The A-10 Thunderbolt II, affectionately known by most of the U.S. military as the “Warthog,” is the U.S. Air Force’s most beloved and capable close-air-support aircraft. Its low airspeed and low-altitude capabilities give it an accuracy unmatched by any aircraft in the Air Force fleet. No matter what anyone in an Air Force uniform tells you, especially if there are stars on their shoulders.
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For one A-10 pilot, the Close Air Support world was turned upside down during the First Gulf War. 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 Los Angeles 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 was indeed a helicopter, Swain moved in for the kill. One of the targets (wisely) broke off and moved north (back toward Iraq), the other moved south. Big mistake. 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—the BRRRRRT.
Swain was about to score the first air-to-air kill in the A-10’s operational history. But he 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.
“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.”
Swain’s A-10 became known as the “Chopper Popper” in Air Force lore and is now displayed on the grounds of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
“We tried to identify the type of [helicopter] after we were finished, but it was just a bunch of pieces,” he later told the Air Force Academy’s news service.
After the war, Swain returned to his job flying Boeing 747s for U.S. Air and was still in the Air Force Reserve as of 2015, with the rank of colonel.
