The US Air Force's A-10 Thunderbolt is a relatively slow but highly manoeuvrable and heavily armoured plane, built for attacking ground targets in support of troops.
Its OA-10 version is designed for forward air control - directing other aircraft onto ground targets.
The Thunderbolt - also known as the "Tankbuster" or "Warthog" - has a distinctive shape, with unswept wings and two turbofan jet engines mounted high on the rear fuselage, ahead of twin rear tail fins.
Pilots of "pointy-nosed" fast jets tend to look down on the slow, snub-nosed A-10 - one joke being that its airspeed indicator is a calendar.
But it can take off and land using short runways and is able to loiter over a battlefield, hunting for targets, in a way that fast jets cannot.
Once it finds them, it has a seven-barrel, 30mm Gatling gun under its nose that can fire 65 rounds per second - of controversial depleted uranium shells.
Slung beneath the fuselage and wings it can also carry up to 16,000lbs (7,200 kg) of other weapons, including high explosive and cluster bombs, laser-guided bombs and Maverick missiles, rockets and air-to-air missiles.
To protect it from anti-aircraft fire the A-10 has a lot of armour - much of it titanium - and "survivability" features such as self-sealing fuel cells and manual backup for the hydraulic controls.
Introduced in 1975, upgrades have involved better weapons targeting and night-time capability.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~42~RS~)
One-Minute World News
News services
Email this to a friend
Printable version
