“...The avionics package and other electronics could EASILY be modernized in NEW airframes....even if the dies were destroyed it’s not that big a thing to make new ones...” [Don W, post 68]
One assumes your extensive experience in system design, aircraft construction, avionics installation, and die sinking informs your thinking on this.
“Dies” are just one aspect of tooling. Not sure if they are the most expensive, but their fabrication requires skill and experience few workers have. Fewer each day.
Drawings & other manufacturing records aren’t necessarily kept; recall that Fairchild Republic went out of business about 15 years ago.
Avionics have changed completely, since the A-10 was designed (over 50 years ago). Even if the old airframe could be redesigned to accept the new stuff, other systems would have to be added to bring the machine up to snuff with only the most basic capabilities of more recent aircraft. Single-seaters are notorious for being densely packed, and available interior space may not be there to accommodate newer systems. And if a “new” A-10 couldn’t accept digital data, communicate with other forces (nor ground troops, nor control centers), and defeat modern air defenses, it would not survive in today’s environments.
We really do get stupider as we get older, don’t we?
We could never figure out how to do anything we once did when we were young and knew everything.
Nobody today knows how to design and build new aircraft, specially one that uses ideas that were perfected 50 years ago. Disassembly and measuring of the main structure is nigh on impossible, and nobody could ever figure out how to build structure ever.
The electronics take up so much more space today for 1/4 the utility, for example (Sarcasm).
Of course there is no way to upgrade avionics or other electronics in a system that is using a long proven design that said airframe could possibly communicate with other assets in a combat zone. They’ve been shooting down A-10s like there’s no tomorrow in the sandbox.
I don’t know what your qualifications are, FRiend, but as an engineer, I damn sure have a LOT more confidence in the designers and constructors of military assets than I do in the pessimistic ramblings of an anonymous Debbie Downer.
There is a company that is currently building brand new DeHavilland Beavers. DeHavilland went out of business about the same time the A-10 was in the design stage. If the plans for a civilian bush plane can be found and used, I have little doubt the plans for the Wart Hog are available.
If the US aviation industry can’t reverse engineer one of its own products, we are in far deeper kimchi than anyone could believe. The Soviets did it with the B-29, which is a much more daunting prospect IMHO.