A Great Big Gun - Airplane Attached Goofy Stuff / Back Home
Thanks to Sammie and to Lisa for sending this one!
First there was this gun...
It was developed by
General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people. It's one of the
modern-day Gatlin 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, let's build an airplane around it."
So they did. And "they"
were the Fairchild-Republic airplane people.
And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back
in WWII ...
...called
the P-47 Thunderbolt, they decided to call it the A10 Thunderbolt.
They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with
that fabulous gun.
But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot
of bad guys
have found you can shoot an 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's not sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think 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 over Bagdad and flew for another hour before
returning to base. But, back to 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 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. They 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 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.
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.
I'm glad it's ours!!