The A-1E Skyraider aircraft seemed like a “relic from an earlier time” when it was deployed in the Vietnam War half a century ago, according to the Air Force’s national museum.
The propeller plane, a World War II design in a new age of jet aircraft, still proved highly valuable for its ability to loiter over the battlefield and support dangerous rescue missions during its tour in the mid-1960s.
But the venerable attack aircraft also suffered one of the highest loss rates of any U.S. aircraft in South Vietnam, according to the Air Force’s Air and Space Power Journal. A total of 266 Skyraiders were reportedly lost and 144 service members — including about one of every seven Air Force A-1E combat pilots — were killed.
The Air Force has now returned to the idea of a light attack aircraft fleet and this month moved to the next phase in a competition between two candidates, the A-29 Super Tucano from Sierra Nevada and Embraer, and the Beechcraft AT-6 Wolverine by Textron Aviation.
The fleet could offer some of the same battlefield strengths as the old Skyraider. But the yet-unnamed aircraft, called the OA-X, will face new battlefields and enemies, and a much smaller chance of being shot down, some experts say.
“A-1s did in fact get shot up a lot in Vietnam doing close-air support. If you look at statistics of ops in South Vietnam, they probably got more shot up than anybody else,” said Col. Mike Pietrucha, an Air Force weapons systems officer who is testing the AT-6 Wolverine and has published articles on the search for a light attack aircraft. “That is a feature of the kind of mission they were doing and the kind of battlefield they were fighting over.”
The OA-X is not being developed to face off with the heavy anti-aircraft artillery of the North Vietnamese or that of any modern advanced adversary. Instead, it is envisioned to fight terrorists and insurgents wielding small arms in places such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Africa.
“Fortunately we left the Vietnam War behind quite a few years ago and that is not the environment we are facing today,” Pietrucha said. “The primary threat in terms of numbers, in terms of guns, they are AK-47s. They are rifles.”
The Air Force had planned a three-month fly-off in New Mexico between the A-29 and AT-6B, but ended the event a month earlier after a Navy test pilot was killed in the Super Tucano he was flying. The incident is under review by a safety board.
Analysis of the two competitors is ongoing and a contract award for the winning aircraft is expected in 2019. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proposed last year that the service buy 300 of the light attack aircraft and lawmakers are now weighing whether to including some initial funding in the 2019 defense budget.
From the Air Force’s perspective, the light attack aircraft are a relatively cheap way to expand its undersized fleet and could take demands off higher-end aircraft such as the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-22 Raptor that are already deployed to battlefields to fight lightly armed enemies. In Afghanistan, for example, U.S. air power has been used to take out Taliban drug labs.
The F-16 fighter jet can cost up to $30,000 per hour to operate while the slower-moving A-29 Super Tucano can perform many similar missions for a fraction of that cost, said Taco Gilbert, a retired Air Force brigadier general and senior vice president of Sierra Nevada Corp.
“You are dramatically escalating the cost of that engagement, whereas an A-29 can loiter without tanker support for hours, it can engage the target with a non-precision weapon,” Gilbert said. “So you are saving all the way around while saving the service life on that high-end aircraft.”
The Afghan air force has been using the A-29 for 18 months with no losses in its operations against the Taliban, and more than a dozen other nations use it. Gilbert said the plane’s maneuverability, small infrared signature, armor and defense mechanisms such as flares make it difficult to shoot down.
“We have 46,000 combat hours on this aircraft in a variety of locations against a variety of opponents and the aircraft has performed remarkably well,” he said. “I disagree that it is going to cost the lives of American airmen in combat. I think that we’ve proven that in combat.”
During a 2016 exercise in Nevada, a team of Marine Corps Stinger missile operators was tasked with trying to get a valid shot on an A-29 but could not do it.
The AT-6 Wolverine, the other competitor for the OA-X contract, is a variant of the trainer aircraft used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. No militaries use it specifically in a light attack role, but about 1,000 other variants are fielded around the world, said Michael Rambo, director of sales for North America for Textron Aviation Defense and the project lead for the AT-6.
“The AT-6 offers something that really no one else can and that is it is a system that is familiar to the U.S. government as well as many of the U.S. government’s allies,” Rambo said. “It is a system that over the course of millions of flight hours has proven itself as being very supportable, very durable and an aircraft that can meet the Air Force’s needs from a manufacturing standpoint in the fastest possible time.”
The light attack platform was not designed to go up against complex, advanced anti-aircraft defense systems, but the AT-6 will be resilient against smalls arms such as AK-47 rifles and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, he said.
The Wolverine has high-tech armor and a fully automated missile warning and countermeasures system that is specifically designed to counter those types of threats, which the military is seeing on overseas battlefields, Rambo said.
“The reality is it really is a very different battlespace that is out there. It is a very permissive environment unlike the environment of Vietnam and others,” he said. “While it’s most definitely a different type of battlespace, the aircraft was specifically designed to counter the types of threats that we would expect to encounter.”
During Vietnam, the attack aircraft were a “light, cheap, slower” tool that was limited but effective, and then through the 1980s and 1990s the Air Force focused on universal strike aircraft that are expensive and can perform many duties, said Larry Stutzriem, a retired Air Force major general with the Mitchell Institute.
“But the world has changed and there is going to be an enduring low-intensity counter-insurgency support for the internal defense of other countries … so in these permissive environments the specialization of the aircraft is a very affordable and efficient thing to do,” Stutzriem said. “It’s really about the environment. Why bring a fifth-generation fighter, advanced bomber, wear it down and have the cost associated with that, in an environment where this type of aircraft could fit in really nicely.”
But not all experts agree that the Air Force’s next light attack aircraft is going to be a battlefield success.
Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at the Teal Group, called the program a “great way to get pilots killed” because they are slow and unarmored, and the aircraft would have very limited applications in war.
“You take this out of Chad or Afghanistan, you use it in a context that actually calls for strategy rather than just hunting the odd Ford pickup truck full of terrorists in the desert and it’s the Russians, Chinese, or Iranian air forces favorite mid-meal snack,” Aboulafia said.
The new aircraft could also be redundant because the Army has more than 800 Apache attack helicopters that could already perform many of the same roles as a new light attack aircraft, he said.
