I thought the biggest advantage to the F16s was that they were natively compatible launch platforms for all NATO air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, and had a much longer range radar than the Migs they're currently using. So they could remain further behind the front line, searching for potential targets and launch their missiles, without needing to have everything all pre-programmed before the flight.
Thats pretty much their only "real" advantage in Ukraine, everything else (longer range radar than Ukrainian MiG-29 but shorter than their Su-27 etc) just isn't really usable in the very limited way Ukraine could attempt to leverage them, as they're missing so much of the rest of the NATO-style support infrastructure (AWAC's, Tankers, EW, Datalinks etc) that makes NATO led F-16's a far greater threat.
This next paragraph may annoy people who had a model of one as a kid, but the A-10 is not a good aircraft. Built for a war that never happened and overhyped by a reputation and capabilities that it never earned nor demonstrated, it has repeatedly failed to live up to the hype every time it's been deployed, the only reason it's still in service while more capable aircraft like the F-111 have retired is because the people making those decisions have more knowledge of the hype and not it's actual combat performance.
Ah, I love popping in here and reading the things people write, never stop, please, never stop!
In every war it's been a great workhorse despite human errors. During GW1 the A-10 "desk" in the huge airwar HQ building even jokingly changed the name above their desk from A-10 (Attack) to the AFBRIWW-10 (Attack, Fighter, Bomber, Recon, Interdiction, Wild-Weasel) because its mission set kept being expanded into more and more roles because it was so good, hell it even went SCUD hunting too (taken from the book "Warthog" written by a historian, not an A-10 pilot - available on Amazon
).
The only real weakness of the A-10 (aside from being slow), and it is a big one given the role, is target acquisition and lack of technology when it comes to navigating and finding targets visually and that is fixable with modern electronics and much improved with the targetting pod upgrade post ~2008, though the sniper pod has had some issues including being implicated in friendly fire instances.
If you watch the cockpit videos, especially older ones, they often really struggle to locate and get on target especially in environments where the targets can more easily blend in and/or terrain without many good landmarks.
There are only modernised A-10C's left now, no older A-10A's remain. The A-10C's have some of the most modern equipment within the USAF for target acquisition, tracking & navigation outside of the F-35's kit, including helmet mounted display (HMCS), laser ring gyros for Nav, advanced datalinks (SADL, L16 etc) for off-aircraft detection, Sniper ATP-SE or XR or Litening ER laser pod for on-aircraft detection etc etc.
The biggest one there for modern battlefields (vs the F-16/-15E/-18 etc) is the SADL, where a JTAC on the ground simply types in the location of the enemy they can see and transmits it to the A-10C which automatically updates its displays (inc the HMDS) with that info within a second, so the pilot now just looks and can instantly see through the helmet display exactly what the guy on the ground has ID'd. Then the A-10C can send a video feed back to the JTAC from the Sniper/Litening pod so the JTAC can confirm thats correct target, all done within seconds with no "visual" scanning for targets required, looking for coloured smoke or words passed between people to be misheard etc. The F-16/-15E/-18 etc doesn't have capability and so would have to spend time manually passing that data from the ground to the aircraft via voice usinga 9-Liner report which can (and has in the past) led to errors, takes far longer and has no way to transmit video images back to the ground for confirmation.
As an aside, due to a quirk of its huge weapons carriage, there's plans to make it an Airborne
MALD Decoy/Drone carrier as it can carry the same amount of MALD as a B-52 can (16) which is more than an F-16/15E/-18 can -
Inside Nellis Week: New weapons, fuel tanks, displays, and more are being added to the A-10 to make it a key player in a high-end conflict.
www.thedrive.com
“MALD was the easy button. It requires no software integration with the A-10, we can just hang it up, drop it, and it works. To bring it to the fight you just need lots of stations — which is what the A-10 has — we’re not limited by weight because it’s a lightweight weapon and we’ve got 10 pylons that we can hang MALD on.”
The A-10 will be able to carry up to 16 MALDs, the same quantity as the B-52, and an interesting comparison with the F-16, which can carry four.
