When cued to IRST or radar, there is some sort of automatic control installed. Pilot only needs to get close enough to place the pipper on the target and push the button. FCS takes care of the rest (aided by the data feed from IRST/radar). I am sure there are guys here who can describe this system into more detail.

For somebody who has called others derogatory and insulting names in this topic regarding their knowledge of this subject, that is a decidedly weak response.

Is that the best that you can come up with?

Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. If eyewitness accounts, BDA, and video analysis isn’t sufficient, then there’s no hope.

I think you’ve summed it up quite nicely.

That’s right..because they were diving from 700m over the target at a 45º dive…:rolleyes:

If they killed tanks that was with the ‘maverick’ missile, not with the gun.

And actually there is no evidence for such claim, while there is a wide evidence for the AGM-65 used to kill tanks (static ones)

You are having difficulty sticking with your original claim. First you imply low angle attacks and then you flip-flop and agree to them. You stated that the GAU-8 was intended for “soft targets”, not anti-armor. That must have got a few chuckles when folks read that!

Who cares? all that matters is the penetration range, i mean..really who cares if were made with DU or W?

I care. You made a claim that has to be one of the most ludicrous I’ve heard regarding the A-10. What’s next…you going to claim that the airplane might stall if the gun was fired too long?

If you are so uninformed as to ask that question, then you have no business in this discussion.

Hint: The round does not have enough penetration against a tank (yes the top armor)

Another chuckle-getter. Where do you get your vast knowledge of GAU-8 capability from?

It’s no secret that the GAU-8 projectile cannot penetrate the frontal armor of a modern MBT…and nobody is claiming it can…but it certainly can and has penetrated other areas of those same tanks, and when it does, the game is over regardless of your questions about rounds fired versus rounds that hit.

I’ve noticed a fair amount of attention given to how fast these guns “spin up” when the trigger is pulled…perhaps a little clarification might add to the conversation.

In these comparisons taken from various sources, the point is made that gun X reaches its full firing rate in ____ seconds (usually measured in a about a second or less, while gun Y takes ___ seconds to reach its firing rate. The idea is to suggest that the faster spin up time means a more effective gun. It’s a distinction that is irrelevant. Here’s why…

This comparison might be more indicative of gun lethality if we were talking about air-to-air use…but we aren’t. We’re talking about shooting a target on the ground that is stationary or moving relatively slowly. In these attacks, wind drift is more of a factor than target movement…and with a modern computing sight such as the A-10 has, that point is moot.

Then there is this. Burst length. In a combat application, we fired long bursts, not the short little squirts we used when practicing on a gunnery range. We had 100 rounds to shoot on these missions and usually tried to have that last for three passes. In between these passes, we made aim point corrections based on what the wind or the gun needed. The idea was to score the most hits and win the most money from the rest of the pilots.

Not so in a combat situation. We don’t play for nickels in combat. Here we fired a long burst to get max rounds on target…at least a one second burst or more. On a typical gunnery mission, I might fire initial “sighter” bursts of 10-20 rounds to see where the rounds were going…but at Red Flag, where we used combat tactics, I held the trigger down for a good two seconds or more while trying very hard to hold the pipper on the target. We wanted a one pass kill and were not interested in playing games with whose gun spun up the quickest.

Yeah, thats nice. But reccal reading somewere (Tanknet?) that the gun never proved to be very effective against its intended primary targets -MBTs.
Might be crap talk though, got no idea..

Your source was wrong. In the only time that A-10s have been in significant action against MBTs (Desert Storm), they were very effective…but not as originally conceived, in daylight attacks at low level. In DS, Hogs went in at night, from medium altitude, and killed the tanks as they sat hunkered down in their berms, shot right through the top.

And it was nice. Nice that nobody else had a similar capability. And that was with the old “iron sight”…these days, the C model with its computer assisted aiming system is even better.

@alfakilo,
I respect your view, but gently disagree. I think it’s a generation issue you will encounter everywhere, even in daily live where technology is used.

I will agree that some, perhaps most, of the younger generation tend to learn new ways more easily than some older folks.

But please note the qualifier “some”.

Age put me out of the cockpit of real jets and into the cockpit of a state of the art airline simulator where I now instruct and evaluate the aforementioned young and older folks. After some six years of doing this with clients both foreign and domestic, I feel pretty confident about my opinions.

Learning new things is mostly attitude mixed with a healthy measure of ability to grasp new concepts. Most can, some can’t…and that applies to both young and old.

But some concepts remain as before. From the gitgo, I tell the folks I work with to never, ever trust a FMS, flight director, autopilot, or autothrottle, because the day they do is the day one or more of those things will bite them on their butt. The human is far from the weak link in the process.

LOL!!

Engineers are a thin skinned bunch!!

In the flying game, engineering is the art of designing what can be done. Piloting is the art of doing what should be done. Just because something can be done is no justification for doing it. Or having it.

Here’s an example…technology today has produced an attitude indicator that incorporates just about every bit of information or performance cue known to mankind. Yet pilots are still the same old bunch of folks who can only process just so much data in a given period of time. When the doo-doo hits the fan, successful pilots quickly prioritize the info available into what is needed at the moment. By “successful”, I mean those who stay alive or get the machine on the ground. Often this boils down to “keeping blue up and brown down”…past that, all the fancy engineering cues in the world are irrelevant.

But, far be it for me to pick on engineers too much. Without them, I’d still be flying an attitude indicator that precesses!!

Thanks for a flight path vector display, guys!! But you can get rid of that acceleration pointer or speed error tape…they aren’t worth the money spent on designing them. Just because you could design those things doesn’t mean you should have.