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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

There's a common theme for just about all of those aircraft: they're ugly. There's truth in the saying that good aircraft are always beautiful aircraft.

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Google "A10 warthog". This is probably the exception which proves the rule. The air force hates it because it's ugly, but they can't eliminate it because it's amazing at doing what it does.

They don't hate it because it's ugly. I think the simplified version here is they hate it because they don't want to fulfill the role it does.

It's not that the Air Force doesn't want to fulfill the CAS role, they wan't the F-35 to do so instead which won't be truly CAS capable in a high threat contested environment for at least another 4-6 years. So, they want the F-15 and F-16 community to take over the role in the meantime -- a job the A-10 was built for and better equipped to handle (which is why it's the most requested asset for CAS). The Army would have been a much better place for these rugged jets, but they have no budget capacity for it and the Air Force is not going to allow them to have a fixed-wing CAS aircraft.

The RAF is the same; they would much rather the nation not even have a capability at all, than allow the Army or Navy to operate it.

Which is baffling. It's your job, guys. Your entire organization with all its staggering budget exists to provide certain specific services to the nation. Deciding which of those services you feel like providing is not in your job description.

Every air force in the world is run by fighter pilots. Even well-meaning serious-minded people tend to emphasize what they know best. Hence air superiority tends to get far more attention than any other aspect of air combat operations.

Frankly, I think the US might be better off allowing the US Army to set up its own units for close air support. I suspect if they were allowed free choice of equipment they would operate some type of rugged STOL fixed-wing airplanes for that purpose.

The US Air Force was created by the strategic bomber boys, though, and they held the reins for a long time, even when long-range bombers became the weakest leg of the nuclear triad.

See also how many hundreds of bombers and thousands of crew were lost to Messerschmitts over Germany before the Army Air Force would admit that, yes, they did need fighter escorts. https://warisboring.com/arrogant-u-s-generals-made-the-p-51-...

Does anyone else think that the whole idea of different branches of the military is a stupid one? Why have different chains of command for different pieces of hardware used in the same mission?

Politically Starship Troopers is problematic in many ways, but one thing I do like about it is that generals in the military had to qualify as an officer in both the army and the navy on the basis that it gives them the required insight into what's involved on both sides.

Canada tried merging the different branches and found that it didn't work too well.

Well of course if you shove it on them after the fact it won't go well. Everyone gets their egos ruffled. You would have to start from scratch.

I'm assuming you're talking about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_the_Canadian_Ar...

Isn't the US Navy basically fulfilling all branches to some extent?

Redundancy is a feature. What happens if army brass go off the rails?

The A-10 is obsolete. It is too vulnerable to ground-to-air missiles and too slow to get to the right place to drop smart bombs on pickup trucks.

I get your point, but it seems to be an unfair comparison. Of course the A10 is not suitable for roles that it was not designed for. But that does not inherently mean the particular capabilities are obsolete. Or that the F35 does not have significant comprimises in its own design.

The role that the A10 was designed for no longer exists. An attack helicopter can hide behind cover, everything else needs to fly high enough to avoid MANPADS which means that the big gun is just dead weight.

Correct: it is fantastic at being vulnerable to air defenses, leaving it unable to engage the Iraqi Republican Guard in 1993.

http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-100927-061...

I actually find that to be a reasonably attractive plane: unusual to be sure, but not ugly.

I would like to one up you, I find it to be quite a sexy plane! I can’t even put my finger on why it does, but I just find it way better looking than regular figher jets.

I too think it is beautiful, especially when you watch it performing aerobatics at low speed.

It is not a plane with a gun attached. It is a gun that someone built a plane around.

Brrrrrt.

Congress funded the Warthog in spite of what the Air Force requested, a request that had little to do with appearance.

To be "fair", they hate it because it's not a dogfighter.

They "hate" it because it is completely useless against an enemy that has anything even vaguely resembling a military.

It's a great plane for the "war on terror". It would be completely useless in any other war.

I don't think anybody is arguing it should the only plane in the arsenal; complaints against its retirement are that a country with the ambitions of the USA should be able to fight any war, and, since it has chosen to enter this one, should deploy the best it has there.

Back to the article: if the military were as agile as it was in World War Two, it would have built something better than an A10 within a few years of entering the war in the Middle East. In the search for that better product, it also would have designed, built, and deployed quite a few strong candidates for this 'worst air force' article, killing quite a few of its own pilots in 'field testing' the various designs.

I'm not sure the F35, with its "we can design a plane that will work great in any war, if you give us a few decades" is an improvement over that. If it ever has to go to war against something "even vaguely resembling a military", and it turns out to come up slightly short in the first few encounters, what would the next step be? If it would take another decade to fix that, chances are the war would be lost before a fix was deployed.

The same war we've been fighting for 15 years with no signs of stopping.

Every government needs an enemy... We're just fortunate that there aren't any real ones around right now.

When that day comes, hopefully our military tech is up to the challenge. The A-10 most certainly isn't, and I'm not convinced we have a real replacement coming any time soon.

The F-35 isn't a dogfighter either.

Depending on ones view of the program, it could be described as the first half of dogfighter.

You don't have a single fucking clue about what you're talking about.

Please provide an substantive argument rather than attack the commenter. There's never a need to be uncivil on HN.

The F16 is probably the best illustration. In my opinion no modern aircraft surpasses its elegance from a pure design point of view. And it is still being produced now, 40 years after its first flight!

If we're talking American fighters, I think the P-51 is an even better example. It was obviously obsoleted by the jet era, but it was one of the sexiest planes in the air at the time, and could outfly just about anything else.

Just about every airplane achieves a certain state of grace by taking to the air - though it is illusory if it has nasty handling characteristics.

That's an incredibly subjective metric.

Or is it that we associate beauty with 'conventional' planes, which by definition fly well.

Beauty is truth.

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