didn’t they stop making these a good 10 years ago?
I think they stopped production more than ten years ago but most of the fleet were recently upgraded with modern avionics.
If you ever see one upside down look closely and you will see a painted silhouette of the canopy near the front, thats to fool ground shooters to fire at the front fuselage where the pilot sits, in a titanium tub!
Its true the Air Force did not like this plane, it was not in their eyes the “macho” image of the WW2 pilot with a scarf type of thing, they are stuck on a pseudo type of bushido code that they must go mano on mano with another enemy aircraft.
Well so far our real enemies have a distinct lack of hi tech aircraft, they do have lots of SAMs, tanks and other ground based weapons, of which the Warthog is arguably the best fixed wing offensive weapon we have.
The only other airframe that could compare to this would be the C-130 gunship in as much as firepower but of course has much more.
The last new one was delivered in 1984. In 2007 Boeing won a contract to build 242 new sets of wings for the A-10 fleet. Supposedly they will stay in service till 2028.