When did NATO ground troops go into Serbia/Kosovo?
Those AMXs would have been flying precision strike or interdiction missiles, just like all other multirole fastjets.
I see your point but the AMX is hardly a fast aircraft, its a subsonic attack aircraft that flies about as fast as an Su-25, and for its missions in the Former Yugoslavia it would be laid down heavily with bombs and munitions but yes, they would be performing more a ‘strike’ role than a ground support role (as you have stated there were no NATO ground forces)
CAS often involves getting your hands a lot ‘dirtier’. For example, if your forward ground advance runs into serious organised opposition, that would be the perfect time for CAS planes to come in.
I am not convinced how effective unarmoured planes would be in such situations where you can expect heavy AA fire from small arms and HMGs, and where your own grunts might be calling in danger close fire missions that may well require the pilots to visually ID targets.
Unarmoured attack aircraft have a long history of operating in direct combat situations, in the Cenepa War in ’95 both Ecuador and Peru had fairly modern air defence capabilities with man Soviet and British MANPADs, several unarmoured A-37 Super Tweets were hit by MANPADs but survived and made their way back to base.
A fast jet CAS plane relies on its speed to zoom in and drop ordinates on a well identified target and be gone before the enemy can properly respond.
An armoured CAS plane like the A10 or Su25 can have the flexibility to stay on station over the combat zone for a while to use their own initiative to engage targets of opportunity your own guys on the ground might not have been able to see coming.
All very true.
The job of a CAS plane can be very similar to an attack helo, and there is no question whether a dedicated armoured attach helo is better or a armed transport?
That depends on whatever is needed at any given time. Hinds are both attack helo and transport which give great flexibility to move troops back and forth while at the same time able to provide support for ground troops or to quickly assault a postion from the helo and quickly have troops disembark. The same idea as the MH-60L.
Well if you are going to base the design on an existing plane there is only so much modification you can do before you are better off starting from scratch.
Also, almost all armoured vehicles are aircraft has a distinctive angular feel to them.
Based on those two factors, looking at the design, its hard to see how they could have incorporated a decent level of armour protection.
The L-15 is already a rather small aircraft, I’m not terribly sure how much armour it could take, it will probably be similar to the Q-5 and have an armoured cockpit and fueltank and thats about it.
Well bare in mind that CAS planes will be facing MANPADs most often, and most MANPADs carry a relatively small warhead and relies of proximity fuses.
Adding armour is not an alternative to having decent countermeasures, so I don’t see why you need to give up one to get the other as you seem to be suggesting.
If we take two planes with the same level of decoys and jamming equipment, but one is armoured and the other isn’t, the same MANPAD missile might get through the jamming and decoys of both. But while a close range proximity hit might bring down the unarmoured plane, an armoured plane might easily be able to shrug off the impacts and not only be able to get home later, but could continue to fight in the meantime.
Even if the hit doesn’t bring down the unarmoured plane, armour plating is still a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to replace than having to patch up dozens or hundreds of holes in your plane.
Armor inherently increases weight which can effect the speed, maneuverability and payload of an aircraft. A different design can compensate for that of course but the insistence that without armour, an aircraft could not survive a MANPAD is not necessarily correct.
To be entirely honest there is a good chance that this is just a big pipe dream and it may never progress past this scale model.
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