Hacker News Reader

Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

A ton of people are irritated about the A-10 being retired to make way for the F-35, since the A-10 is vastly better at the ground-attack missions that are currently needed in Iraq.

Building a cheap plane with low running costs which can fulfill that roll would make a lot of people very happy (although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect).

View on HN

A lot of talk about the A-10 Vs. Scorpion. I just wanted to throw a little bit of interesting data into the mix...

Cost per hour:

  * Scorpion (3K/hour)    
 * F-35 (18K/hour)    
 * A-10 (17.7K/hour)    
 * AC-130U gunship (45.9K/hour)    
 * B-1B "Lancer" (57.8K/hour)    
 * B-2A "Stealth bomber" (169K/hour)    
 * B-52H Stratofortress (69K/hour)   
 * C-17 Globemaster (23K/hour)   
 * CV-22B Osprey (83K/hour)    
 * F-16C (22.5K/hour)   
 * MQ-1B Predator Drone (3.6K/hour)   
 * RQ-4B Global Hawk Drone (49K/hour)

To me that really puts things into perspective. If the 3K figure is true, they're competing against drones not against the A-10 which cost almost as much as the F-35.

That is the key, even a small country can deploy these things with people as opposed to drones. It will be interesting to see if any of them take a bite.

Where'd you get those numbers?

Two places, the BBC article from the OP (Scorpion + F-35 per hour figures), and this Times article from 2013: http://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/

Since I posted the above I have learnt that the Global Hawk Drone's per hour cost has decreased quite substantially. It is now closer to 18.9K/hour, instead of 49K per above.

You can read more about that on this Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-4_Global_Hawk#Cost_increase...

FWIW, those F-35 numbers are flat out wrong.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-estimates-f-3...

They're from the BBC's article linked in the OP. So take it up with them.

No need to be defensive. I was just clarifying for others reading.

EDIT:

Now that I look at the OP article more closely, it appears you may have conflated the F-16 CPFH quoted in the article as representing the F-35 CPFH. I don't see mention of CPFH for the F-35.

>although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect

You're probably right about that one. The designers of the A-10 didn't look at the plane and ask, "What gun can we fit on this?" They looked at the GAU-8 and asked, "How can we make this fly?"

> (although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect).

Depending on the flight characteristics and just how strong the airframe is, it's possible it might be able to carry a GAU-13 gun pod, which is the GAU-8s 4 barreled little brother. The F-20 Tigershark mentioned elsewhere in the thread could carry it in a GPU-5/A gunpod and it was only slightly larger than the Scorpion. The 25mm GAU-12 from the Harrier or -- more likely -- the GAU-22 from the JSF would be more likely though.

But, yeah, nothing else is going to lug around 1200 rounds of 30x173 like the A-10. :)

> GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect.

You could fit it but considering the thrust of the Scorpion you'd fall out the sky everytime you fired it ;).

Less people than you think (people that matter, not people who blog). The A-10 is running into the same problem that the A-1 ran into before it: it's a world beater when it comes to CAS for a period in time, so good you can't imagine not having it. But the guys on the receiving end aren't standing still, and there will come a time when the A-10, just like the A-1, is no longer survivable on the modern battlefield. The people who are killing the A-10 see that day coming, and you don't want to figure out when that is the hard way.

Not that they've got a decent replacement...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com