February 06, 2020
By David Fortier
Did you know the one and only air to air kill scored by an A-10 Warthog was against an Iraqi helicopter? What type of helicopter isn't known as went down under about a 300 round burst from the A-10's 30mm gun. Captain Bob Swain was flying anti-armor sorties in central Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. After dropping six 500-pound bombs and taking out two Iraqi tanks with Maverick missiles, he saw potential tangos several miles away, just barely moving around.
"I noticed two black dots running across the desert that looked really different than anything I had seen before," Swain told the LA Times in a February 1991 interview. "They weren't putting up any dust and they were moving fast and quickly over the desert."
He was tracking what he thought was a helicopter. When his OV-10 Bronco observation plane confirmed the target, Swain moved in for the kill. One of the targets broke off and moved north (back toward Iraq), the other moved south. The A-10 pilot tracked the one moving south but couldn't get a lock with his AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles because the target was too close to the ground, just 50 feet above.
So he switched to the A-10's 30mm GAU-8 Avenger cannon – aka the BRRRRRT. It would be the first air-to-air kill in the A-10's operational history. But Swain didn't know that. He was just concerned with taking it down and started firing a mile away from the helicopter. His shots were on target, but the helicopter didn't go down.
Advertisement
"On the final pass, I shot about 300 bullets at him," Swain recalled to a press pool at the time. "That's a pretty good burst. On the first pass, maybe 75 rounds. The second pass, I put enough bullets down, it looked like I hit with a bomb."
