Badass of the WeekThe A-10 Warthog is a big, slow, heavily armed flying machine equipped with enough explosives to blast the Moon into about eight billion tiny inedible cheese wheels. And Ben and Pat are going to chat all about it today. But also, one it's more famous pilot's Kim Campbell who flew the warthog over Iraq in the early 2000's.
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The Gatling cannon unleashes its final barrage of thirty millimeter ammunition. The burst of explosive rounds slam into fortified enemy musicians, ripping through concrete and sandbags, and destroying the enemy weapons teams hidden within. Captain Kim Campbell of the seventy fifth Expeditionary Fighter Squadron pulls her A ten out of a steep dive as the commander of the American Ground Forces informs her overcomes that her shots hit their targets. The sound of cheering soldiers can be heard in the background, but Baghdad is still in the hands of the elite Iraqi Republican Guard, and every anti aircraft gun in the city is now pointed in the direction of her a Warhawk Clason's blair as a air defense systems target her plan. The flat rounds detonate in the skies around her, filling the air with shrapnels. Streams of tracers from high caliber AA machine guns sweep around her cockpit from all sides. Captain Campbell pulls hard on the control stick, diving and weaving the aircraft through the hail of bullets. She deploys the last of her countermeasures. She opens the throttle. It's not enough with a bag. An enemy missile strikes home, ripping the tail off her plane. Alarms ring as more rounds clang off the fuselage from all sides. Her engines are on fire. The controls stop responding. Her aircraft enters a nose dive over enemy occupied Baghdad. Captain Kim Campbell might have helped save the American soldiers on the ground, but now she's going to have to find a way to get herself home alive.
Hello, and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson, and I am here as always with my co hosts, doctor Pat larishat. It is New Year's twenty twenty four. As of the recording of this, it's day two of twenty twenty four. Happy New Year to you, Happy New Year to you too. Yeah. Do you have any resolutions for twenty twenty four?
Why yes, I do, Ben. My external monitor has a resolution of nineteen twenty by ten eighty as a default. Okay, that joke was funny in nineteen eighty two.
That was back when you had to know the resolutions of your monitor because you had to, like if you had a computer game, you had to set it to the correct resolution. Nowadays it knows and it adapts, but like, yes, there was always that thing of like if you didn't know the exact resolution of your monitor, you had to you wouldn't put it and then it would give you all these weird dimensions. Does this work? No? This looks like crap.
Yeah yeah, how about you, Ben, Do you have any resolutions?
No? Not really, keep trying to keep trying to do the show. I think we're working on this project and trying to find some new projects to work on. Yeah, so I don't know. It's a new year and we're we're going to be doing some new stuff. We've got some new characters that we want to talk about on the show. I think that will be, uh, it'll be fun. We have some pretty cool ideas for different episodes and different types of people that we want to talk about. So we've got a lot of stuff in the works right now, and I think that'll be really fun to get into it.
Yeah.
Yeah, We're going to start off twenty twenty four talking about a story that I really have a close like this story really makes me happy, and I really it involves an aircraft that brings a lot of joy to me personally. It's an aircraft that I wrote about in the very early days of the website. It's always been one of my favorite airplanes. But it's not it's gotten more love in the years since I wrote the article. But you know, around the time I was working on it, it wasn't as well known as the you know, the jet fighters and kind of the sexier, sleeker, more you know, maneuverable aircraft in various military histories. But for me, I always had a soft spot for this This A ten. It is a it's called the Warthog, and it is just kind of this slowish, kind of ugly, big meaty aircraft that blows things up. And I always really loved it, and I wrote an article about it in the early days of the website, and it was really cool because I got a lot of emails back from people who flew the thing. So I wrote about this e I was like, this is a cool plane. It doesn't get enough love, and a bunch of A Ten pilots wrote me back and some of them were like, yeah, I thought this was really funny, really cool. We printed it out, we put it in our squadron room, and that's awesome, and that made me really y. It was like a very rewarding thing because I had kind of just gotten going on. The website was very very early on for me, and I hadn't really received a ton of fan mail and certainly nothing like that before, which was really cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So is our story just about the airplane or no?
And you know, originally when I wrote it, it was about you know, why I loved this aircraft, and I'm going to talk about it as we go through the episode today. But yeah, a few years after I wrote that article, a story came out of a really amazing combat experience that it had during the Second of Rock War. The A ten was extremely valuable and did a lot of heavy lifting during Desert Storm nineteen ninety one. But for the Second of Rock War Or there was a story that started coming out. And because I had written this article on the website and people knew I liked it, I started getting a ton of email from people being like, oh, you know, here's a really cool story involving that that aircraft. Do you like check it out? Check it out, and so I got into the story of Kim Campbell. Captain Kim Campbell, not to be confused with the first Prime Minister of Canada Kim Campbell, but.
The first female prime minister of Canada.
Yes, first female Prime minister of Canada.
The others before, yes, But we're talking about the pilot Kim Campbell.
Yes, and she has this really amazing story and the more I read about it, the more I liked it. And so I thought that it would be a really cool opportunity to talk about both this plane and this amazing experience, this amazing feet of kind of flying heroism that was performed twenty years ago now, but I remember getting emails when it happened, you know, and that that was really that was really fulfilling.
It's a cool story that we're going to tell you about after the break. So who is Kim Campbell. Well, she was born Kim Reid into a family that was really involved with flying. Her dad is Chuck Reid, the former mayor of San Jose, but more relevant for our story here, he was also a captain in the Air Force, and Kim joined the Civil Air Patrol at age thirteen. That's the civilian Auxiliary of the US Air Force, and it's a volunteer organization that promotes civilian pilot education, helps out with things like search and rescue operations. During World War Two, it was way to get civilian aviation resources involved in the war effort. And after the war it changed its charter and now it's no longer doing any combat activities. So this is attracting Kim Reid's attention.
At age thirteen, that's a pretty early age to get involved with that.
Yeah, fight.
I guess if you're growing up in that type of family, it's kind of expected.
Yeah. She flies her first civilian flight at seventeen, and she wanted as much of this flying thing as she could get. She said in an interview that she was even dreaming of becoming an astronaut. And okay, we've all dreamt of becoming an astronaut, but it's probably a little more plausible for her than for many of the rest of us.
Yeah, because you do actually have to be able to fly an aircraft for that. Yes, Yes, that was the thing I always liked about Neil Armstrong. When Neil Armstrong passed away, his son said that Neil was amazing, but he was really hard to watch TV with because every time they showed the interior cockpit of an aircraft, Neil Armstrong would be like, that's not what the inside of that plane looks like, because he'd flown like every plane on Earth and he knew what the insides of all of them look like.
Yeah. Yeah, and who knows, maybe that's what Kim Reid and her dad would talk about at the dinner table too, for you. So anyway, so she goes to the US Air Force Academy. She graduates as a cadet wing commander, which is the highest possible rank for a cadet. This was in nineteen ninety seven.
Yeah, and her dad had been one also, and it was the first time that like a father and daughter had like both been that rank because there's only a couple and yeah, graduate preach class, which is kind of cool.
Yeah. So by two thousand and three, she's a six year veteran. She's promoted to captain. She's one of only fifty female fighter pilots at the time, and she said, oh, I get asked that a lot. What's it like to be a female and a fighter squadron. Honestly, I never think about it the important thing is to work really hard and be good at and then nobody cares what gender you are. I'm not a female fighter pilot. I'm just a fighter pilot. And I love it, which.
I love, Like that's such a great attitude of like, yeah, you know, who cares. Like back in two that was like nowadays, it doesn't come up as much. This is two thousand and three that she's doing this interview, and there were only fifty women in the Air Force, like flying attack aircraft at the time. It's not that many. Nowadays it's totally different. You would I don't feel like, oh yeah, you get asked that question anymore if they were doing interviews about the combat mission that they'd been on. But at the time she was kind of groundbreaking, and I love that she was like I don't I don't want to make a big deal out of this, Like I just I'm just a fighter pilot like all the other guys, right, Like, I'm just out there doing my thing, and as long as you don't as long as you get your stuff done, like nobody, nobody cares.
And one of the things she got done was a mission in Afghanistan, and then when that was over, what's next. So would the rotation allow her a bit of a break her. Nope, she was rotated right into Kuwait to prepare for a mission in a rock And that's what we'll tell you about shortly.
Yeah, so by two thousand and three, right, So she graduates in ninety seven, and I mean everything kind of goes nuts a few years later. And so by two thousand and three when the US enters the Iraq War, I mean, she's a six year veteran, but like combat veteran Afghanistan tours of duty, right, you know, operation and during freedom, war on terror. You know, in nineteen ninety seven when she graduated, there were no wars, and now there's a bunch, right, and so she's she's kind of getting into combat in a way that she probably wasn't expecting, and really nobody was. So yeah, things are getting called into duty, and this A ten this aircraft is being called into duty as well. So let's talk a little bit about the A ten this aircraft that I mentioned in the open, and it's the one that she's assigned to fly. She's a fighter pilot. She flies The official term for the aircraft is the A ten Thunderbolt too, But nobody calls it the thunderbolt. They call it the wart hog because it's big and ugly, and they paint mean faces on it, and it's it's not top gun. It's not one of those like sleek, sexy fighter jets that you would picture. This is kind of a big, ugly behemoth.
Yeah, yeah, sturdy chonky. I would even go so far to call it snubnosed, at least as airplanes go, you know. And if you picture an actual wart hog like Pumba in The Lion King, you know, he's sturdy, got a blunt sort of snout, tusks whatever that corresponds to. On an airplane, he's covered in bristles, well adapted to not getting eaten by lions or cheetahs or whatever. And unlike Pumba are aten, wart hog is probably not going to break out into.
Song, no probably, And so you'll often see it with those shark faces or like monster faces that you see think like the flying tigers from World War Two. It is like a big, tough, ugly like warkhorse vehicle that fills a very particular niche in the US Air Forces mil military aviation. But it's a niche that It wasn't originally designed for. It was designed to feel something completely different, but it ended up it got used for other things, and there's really nothing quite like this. So I'll get into a little bit of the history here. The A ten was designed in the late sixties to kind of replace an old propeller plane from the World War II era. It was called the A one sky Raider and it was like a propeller in the front kind of plane. It was designed to like basically drop napalm on ground targets and Vietnam is mostly what it was used for. But the problem with the A one was that you could a guy standing on the ground. He probably had to have pretty good aim, but he could shoot a bullet through the cockpit or through the bottom of the aircraft and really mess it up. And so that's not going to work for a ground attack aircraft. They needed to replace that, so they came up with this A ten program. It was called the AX program, but the A ten is what came out of it. But what this thing was designed to do was in the late sixties early seventies, we were expecting ground war in Europe with the Soviet Union, who had huge fleets of big, heavy tanks. The US needed something, NATO needed something to provide air support, which means shoot things on the ground, blow up tanks, blow up trucks, blow up artillery pieces, and also to be able to call out coordinates of these things and designate targets for aircraft that would come afterwards. And so the A ten it needed this aircraft they were designing. It needed to have be a little faster than an attack helicopter, but it needed to be armored and tough enough that it couldn't be taken out by some guy standing on the ground with an AK. Had needed to have armor, yeah, and it needed to have a gun that was big enough to stop Russian tanks.
That sounds like I could get kind of heavy.
Yeah, could get heavy. Right. It's then that's where we're going to go with this. So the Air Force puts out bids in nineteen sixty six and Fairchild Republic wins the bid. They create this A ten. It has its first flight in nineteen seventy two, goes into service in seventy seven, and seven hundred of them have been built since then. Most of them are still in service fifty years after their first flight. It's kind of amazing.
Hey, good for them. Yeah, so they survive.
Yes, they survive. That is going to be a theme of this episode is that this thing doesn't die right. This thing ain't got time to bleed right. It's not gonna it's not gonna go down easy. And you know, not a lot of not a lot of equipment in the US military can trace its survivability back to nineteen seventy two. That's kind of old for you know, modern military. Sure like they've put a lot of upgrades in it, right, The avionics are different, the countermeasures are different, the electronics are different. A lot of the equipment has been upgraded and changed. But this is still pretty impressive. So what they needed and what this thing does is it takes off from short runways. It operates close to the front lines. It gets in the middle of everything. It doesn't need a lot of maintenance. It is big, and it is heavily armored. It has twelve hundred pounds of titanium armor that protect the pilot and all of the important guts of the aircraft from dudes on the ground with guns. This thing can like take hits from twenty millimeters cannons and keep going.
Wow, So would you call it a tank of the air or does that not do it justice?
No, that's like actually a pretty good analogy, and that's one that you'll see often when you talk about this aircraft. People will kind of refer to what as like a flying tank, because that's what it was basically designed to be. It's gonna fly in it's got these two it's got two big general electric turbo fans. They generate a ton of thrust. But this thing is big, and it's heavy, and it carries a lot of ordinance and it's not particularly fast, which we're gonna come back to in a second, because that is that is helpful and not helpful. The engines are pretty cool because they're positioned in the back of the airplane. If you look at the airplane, like you said, it's snubnose, you can see this big gun sticking out the front nose of the aircraft, but the turbojet fans are in the back kind of near the like like what you'd see for like a you know, like a lear jet kind of thing. This allows the pilot of the of the A ten to keep the engines running while the ground crews add fuel and rearm it and reload the guns and put new bombs on and all that stuff, so they can fly a mission land. They don't have to turn the aircraft off. They can leave it running. They can get it ready to go again and then just take right back off again. And that is what happens with these a lot. The slow speed of it. It, I mean it goes four hundred and twenty miles an hour. It's not slow slow, it's it's not a biplane, but that's.
Not your plane standards.
Yeah, that's not going to out maneuver a MiG right Like it's so it's not designed for air to air. And while it can deflect ground fire machine guns, you know, auto cannons, flat guns, that kind of stuff, it's not going to outrun a heat seeking missile. It's not designed to take out enemy aircraft. But the slow speed actually ends up helping it out a little bit because some of these super fast aircraft they fly too fast to see or hit a ground target. Right, This thing can come in kind of slow, can kind of size it up, line up the shot, et cetera. And whereas something coming in it like MAK two point five, if they they need somebody on the ground with a laser pointer to hit the target they're not going to because they can't see it. They're passing to over too fast.
Yeah.
Yeah, So the eight ten, it's got a bunch of hard points under the wings for bombs and stuff. It can carry like sixteen pounds of air to ground bombs and laser guided, infrared guided and ordinance all this stuff. But it's designed around this cannon that you see sticking out the front of the aircraft. It's a thirty milimeter gout eight, a Avenger seven barrel gatling gun, which you'll picture like a machine gun, but a thirty milimeter shell weighs like a pound and a half. It's an explosive and this thing shoots them at like thirty nine hundred rounds permitted. It's it's one of the biggest guns ever mounted on an aircraft. And what they did with this vehicle was basically build this gun and then build the aircraft around the gun.
So not just design the plane around the gun, but they actually literally assembled it around the gun.
Yes, yes, So when that bid went out, they were like, we need we need a gun that will kill Russian tanks, and we need enough armor to survive them shooting back at you. Okay, that's the deal. So they built this big giant gun and literally, like the front landing gear of the aircraft is offset to the starboard side because you have to have the gun on the center line.
Oh yeah, so this gets it out of the way then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be able to because when you're when you're in the you're in the pilot's seat and you are coming in for an attack run. You need the gun to be centered on your center line. So that means got to move that landing gear out of the way. Who needs that, right.
Yep? Yeah?
Uh so yeah, it shoots depleted uranium shells. You have to go into a thirty degree dive. And and you hear people talk about flying this thing. They say that the entire cockpit shutters when the gun goes off. It makes a very distinctive sound. It's this like hmm, it's this like hum and uh. They say that it slows the aircraft slows down in speed because of the recoil of the gun like pushing back on the plane. The amo drum for this thing is like six feet long. It's crazy.
Wow.
Yeah, Okay, so there's a great picture. Somebody took one out and they put it next to a Volkswagen Beetle and it's like, white's the size of that car just the gun.
Yeah.
Yeah, So it first appeared in the seventies, and like I said, it was supposed to fight land war in Europe against the Soviets, but that didn't happen, and for the most part, the A ten didn't get a lot of action until Desert Storm in nineteen ninety one. Then it really shone because we said it's not it at anti air capabilities, but the US Air Force knocked out the Iraqi Air Force day one of that war. Turns out this thing's really effective at destroying things when there is no enemy air force to be had, which will be a comic thing throughout the War on Terror. And also, hey, it turns out that in nineteen ninety one the Iraqi Army is still using those Soviet tanks from nineteen seventy two that this airplane was designed to blow.
Hey, that's confunient.
So you've got something.
Like that, go warthog.
Yeah, I figured it out right, It worked out. It all worked out in the DA Yeah, they said they flew like eight thousand sorties in combat missions in Desert Storm, they killed something like blew up something like a thousand tanks, a thousand artillery pieces, a thousand trucks, fifty scud missile launchers, just wiping out everything on the ground, right, And we all kind of know the Desert Storm was a pretty serious ass kicking in a rock. At the time, had the third biggest army in the world, right, and the A ten was a big part of kind of knocking a lot of that out. Yeah wow, I mean, you get you get to be a You've become a flying ace for shooting down five enemy aircraft and these guys were going out here. There's only there's only maybe one hundred and thirty A tens that fought in that war, but taking out X number of thousands of enemy vehicles is pretty pretty awesome. The the atens kind of stayed in service since then. They fly them all throughout the War on Terror. They still have them out and you know, they's still in operation. They keep trying to replace them with other stuff because some of the higher ups at the Air Force they don't like that the things from nineteen seventy two, and it's it's slow and it's ugly, and they don't you know, they like keep trying to phase it out. Oh the F thirty five is going to do the thing for it. No no, no, everybody gets mad. Oh we can do this with a own No no, no, no no, We're not gonna do this with a drone. Every time the Air Force proposes phasing out the war hoog, everybody you know gets angry, and then the Air Force drops it. So what I like to say is, well, the joke I used to make is that they're still using them in Terminator Salvation. Although now I realized that that movie was set in twenty eighteen, so it's technically in the past because uh chat GPT hasn't quite become Skynet yet.
Don't give it ideas.
Also, there's a weird side note about the A ten is that it's the first aircraft to ever fly with all engines powered entirely by biofuel that they made out of like wood and like grass and stuff.
So that's cool, okay, hey, no wonder it has fans, I mean humans who are enthusiastic about it. But yeah, it also has General Electic TF thirty four dash GE DASH one hundred turbofan engines.
That's true. Yes, So there's a lot of fans on and of the work. Yes, and so we are, you know, like we've been said, we've been talking about the vehicle, and now we're going to talk about Kim Campbell flying this vehicle in one of the missions that it is most famous for. And we're going to get into that right after this. It's April seventh, two thousand and three. It's day four of the Nine Day Battle of Baghdad during the Second Iraq War. Fighting is raging across the Iraqi capital and American and other Allied soldiers and marines are storming through the streets. They're taking heavy fire from the Republican Guard, who is the kind of elite troops of Saddam Hussein's Army. They're kind of super committed, super well trained. They've got the best equipment in the Iraqi Army, and they are fanatically loyal. They're going to fight to the end. They are also fighting in Baghdad in their home turf, and they've got traps everywhere. They've got choke points, they've got minefields, they've got every bridge zeroed in, and the Americans are trying to take the Iraqi capital and with it Saddam Hussein's palace and him as well. So the Republican Guard is fighting hard to stop this and gunfire explosions. A lot of the big portions of the city have people have fled, so there's a lot of kind of deserted skyscrapers and apartment buildings, But the toughest troops in the Iraqi Army are fighting hard to the last remnants of Saddam Hussein's empire.
And a little north of downtown proper, you've got the North bag Dad Bridge and this is critical. It's this important crossing over the mighty Tigris River and it has to be taken. You have to take you have to hold it if the Allies want to have any chance of cutting off enemy reinforcements and capturing the city.
Yeah, who's going to do it. Yeah, it's the Tigris of like Tigris and Euphrate is one of the most famous rivers in the world, and it runs through Baghdad and the Americans have to take it, and so the task is given to the US third Infantry Division. They've kind of marched all the way in here. They're they're fighting. They're fighting hard for Baghdad, and things are kind of getting hairy for them. On the far side of the bridge, holding an objective that's only four hundred meters from their positions, are Republican Guard forces, heavily entrenched, heavily fortified sandbags, you know, concrete barriers, heavy machine guns, RPGs, everything, and it's all zeroed in on that bridge that the Americans have to cross. The fight is on right. There's this huge gun fight. Everybody's you know, shooting, shooting on both sides, trying to get this river crossing secured. And it doesn't take long for the officers of the third Infantry to realize that they're not gonna be able to take this bridge without taking heavy casualties. They are getting pinned down, they are under heavy fire, snipers, all this stuff. Right. They can't just go out and run across this bridge. It's a death zone. They need help. They need air support, which in this case is our friend. Twenty eight year old Captain Kim Campbell of the seventy fifth Expeditionary Fighter Squadron. She was born Kim Reid. After the US Air Force Academy, she marries a guy named Scott Campbell. She's Kim Campbell. Her call sign is KC, which is not just her initials, but it also stands for killer Chick, which is heard call sign in the Air Force. And I don't feel like that's the kind of call sign you get without earning it. And she's in the cockpit of an a ten warhog happens when this call comes through. She was on her way into a rock from Kuwait on a combat mission, but when the call comes in that there's American troops and heavy fire. She was going to attack some kind of you know, ground target somewhere else away from the fighting. But when the call comes in, they're like, hey, we need help right now. She's like, all right, I can get over there. So she and her wingman peel off and they head straight into Baghdad to try to try to attack the Republican Guard There. She comes in through a dust storm, which probably isn't great for the aviotics of a fighter plane, but or for your visuals or I don't know, if you're flying by instruments through a dust storm. I'm picturing The Mummy, remember that movie. Oh yeah, But so she's coming in through this dust storm over Baghdad, and like I said, the city's under enemy control and it's heavily fortified, not just against ground targets but also against air targets. So she kind of comes in through this storm to find the city which is on fire. Right. There's fires everywhere, there's explosions, there's RPG contrails, there's tracer fire, and some of it is being directed at her as well, because hey, enemy unit on the radar here, let's start shooting at it. Like I said, the wardog is fast enough that a guy on the ground will have a hard time tracking it. But you know, the Iraqis have some pretty state of the art radar and anti aircraft weaponry, and you know, we know how these wars end, so it's easy to kind of talk bad about the Iraqi military, but this was a very very advanced you know, this was one of the toughest armies in the world, and they had some pretty good stuff. So anti aircraft fire starts coming at her immediately, and she only has a few seconds to size up what she's looking at here.
Oh, only a few seconds. That's that's going to be difficult because she's traveling a couple hundred miles an hour through dust storm war zone. She has to pick out camouflage targets like four hundred meters from friendly lines, and then what if you have to do dive straight down, nose first to aim the gun and unleash a massive barrage of death.
Yeah, and you know this isn't a video game where it's like enemies are here. They're all highlighted in red and you just shoot at them, you know, the way close air support works. She is on the radio with the guys from the third Infantry and they are saying, like, Hey, across the bridge this house, can you hit that with a gun on a thirty degree dive at four hundred and twenty miles an hour while enemies are shooting at you, Can I describe to you over the radio what this looks like so that the instant you come out the other end of this dust storm, you can pick up that building. I'm talking about trying to think about like when you're.
You know, giving directions.
Yeah, when you're thinking about like you're at like a concert or like the mall, and you're trying to connect to your friend and your at the top of the escalator and just a little bit tore like I'm waving, can you see me? Like It's like that's how they have to coordinate this stuff there is it like a hey, you know I highlighted them for you on your on your hud. Right, So she has to drive in uh, and she's heading straight down on these Republican Guard guys who are armed with RPGs, which are rocket propelled grenades propelled grenades.
It's not role playing game.
This is Yeah. These guys aren't sitting here playing D and D and she's got to blow them out of the air.
So so yeah, but she's she's a combat veteran, she's this is her second tour of duty here, she's already logged hundreds of hours of combat flight time, and these guys need her.
They're calling like, hey, you know we're getting shot up here. Kim Campbell dives her ward Hoog down at a steep angle, straight at the enemy. She opens up the throttle and unleashes a few thousand pounds and a half big thirty millimeter rounds bullets from the nineteen foot long galway to Venger gatling guns strapped to the front nose of her jet. And then when she's done with that run, she has to pull hard on the stick. She pulls some some pretty serious G force power against her, like kind of brown out blackout levels of G forces to pull up and out of there as fast as possible because they are shooting at her and they're tracking her with radar and anti aircraft missile systems and things like that. So she does that, She comes around, she makes a second pass, She comes around again. She's had a gatling gun, ammo, but she's still got those rockets and bombs and stuff. She has another pass. She unleashes all of her high explosive rockets. But by this point they know that she's there and she's been shooting at them, and they've been shooting at her, but they're they're kind of they're finding the entire city of Baghdad is kind of waiting for her to come back on this third this third run, and she has to make it because they're killing Americans down there, and we got together. They're killing these guys. Turn across the bridge. You gotta take them out, and so she comes down. She fires the last of her rockets, and as the end of her payload has done, every gun in a rock is pointing at her, and bullets are bouncing off the armor like machine gun rounds and rifle fire doesn't. It's not gonna affect that. You've got that titanium armor. That's what this thing was designed for. That's not working. But anti aircraft artillery is blowing up all around her, and missiles are streaking past her, RPG's are streaking past her, and then suddenly there's a huge explosion that rocks the entire A ten, A service to air missile strikes the tail of the A ten, blows pieces of it off, riddles the entire fuselage with shrapnel holes, shreds the tail shreds the engine cowling blows out the hydraulics, blows out the horizontal stabilizers. In case you don't know anything about airplanes, those are all important parts of the vehicle. The plane shakes, rolls left and begins a death spiral nose dive towards Baghdad. Oh, every panel, control panel, everything is screaming at her. Controls completely non responsive, warning, warning, eject pat What do you do if you're in this situation?
I would probably say a bad words. Yeah we're oh yeah, yeah yeah, but yeah we're nose diving into densely populated city on fire, in the middle of enemy fire. We're running lawn ammo. Controls aren't responding. Oh, I know what to do. Then I would use the force.
Yeah, and that's roughly what happens. So she has a split second to think about this. She realizes she has two options. She can eject and let her multi million dollar jet explode in the middle of a city of eleven million people and risk almost certain captured by Iraqi troops because the city is still under their control all over the place. Or she can fight and try to regain control of the vehicle and risk dying in a towering fireball. She chooses to fight for it. Okay, she doesn't want to eject. She thinks she can do this. Turns out the breaks, steering rudders, flaps, and flight gear are all failing to respond. So what does she do? This is a thing that you can do in this aircraft. She cuts the hydraulics and switches over to manual piloting mode. Here's the general idea. The way she describes it is, when you lose all the hydraulics, you don't have speed breaks, you don't have brakes, and you don't have steering, so she basically kills the power steering and the power breaks. There are literally like a series of wires that connect the flight stick and all of that to the rudders and flaps and all of these things. Captain Kim Campbell has to pull herself out of a tailspin under enemy fire by piloting this multimillion dollar fighter jet like the Right Brothers piloted their Right Flyer in nineteen oh three. Yeah, cables employees like literally wrestling the thing with like and from what I understand of this, you know, I've seen some some kind of amateur pilots talk about it, and it's like, this is not this is like this requires serious upper body strength to you're literally wrestling the airplane.
Yeah, and this is not just a little airplane like the Right Brothers had. Or I'm also picturing Wiley Coyote because he's all about crappy contraptions and stuff.
It's definitely like that.
Yeah, it's so you've got the contraption indt of things, but it's it's not like a little two propeller puddle jumper. This is an a ten warthog and we're in a dangerous situation and Kim Campbell is using the force but the before cit equals mass times acceleration.
Yes, yes, she is in a twenty five thousand pounds aircraft that is missing its tail and big parts of both wings, but somehow miraculously she regains control using this wires and cables system. It's a method of flying that a ten pilots practice exactly once during their training and not trying to pull it out of a dive, like they flip it into manual while they're flying in good conditions level at high altitude, with the option of turning it back off again and going back to hydraulics.
But she yeah, so she's never done the entire procedure before.
No, No, like blowing off the tail of aircraft and then try to switch the manual and a death spiral is not part of like the standard operating procedure for for Force Academy. Maybe probably even in the simulators. But even the simulators wouldn't do a good job because they don't really they would be able to. They would have a hard time kind of simulating the actual force. You'd need to maneuver this thing, the actual like you have to fight this thing to arm wrestle a jet fighter. So vehicles crippled, but she pulls out of the dive. She straightens it out. She flies over downtown Iraq, still being shot at by a couple hundred AA guns. She can't really tell exactly how damaged it is. She can look around the cockpit kind of get an idea. She can look at her instruments, everything screaming at her and flashing bad colors. But there are pictures that I very strongly encourage listeners to go look at of what this thing look like. Like pieces of it are flying off. I don't know if you saw the movie Hot Shots with Charlie Sheen, where like he gets shot up at the end and then it's just like just a cockpit kind of drops down onto the aircraft carrier. That's what I picture with this, Like, yes, it's insane how much damage this vehicle took, but it's still flying, and as it was kind of of the more damage to God, the more easy it was for other things to shoot it and hit it. Okay, But she pulls out, She gets out of Baghdad and she is manually flying the aircraft back to her base, her air base in Kuwait now she could have at this point, she could have ejected, she's out, she's over friendly territory. She could eject, the plane will explode, but she'd live. But she's like, you know what, I think I can land this. And the way she describes that she had no doubt in her mind she could land it. So she and her wingman is she's she's got her flight leader that she's been following, but she tells him, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna go in for a manual landing.
So how common are manual landings like this? They've probably done this a few times in.
Training, right, No, the procedure with landing the plane flying by wire is one thing they train that once during you know, while you're working on the vehicle, but landing the plan lane manually landing the plane by wire is so dangerous that Kim Campbell says it they don't even practice it in full and in A ten flight training at all. In fact, manual landings in the A ten had only been attempted exactly twice before this. The first time twice the first time the plane cartwheeled and exploded and the pilot died. The second time, the A ten broke in half and caught fire, and the pilot was only saved when fire crews pulled him out of the inferno. And now Kim Campbell is trying to do it with a plane that has been completely shot to pieces. Looks like Swiss cheese. It doesn't look like it should be flying. And she's going to try to land this one manually. Now here's the thing. As I wish I had some dramatic build up moment ending to insert here, but according to her flight lead, he said quote, she landed in manual more smoothly than I landed with hydro. It was just no problem, three wheels down, textbook landing, despite the plane's wing being like half hanging off and the tail being shredded. And the next morning Kats and Kim Campbell is out there again flying close air support for a rescue mission over Baghdad, just like nothing had happened.
Well, doesn't miss a beat.
She goes on to serve three tours of duty in Iraq. In Afghanistan, she flies three hundred and seventy five combat hours, which is like fifteen seasons of an hour long TV show on Network TV.
Wow. Yeah, so she's done a lot and very well, it sounds like yes, so yeah, yeah, So for those actions in April two thousand and three, when Kim Campbell both eliminated an enemy position that was danger close to friendly troops and also because she had flown home with wires and cranks for all of this, she received the Distinguished Flying Cross and got a commendation from the South Carolina Legislature. And okay, that's cool, but she also got a paper napkin that a soldier from the third Infantry left for her in her ready room later that week. He had written on a simple handwritten message, if it hadn't been for you, guys, I wouldn't still be here. And Kim Campbell goes on to command a theater operation group consisting of several squadrons. She was a faculty chair at the Air Force Academy and then she retired with the rank of colonel, and now she does teaching in public speaking. And when someone asked her what it was like to take so much incoming fire in a war zone, she said, those are the risks you are going to take to help the guys on the ground. That's our job, that's what we do. Our guys were taking fire and do you want to do everything you can to help them out.
That is Kim Campbell and the a ten Wardhog and just a couple of really a really cool piece of equipment and in the hands of somebody who is is brave and talented and well trained, and it is a really amazing to see what it's capable of and what the what these pilots are capable of. So thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. We we had a fun time putting it together and we really hope you guys liked listening to it. Please do remember to like and subscribe and share our show with your friends if you if you enjoy it, because that really does help us out a lot. So thank you guys so much. Being Happy New Year, and we will see you on the next one.
Stay Badass. Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast dou used by High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs. Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
