The Buzz: Bidding farewell to the A-10

As the longtime Air Force planes move from Davis Monthan to the Boneyard, we look at their legacy.


Southern Arizona has started a long goodbye to a familiar sight and sound in our skies. Since 1976, that sound, A-10s flying in and out of Davis Monthan Air Force Base, has become a familiar sound, but it's going away. The Air Force is moving the jets to the boneyard for storage, and plans to retire all of its A-10s by 2029.

When it was introduced, the A-10s ability to fly slow and low made it revolutionary for air-to-ground combat, according to Hal Sundt, author of War Plane: How the military reformers birthed the A-10 Warthog.

"What made this challenging and first is that no one had ever designed an airplane to be accurate at shooting the ground, which is such a funny thing to think about when they first were conceiving of the airplane, before it was even going to a design phase when they were coming out on paper with, 'Hey, what does this thing need to do?' The gun was at the center of the airplane. And so they literally started with the idea that we need this gun that can presumably destroy tanks, and we're going to build everything out from it."

Sundt said the innovations go deeper than that.

https://originals.azpm.org/p/radio-buzz/2024/3/22/219536-the-buzz-bidding-farewell-to-the-a-10/