[BITList] A-10 THUNDERBOLT & GATTLING GUN

Wed Aug 25 10:12:58 BST 2010

 A deadly fighter bomber aircraft, the

A-10 Thunderbolt, designed and built explicitly to fit around and carry

a frightening gatling-type gun, known as the GAU-8/A 30mm.

The  GAU-8/A  30mm GUN

It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people.  

It's one of the modern-day Gatling Guns.. 

It shoots very big bullets. It shoots them very quickly.

Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane."

Someone else said, "Better still, and let's build an airplane around it."

So they did.

And "they" were the Fairchild-Republic airplane people. 

...... because they had done such a good job with another airplane that

 they had developed back in WWII, called the P-47 Thunderbolt,

they decided to call this new aircraft the A10 Thunderbolt.

                This was the old WW2  P-47 Thunderbolt fighter 'plane.

Now we come to the newer A-10 Thunderbolt      

They made it so that it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things

with that fabulous gun. 

But since it did need to fly low and slow, they also made it bulletproof, or almost so.

A lot of bad guys have found you can shoot at the A10 with anything from a pistol to

a 23mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying and shooting.

When they got through, it looked like this...

It may not be sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such,

but it's such a great airplane because it does what it does better than any

other plane in the world.    It kills tanks.

Not only tanks, as Sadam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored

personnel carriers, radar stations, locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots...

....just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be

easy pickings for this beast.

See those engines. One of them alone will fly this puppy. The pilot sits in

a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub." 

That's typical of the design.

They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on

the left side or right side of the plane, like landing gear, for instance. 

Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the

 landing gear uses such low pressure tires, it can operate from a damaged airport,

 interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road. 

Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything.

Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight controls. 
There's triple redundancy of those,  and even if there is a total failure of the double

hydraulic system, there is a set of manual flying controls.

Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage (above) over Bagdad

and flew for another hour before returning to base.

But about that gun...

It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is.

This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about.

What the guy is holding is NOT the 30mm round, but a "little" .50 Browing

machinegun round and the 20mm cannon round which has been around for a long time.

The 30mm is MUCH bigger. 

Down at the bottom of this chart are the .50 BMG and 20x102 Vulcan the fellow

was holding. At the bottom right is the bad boy we're discussing.

Let's get some perspective here:

The .223 Rem (M16 rifle round) is fast. It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about

3300 feet/sec, give or take. It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one).

When you move up to the .30 caliber rounds, the bullets jump up in 
weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.

The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet

at 2800 fps or so. You can kill bad guys at over a mile with that one.

The .50 BMG is really big. Mike Beasley has one on his desk. Everyone who picks it up

thinks it's some sort of fake, unless they know big ammo.

 It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua. 

I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat.

The bullet for the 30x173 Avenger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core

and weighs 6560 grains (yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M16 bullet, and flies through

 the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M16 as well). 

The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand.

Pilots typically shoot either one-or-two-second burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds.

The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet. 

OK, the best for last. 

You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me

and you don't fully appreciate how big the GA GAU-8 Avenger gun really is.

Take a look...

Each of those seven barrels is 112" long. That's almost ten feet. The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long.  

That gives you the size of the airplane .... something to relate to.

Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room. 

Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. 

There's just so dang many flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft. 

Oh yeah, I forgot, they can hang those bomb and rocket things on 'em too, just in case. 

After all, it is an airplane!

Like I said, this is a beautiful design. 

It's not the fastest, the biggest or the prettiest... but at it's job... there's a lot of

soldiers that think it's just the lovliest thing in the air!

I'm glad it's on our side....  how about you?

__,_._,___

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