How Air Force Pilots Fly The Controversial $19 Million A-10 Warthog | Boot Camp | Insider Business

This is the A-10 Thunderbolt II, more commonly known as the Warthog. The Air Force uses the A-10 for close air support, missions that require the plane to fly low to provide cover and assist ground troops in battle. So our whole mission in life and our whole job in life is to take care of the men and women on the ground. It's the only thing we think about. It's the only thing we train to. It's the only thing we talk about, and it's exactly what this airplane is built to do. But these pilots may be among the last to be trained to fly it. For years, the Air Force has considered retiring the A-10 in favor of the newer F-35 fighter jet, and that might finally be happening with Congress approving the Air Force's plan to phase out the A-10 over the next five to six years. But the public debate over the need for the A-10 continues. And while some A-10s are as much as 50 years old, F-35s cost about $60 million more per aircraft and weren't built solely to support ground troops. There may be a day that I am called to potentially help save someone's life when they're having the worst day of their life. That comes back to my training and making sure that I know what I'm doing in the jet. So how vital is the A-10, and could the Air Force soon be without one of its most iconic warplanes? So the only base that A-10 pilots train at is at Davis-Moffin Air Force Base. Before they fly the A-10, pilots train in the T-38 Talon during their initial flight training in Texas. They fly completely different based on their flight performance and characteristics. The T-38 is kind of like a sports car. It's quick, it's agile, it's fast, but the A-10 drives more like a Cadillac. After graduating from flight training, new pilots move to their assigned posts. Really like the mission of the A-10. I thought it was super cool. I like the idea that it doesn't matter what I'm doing, that I'm strictly there for people on the ground. If you look at it, not the most attractive looking plane, if you will. It's pretty, pretty ugly. It doesn't have the swept back wings. It's got, you know, big Hershey bar wings on it for like added stability. So it's just a mean looking airplane, and that's ultimately like what a Warthog is. What sound does the A-10 make when it fires? You know, like, burr, burr, burr. And that's actually just the noise of the bullets exiting the barrel. This is the Galwade Avenger. It's a 30 millimeter Gatling gun. It's built by General Electric, and this is the largest Gatling gun ever built and put into an airplane. So it's got, it's seven barrels. It shoots at a maximum rate, about 3,900 rounds a minute. There's almost no target that the Galwade is not a valid weapon to use against. As we go around, the titanium bathtub is one of the features designed specifically to protect the pilot in the airplane. So this whole panel right here, where you see these giant Phillips head looking fasteners, that whole panel is titanium. So you can hear all these are hollow aluminum, and that's rock solid titanium right there. This was one of the first fighter types that incorporated that into the design of the airplane. And it's the only one I know about that has a full bathtub encompassing the pilot. Behind this panel right here, this is our single point refueling system right here. So pull that cap off and fill the airplane up with fuel. We have four fuel tanks for a total of about 11,000 pounds of gas. If I'm topped off, I can fly for about three hours. And then once you add in aerial refueling, we can fly pretty much indefinitely. And then as you're looking towards the back of the airplane, you can see we have a lot of hard points, a lot of weapon stations on the airplane. There's 11 in total. In between those, we can carry up to 16,000 pounds of ordnance on those 11 weapon stations. This is a Mark 82 bomb body. So a 500 pound bomb body, just a blast and fragmentation type weapon that you drop it, it's unguided on impact and it detonates. This is a GBU-31. This is a 2,000 pound bomb with a GPS guidance kit on the back of it. So it's a coordinate-seeking weapon, meaning I can input a GPS coordinate and that's exactly where that weapon's gonna go. But how does the A-10 stack up to the F-35 meant to replace it? Supporters of the F-35 say it has a huge stealth advantage, but detractors say it doesn't have the durability the A-10 does thanks to features like the titanium bathtub. Another concern is how F-35 pilots are trained. Insider reported that according to a 2022 training memo, no F-35 pilots are required to execute close air support training simulations in 2023 or 2024. For A-10 pilots, close air support is at the center of their training, which starts here in a virtual reality simulator lab. They're gonna start off in the VR lab and that's gonna give them the sight pictures and the references on the ground and the references in the aircraft for the first time. So simulators are extremely important. They're able to practice everything in a safe environment with professional instructors before they get out and actually fly them on their own. Students familiarize themselves with the A-10's control panels and starting procedures before moving on to the flight simulator. We're gonna open our air-to-air refueling door at this point. He was doing aerial refueling. It's a mission that the students actually perform in the aircraft pretty early in their training pipeline. Historically, without this lesson, it's usually taken about 10 to 15 minutes of talking to the students through getting the successful hookup in flight. Whereas now that we're able to have them practice with this lesson, they go out on that first flight having already done it before. We wanna make sure, we wanna take a look at our airspeed as we're in formation with the tanker. Now the feedback we're getting from instructors is that they're just going right up to the boom and they're getting their hookup on their first try. For the VR sim, you're getting the muscle memory. So the first time we practice it in the jet, we know physically what we're doing with our hands and we know where our eyes should be, where we should gauge and then our IPs are helping us fine tune those things. After spending a month in the simulator and learning the basic operations of the aircraft, pilots begin flying training missions in the A-10. Captain Lindsay Madd-Johnson has five years of experience flying the A-10. Today, she's training for a new role to be a pilot on an A-10 demo team where she will highlight the capabilities of the Warthog. I am about two hours shy of 1,200 hours in the A-10 itself. They call it like a crawl, walk, run process. So I did it in the sim multiple times. Then we go out to the airspace for my first time with a floor, not actual floor, but a simulated floor of 5,000 feet AGL. And then I go here, 2,000 feet AGL, 1,000 feet AGL and then 500 feet AGL until I got through my first certification. After Johnson completed a few rolls and dives, she moved on to simulating a strafe, which is an attack on enemy ground forces, a technique used in close air support operations. So when we do close air support, we are egressing, as they say it, from in front of the target area. I'm going out about, you know, two, two and a half miles away at about 500 feet. And then I'm turning back around this way. And as I'm about just outside of a mile, I'll pop to about 30 degrees nose high, which allows me to get high enough to be able to see there is what would be designated as the friendlies and what would be designated as the enemy on the ground. And then as I visually acquire that out over my canopy rail, I'm then rolling in using both ailerons. My throttles are already in max. I'm rolling in and then I'm putting basically my nose position down on what we consider to be like a 20 degree wire. So rather than flying straight and level, I'm 20 degrees nose low towards the ground. I learned about the A-10 growing up. I knew I wanted to do something kind of to pay homage to my dad's time in service. I was young when September 11th happened. I was nine and he deployed two months after September 11th happened. That kind of stuck with me and I knew I wanted to do something that was going to give back to my country as well. The A-10 debuted in combat in 1977, making it just shy of 50 years old, which is one reason many want it to be retired. For years, the warthog has been the subject of debate between the U.S. Air Force and Congress. Some members of Air Force leadership have suggested retiring the A-10 to focus on developing more modern aircraft, like the $80 million F-35. Then why would you want to retire the least expensive, most accurate close air support system? I don't want to retire it, Senator. But the Air Force has to get bigger to do all this. But Congress has fought those requests due to the success of the A-10 in recent conflicts with ISIS and the Taliban and the plane's overall cost efficiency. It's tried and true. It's very rudimentary with the systems that it has, but why fix something that's not broke? It's been in every conflict that the United States has been in since Bosnia, Grenada, pretty much every contingent that the United States has been a part of, the A-10 has been pretty much a leader of all that. Last year, Congress approved an Air Force proposal to retire 21 A-10s, reducing the total fleet to 260, with plans to decommission the remaining planes in the next five to six years. People don't realize how much maintenance actually goes into keeping these aircraft airworthy. You know, it's not like a car. When we wake up in the morning, we jump in the car, start it, and drive, right? These have starting issues. They have leaks. They're 40, 50 years old. They all have somewhere between 13,000 to 15,000 flight hours on them, and that exceeds the actual life expectancy of the airframe by, you know, 5,000, 7,000 hours. A-10 critics may use the plane's maintenance issues to fuel their argument, but the cost of maintaining the F-35 jumped 15% between 2018 and 2020. What happens to you when you finish the training? Once we all finish, we'll go to the different assigned bases, so I'll be going to Korea next. This is fun to fly. It does a job that no one else does, and it's, you're like, you're good at that. That is your thing. That's the A-10's thing. After completing the six-month training program at Davis-Monthan, newly certified A-10 pilots will begin their careers as fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force. The plane was built well before I was alive, and knowing just, like, the generations of people that flew the plane before me were looking at the exact same gauges that I'm looking at, so it's a pretty unique experience. I knew as, like, a younger child that I wanted to fly the A-10. My grandpa was in the Army. He has seen the A-10, like, when he was in the Army, do things, and so that was even more just, like, a further drive to pursue the airplane. While everybody knows us for the gun and its capabilities, a thing that we take most pride in as an A-10 community is protecting the lives of the men and women that are on the ground.