A-10A

 On 10 February 1976, Deputy Secretary of Defense Clements authorized full-rate production, with the first A-10 being accepted by the Air Force Tactical Air Command on 30 March 1976. Production continued at a rate of 15 aircraft per month, which was believed to be the best rate Fairchild could deliver. A total of 715 airplanes, including the two prototypes, was delivered by 1984.^[21]

When A-10 full-rate production was first authorized the planned service life was 6,000 hours. A small reinforcement to the design was quickly adopted when the A-10 failed initial fatigue testing at 80% of testing; with the fix, the A-10 passed the fatigue tests, and 8,000 flight-hour service lives were becoming common at the time, so fatigue testing of the A-10 continued with a new 8,000 hour target. Fatigue testing for the new target quickly discovered serious cracks at Wing Station 23 (WS23) where the outboard portions of the wings are joined to the fuselage. The first production change was to add cold working at WS23 to address this problem. Soon after that, the Air Force determined that the real-world A-10 fleet fatigue was more harsh than estimated, forcing them to change their fatigue testing, introducing "spectrum 3" equivalent flight-hour testing.^[7]

Spectrum 3 fatigue testing started in 1979. This round of testing quickly determined that more drastic reinforcement would be needed. The second change in production, starting with aircraft #442, was to increase the thickness of the lower skin on the outer wing panels. A tech order was issued to retrofit the "thick skin" to the whole fleet, but the tech order was rescinded after roughly 242 planes, leaving about 200 planes with the original "thin skin". Starting with aircraft #530, cold working at WS0 was performed, and this retrofit was performed on earlier aircraft. A fourth, even more drastic change was initiated with aircraft #582, again to address the problems discovered with spectrum 3 testing. This change increased the thickness on the lower skin on the center wing panel, but it required modifications to the lower spar caps to accommodate the thicker skin. The Air Force determined that it was not economically feasible to retrofit earlier planes with this modification.^[7]

    Review by   COOL  (Posted on Thursday 30 May, 2024)

very amazing, 30mm very effective against even up to t80

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