doing is driving me down closer and closer to this AAA range.
25:26So it's going to become effective and a significant factor here soon.
25:32And I don't want to say it's fear that you really start thinking about.
25:36But it's almost like, why me?
25:39Mitch was there too.
25:41Mule is the SAM ace today.
25:43He had a five-room shot ahead of him.
25:45Buffooned my way over top of her too, sir.
25:47But sometimes the SAMs find their mark.
25:53And early on, a 353rd hog driver, performing the search and rescue role,
25:58is forced to save a downed Navy pilot from certain capture.
26:03A whole bunch of vehicles.
26:05Deep in enemy territory and nearly out of fuel,
26:08Captain Paul Johnson blasts a truckload of Iraqis that had closed to just 100 yards of the stricken American.
26:15We did the first combat rescue in the hog today.
26:19We grabbed an F-14 front seater.
26:22Slate 4-6.
26:24Went down last night.
26:26I don't know how deep we went, I'll have to look.
26:29We grabbed him with a couple of favorable helicopters and brought him out.
26:33The nine-hour rescue mission earns Johnson one of the two Air Force crosses awarded in the conflict.
26:40But just days later, Johnson himself winds up on the wrong end of an Iraqi surface-to-air missile.
26:54Many say he is one of the best pilots to ever fly the hog.
26:58Yet he becomes obsessed with knocking out an enemy radar site,
27:02despite dense cloud cover that makes his TV-guided Maverick useless.
27:08I'd been there too long. The weather was interfering.
27:11It was past time to throw in the towel and go home.
27:13But my fangs had come out.
27:15I'd driven my fangs through the floorboard, you know, grown one eyebrow and said,
27:18I'm going to go kill this thing.
27:20And I decide my last feeble attempt, I'm going to roll down the chute,
27:24take it down, a load of Mark 82, 500-pounders, pull off, and then we'll go home.
27:28And a couple of things happened on the attack.
27:32As I rolled in on the bomb run with my number two man, calls blind.
27:39In other words, he can't see me. He's lost sight of me.
27:42And I missed that radio call.
27:44Had I heard that radio call, the answer would have been,
27:47I'm aborting the attack, I come off drive,
27:49because I am going down into the threat envelope and nobody's looking at me.
27:54Suddenly, what feels like a sledgehammer just hammers my wing.
28:00And the airplane hard rolls to the right.
28:03Hold that! One's hit! One's hit!
28:08I'm yelling in the intercom that one's hit, one's hit.
28:12Then I finally key the mic and decide to tell everybody else.
28:15One's hit! One's hit!
28:18I look out my wing and see a gaping hole,
28:23a lot of skin ripped off the top of the wing.
28:26I can see my entire main tire is visible to me, which is a bad thing.
28:31I usually don't need to see that.
28:33Does Q1 need assistance?
28:34You bet I do!
28:36What do you need?
28:37I'm westbound. I need a vicar the shortest way across the border.
28:40Wit, who still has not found me, comes screaming down below the weather to get sight of me.
28:45Hey, one, I'm two. I'm right above you now. I got you.
28:47Copy that. Keep cover on the ground threads. We'll have to penetrate some bad airspace.
28:51The A-10 is triple redundant. This means that if the main hydraulic system goes down, it is backed up by another.
29:03If the secondary system fails, the pilot can turn to manual reversion, where the hog's cable and pulley system kicks in.
29:11Manual reversion saves Paul Johnson's life, enabling him to nurse his wounded hog back to the Saudi border.
29:19In the Air Force, in emergency situations, we talk about the pucker factor in 664 in the fleet.
29:29She still bears the scars and the fang marks all over the cockpit, but the seat cushion has yet to be found, because my pucker factor was so high that particular day.
29:40Johnson can also thank his life to the warthog's sturdy turbofan jets.
29:47When his wing was hit, 664's right engine swallowed an incredible amount of shrapnel and debris.
29:53But by design, it was able to spit the wreckage out, power back up, and bring him home.
29:59The entire airplane is a piece of armor. It is a flying tank. You could shoot the leading edges of the wings off, or blow sections of wing off, or a fuselage, and the airplane still flies.
30:09It almost harks back to the World War II idea of the B-17 and the P-47, which were very rugged airplanes, and intended to fly home all shot up, and still bring the crews home.
30:20Obviously, this guy made it back okay.
30:22Yeah, he hobbled back. I'm sure he had to clean his flight suit out, because he took a very severe hit.
30:29The next day, a lot of guys were coming up to me in a hooch or in a squadron and said,
30:36P.J., did you sleep okay last night? P.J., were you laying awake last night?
30:40And on reflection, I got to thinking about it. I said, no, actually, I slept quite well, thank you.
30:45I said my prayer at the end of the day, and thank the Lord for taking care of me and recognize that we revalidated an old concept and an old term from years and years ago,
31:00when the 8th Air Force and the bombers and the fighters used to talk about coming home on a wing and a prayer.
31:06And I think that was applicable in my case. We brought her home on a wing and a prayer.
31:13Hogs take off and head into combat every seven minutes for the duration of the war.
31:28They are universally feared by the Iraqis.
31:34About 5,000 feet, the plane's quiet turbofans cannot be heard.
31:40And at night, the olive drab paint scheme is nearly impossible to see.
31:45In the end, these simple machines prove stealthy in their own right.
31:51One of the advantages of this high bypass ducted fan engine is that this engine is real quiet when it's running in comparison.
31:59Especially, like, if you're on a bombing run, when you come in to do your bombing run, if you pull your throttles back to part power,
32:06you're going to reduce even more thrust and more noise, and you're just going to glide in.
32:10Once you hit your bombing target, you can power up and thrust out.
32:13A quiet approach, and who cares how much noise you produce on the way up because you've already killed them.
32:22They sweep in silently.
32:24From more than a mile away, the Gatling gun rips enemy columns apart, suddenly and without warning.
32:37Because they were slated for retirement, warthogs in the Gulf do not carry the FLIR pods that enable other aircraft to operate at night.
32:45Warthog pilots come up with an ingenious solution.
32:48The Mavericks, slung on their wings, are guided by infrared television cameras mounted in the missile's nose.
32:57A-10 crewmen use the Maverick to convey this infrared image to a tiny TV screen in the cockpit.
33:04With this, hog drivers, too, can see at night.
33:07Compared to something that everybody would understand, it's kind of like if you took a soda straw and looked through it and tried to drive down the road, you know, with your other eye closed.
33:19Movers on the road!
33:20With the Maverick and its ad hoc sighting system, Iraqis moving under the cover of darkness find no haven from prowling A-10s.
33:30Now stand down to the side of the hot spot.
33:34Okay, we got people running, people running.
33:37Roger that.
33:39We didn't know there were people in there until we started looking at our films, and we could see them jumping over the berms after the first missile blew up.
33:45So these guys who had thought they had protection of hiding at night, actually, it became their worst enemy.
33:55They are running out of their vehicles, too. Take them.
34:01Yeah, I know all those guys had families and kids and brothers and sisters and all, but the way I look at it, he's shooting at me and I'm shooting at him, and I was just the lucky one.
34:12And that's, you know, that's not for a soldier or an airman to decide. We just go with our marching orders and do what we're told to do.
34:19When you were out there fighting, you were fighting a vehicle as opposed to the people in the vehicle.
34:28When I saw a tank, I've got to admit, I didn't think for a New York second about the tank crew inside.
34:35I thought about, hey, there's a tank, and there goes a tank.
34:40By February 24th, D-Day arrives. Allied ground forces launch a ferocious assault on the dug-in remnants of Iraq's vaunted army.
34:59Most feared is enemy artillery. Iraqi guns are deadly accurate and have longer range than coalition gun batteries.
35:09They soon become the A-10's primary target and meet the same fate dealt to hundreds of Iraqi tank crews.
35:22When the remnants of enemy armor attempt to flee, the slaughter is remarkable.
35:29The Iraqis were caught on the open. It was like flicking on a light in a kitchen with a bunch of cockroaches.
35:35They were pounded from the air for days.
35:41Now, warthog drivers settled into the deck-hugging job for which they first trained, close air support.
35:48With the lives of American GIs and Marines at risk, all altitude restrictions are removed, and A-10s streak in as low as 100 feet to aid the troops below.
36:03For a typical day for us, it was, you'd take off and fly three sorties, you'd go back to the base, refuel, rearm, come back out, back to the base, refuel, rearm, come back out.
36:16You'd work your 12 to 14-hour day, and you'd go sleep, and then you'd get up the next day and do the same thing again. Plan, fly, eat, and sleep. And that was about all we did for six weeks straight.
36:29Made for a long day, but it really put a lot of iron and a lot of firepower out there on the target. A lot of sorties were flown.
36:36A-10 pilots learn to fly, as we say, in the weeds, undetected by radar, or by the eyeball, or by the ear. Surprise becomes a terrific capability, and that was the idea.
36:51They can loiter over the battlefield for nearly two hours, as commanders repeatedly call upon them
37:20to dive onto enemy forces. And when they do, hog pilots often use a trick as old as combat aviation itself.
37:32A tactic all fighter pilots have used since World War I is coming out of the sun.
37:36Matter of fact, the catchphrase in World War II was, beware the Hun in the sun.
37:40And the idea is that you use the sun as a backdrop, and it blinds the guy you're shooting at, whether he's in the air or he's on the ground.
37:48This World War I tactic can counter a very modern threat.
37:53Coming out of the sun not only blinds enemy gunners, it also provides an ideal heat source
37:59to draw Iraqi heat-seeking missiles away from their intended target.
38:04But the sun over the Gulf would soon be eclipsed.
38:08As American ground forces press home their assault, Saddam Hussein takes one last desperate stab at denying them air cover.
38:16By February 26th, over 300 Kuwaiti oil wells burn out of control.
38:27The oil fires in Kuwait, quite frankly, were a pretty smart military option.
38:32When Saddam Hussein set them on fire, he knew that these fires, and particularly the smoke, would interfere with a lot of what the A-10 and other airplanes could do.
38:41You just can't see through smoke. High-tech isn't going to get you through it.
38:45Infrared isn't going to get you through it. Good electro-optics and radar isn't going to get you through it.
38:49And the A-10, if nothing else, could fly low enough and around a lot of this smoke to overcome some of it.
38:56So it was probably a better airplane in the environment than most of the higher-altitude airplanes.
39:00A-10 pilots run the gauntlet beneath the dark clouds of smoke, and Saddam's environmental disaster does little to stem the tide.
39:12One hundred hours into the ground war, it is nearly over.
39:21The battered survivors of Iraq's army flee for home.
39:25Most of those who stand their ground do so for the sole purpose of surrendering as quickly as possible to advancing coalition troops.
39:33The really surprising part of all of it was these Iraqi vehicles, some of the ones we had shot or were shooting, had been evacuated, had been vacated.
39:46Because as I employ on one particular tank, and I pull off, and I am employing self-protection flares out of my airplane.
39:53So these small flares are popping out of my airplane about once every three seconds.
39:58And Wit, my wingman, who is several thousand feet behind me, but looking at me and covering me, says,
40:04Hey PG, I think you're dropping flares on their heads.
40:07And I look down, and here in the middle of the desert, probably two or three hundred yards away from any vehicle of any kind, is probably, I don't know, fifty to a hundred Iraqis.
40:18Standing out in the middle of the desert, looking up at my airplane with their hands up, trying to surrender my airplane.
40:24As the ceasefire approaches, the tempo of American air assaults becomes brutally intense.
40:30It was really just a turkey shoot, because those guys were running away, and we'd just pick a vehicle that was trying to get away and shoot a maverick or drop a bomb or strafe it, and try and take it out, just to destroy as much equipment as we could.
40:44All United States and coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations.
40:55What does that say?
40:56It is actually a reload right at the end of RTLT.
40:58Suspension on the part of the coalition, the council's permanence is open.
41:04Aircraft RTCs, offensive operations at this time.
41:10Yes!
41:11Corridor today, the dollar is over.
41:14It's an S-U-K.
41:16It's time for E-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.
41:19A victory!
41:24And the storm is over for the Panthers!
41:27Touch! Touch! Touch! Touch!
41:29Yeah!
41:30Congratulations, man.
41:31Maybe the last Panther combat flight.
41:32I think so.
41:33That's what it sounds like.
41:34We're toast.
41:35They kicked us out of the area at 7.30 and said, we're done.
41:36The hog is taken to the house.
41:37Despite its proven ability, the warthog is still headed to the slaughterhouse.
41:40It is unlikely that any A-10s will survive the Air Force's ongoing trend toward high-tech weaponry.
42:05The airplane fulfills a low-tech requirement that now is not going to be replaced.
42:17We are replacing A-10s with F-16s.
42:19Many people think this is a big mistake.
42:21Can the F-16 do the job?
42:22You can hang some pods on the airplane.
42:24You can do the things.
42:25But the F-16 is a fragile airplane compared to an A-10.
42:28The A-10 idea was to get in close with a gun and let the pilot decide what he's going to shoot
42:33and use his brain more than the computer.
42:38The low-tech end of war will never disappear.
42:41You'll always have to confront the guy on the ground with a rifle or a tank or a truck or an artillery piece.
42:47And the A-10 does this marvelously.
42:50The war is over today and I'm going home tomorrow.
42:55All of you are always welcome in my home, wherever that may be.
43:02And I want you to know I'm going to be praying for all you guys to get home real soon.
43:08And I'm going to continue to pray for Sif and for Sweetness until they're back with us.
43:19But one A-10 pilot of the 353rd would not be coming home.
43:23As Rob Sweet and other American POWs are released, the Iraqis relay news that Sif, Captain Steve Phyllis, was killed in action on February 15th.
43:38His warthog knocked out of the sky by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile.
43:42We've lived together for seven months. You're going to get pretty close with people.
43:51And then when you go through the experience of losing somebody, in our case temporarily losing Sweetness, Rob Sweet, our POW,
43:59and then losing Sif, who was killed in action, that's difficult as well.
44:05And that also draws a squadron together to go through something like that.
44:09It's kind of a harsh reminder that in the middle of this techno war that people want to call it, there was a human cost.
44:18Certainly it wasn't as costly as other places we've been, but there was a cost, and it was a very personal cost.
44:26And to come back and remember that we didn't bring everybody home.
44:30We did not come home with everybody we're left with.
44:32The flight into Myrtle Beach was awesome.
44:43We got on the ground, and there was just people just lining the roads, and we got the land pool in, ran through a sprinkler system.
44:52They had their big fire trucks, they had blue water in it, and that was our squadron color.
44:58And so we were pretty choked up getting out, and our families running over and getting big hugs from our kids,
45:03which we hadn't seen in the whole seven months, and it was good to be home.
45:07Coming up next, fly some of the fastest military aircraft around, examine the fighter on Air Power Showdown.
45:23Then we rely on it for our good days and our bad ones. More than just the forecast, take a scientific look at weather on Discover Magazine.
46:13I'm coming back.
46:14Let's go to the forecast.
46:15I'll get to the forecast.
46:16There we are.
46:18Excellency.
46:19Climate change.
46:21The forecast is on Earth.
46:23You want to get to the forecast.
46:25It's not the forecast.
46:27It's not the forecast.
46:28I'm going to be right in the forecast.
46:32All right.
46:33There's a forecast.
46:35It's not the forecast.
46:36It's an forecast.
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