The Gun (not just any gun, but "The 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, 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 A 10
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 A 10 with anything from a pistol to a
23 mm 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 F 18 Hornet or the stealthy F 22 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 Saddam 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.
Captain Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Baghdad and flew for another hour before returning to base. But, back to that gun... It's just 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 Caliber Browning machine gun round and the 20MM cannon round which has been around for a long time. The 30MM is much, much bigger.
Down
at the bottom are the .50 Caliber BMG and 20 x 102 MM Vulcan the fellow
was holding. At the bottom right is the bad boy we're discussing.
Let's
get some perspective here: The .223 Caliber Remington (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 range from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.
The
.338 Caliber Lapua is the king of all 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 Caliber 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 ammunition. It's really huge with a
bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua.
I
don't have data on the 20 MM Vulcan, but hang on to your hat. The bullet
for the 30 x 173 MM Avenger has an aluminum jacket around a spent
uranium core and weighs 6560 grains (yes, over 100 times as heavy as the
M 16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster
than the M 16 bullet as well).
The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand two hundred.
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 20 MM
Avenger gun really is.
Take a look...
Each
of the seven barrels are 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 really beautiful designed aircraft.
I'm so glad it's our Beautiful Beast!
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