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Buzzed by an A-10 "Warthog"...Impressive!!
Frogdog
Member Posts: 2,990 ✭✭✭✭
Traveling on I-95N today between Brunswick and Savannah. All of a sudden just ahead of me, I saw an A-10 dive out of the sky and drop low. How low? I'm not sure….maybe 200 feet. Darn sure looked like it was just above the tree tops as it came down and lined up on the highway. Then, ZOOM.....hard bank right and it was gone down the river. A second later, another one appeared and followed suit. Really impressive. I have seen a lot of other jets zipping around over the years, but never an A-10, and definitely never that low and close. Fantastic!
Comments
If that pilot would’ve turned that GAU-8 Avenger 30mm gatling gun loose, you would have new respect for the word ‘impressive’ ,,,,,,,,, 🤣
Before they moved them from Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, LA, they regularly "buzzed" Lake Erling in SW Arkansas where my hunting club is located. We would take our flag down and hold it flat so the pilots could see it, and they would fly low and acknowledge it.
Yea, I couldn’t help but thinking, “Oh, so this is what the last few seconds were like for a lot of bad guys.”
Here’s one for you ‘math’ boys ,,,,,,,, 🙄
https://engineering.purdue.edu/~wassgren/teaching/ME30800/Examples/COLM_78.pdf
I remember being on a range at Ft. Stewart in the mid 90s. They flew over and a little bit later you could hear them burping. Very impressive machine.
That was fun
Brad Steele
The Fairchild A 10 is one of the only aircraft where the weapon came first and the aircraft was built around the weapon. Was built to take a lot of damage and still keep flying. There is an armored hull built around the pilot.
Was in a temporary comm tower about 20 feet above the tree line in Germany and got buzzed by one, that tower was moving 10 feet in both directions and once it stopped we got down and I never went up higher than telephone pole after that...
The best ground troop supporter we have in the air and the dumb people we have running this country wants to cancel the A-10's completely. 🤬
"Never do wrong to make a friend----or to keep one".....Robert E. Lee
I watched an A-10 take out practice targets at Shaw AFB once. VERY impressive.
That could be real cool and a oh poop moment at the same time.
Don't get the chance to see them much here. I live right behind Seymour Johnson Air force base.4th tatical fighter wing flying f15 strike eagles When they practice touch and goes they fly over the house Occasionally see one as a transient.
We see a lot of them because Hill AFB is the global maintenance center for most USAF aircraft. They did all the re-wing mods here. (You should have seen all the replaced wings sitting in the surplus yard awaiting scrapping!) and they fly one of our low-level routes here for training, too.
I was air-to-mud qualified, but sadly fell in the gap between the phase-out of the A-7 and the phase-in of the A-10. Never got to fly either. Would have wet my pants to get either one. There I was, up for assignment, fighter-qualled and having flown combat missions and instructor duties in tiny airplanes. So what did the all-knowing AF assign me to? B-52s. As an instructor. Insulted to that degree, I resigned from active duty and went Reserve. To a desk.
^^^^^^
what a bummer, Rocky. I have seen the A-10 up close at numerous airshows that I attended over the years. What a ride! With your experience, you should’ve been first in line!
Frogdog, your description reminded me of this A-10 video, filmed at an airstrip just outside of Fortine, Montana.
It was a sad thing back then. In the first place, there was a huge over-abundance of pilots after 'Nam. Guys were getting phone calls at night and told literally to report in the morning to be drummed out of the AF. Guys like me were considered to be "second string" fighter jocks at best. There was enough scrambling and clawing for the actual jocks to keep fighter slots that the rest of us hadn't a chance.
I had one friend who fell on his sword enough to take a job as a recruiter. Halfway to his duty station, they somehow managed to reach him by phone and told him "Never mind. You're out."
I saw the cursive on the drywall and volunteered to be a Public Affairs Officer for three years. Talked my way into a job at Patrick AFB, Florida in the space program. Then, when they told me I was going to be a B-52 IP, I called my compatriots up the road at NASA and said "I'm available."
Never flew again, obviously. I miss the hell out of it but for years I couldn't afford to even fly private and now I'm simply too old to try to learn everything from scratch again. Aviation is nothing at all like it was in the 70s.
Yep, that first pass in the video is pretty close to how it looked, with a hard bank right before they got to us. A good show for us bored, half-asleep travelers.