Go Ugly Early: A Story of Survivable Design and the Air Force’’s Un-Killable Jet

The A-10 is the Air Force’s unlikely success story, an airplane designed to support the Army, and one that ground troops came to venerate. Originally conceived with the express purpose of destroying Soviet tanks, the Air Force only developed it to keep funding away from the Army’s response to the mission, the AH-56 Cheyenne helicopter. Inspired by the biography of a tank-busting German pilot in World War II, the engineering and design of the A-10 fell to Pierre Sprey, a precocious civilian who’d enrolled at Yale when he was just 15-years-old, and now, barely 30, wasexiled to a Pentagon backwater with little, if any, supervision. The end result was one of the finest military aircraft ever built, a plane essentially constructed around a 19.5-foot, 4,000-pound cannon that fired 30mm depleted uranium bullets at a blistering rate. Looking like it was built from discarded airplane parts, it was probably the ugliest combat aircraft ever built, thus the ＂Warthog＂ appellation. But it was also an incredibly reliable ground attack aircraft, beloved by ground troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Despite repeated attempts to replace it with stealth aircraft and drones, over 280 A-10s remain in service today, serviced by dedicated and imaginative engineers and maintainers, and defended by a fervent cohort of advocates descended from the Military Reform movement. This is the story of intra-service rivalries, Pentagon obsessions with speed and stealth over tactical simplicity, and an aircraft that shows no sign of obsolescence as it nears fifty years in service.

Hal Sundt is a writer from Minnesota. He received his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, where he also taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program, among other universities and writing centers in New York City. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oberlin College. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Ringer, The Bitter Southerner, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. Longform.org, which recommends the best new and classic nonfiction, recently recognized his story, ＂The Quest for the Best Amusement Park is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.＂