Intriguing new light attack aircraft unveiled

I’m both amused and impressed by the thinking that’s gone into a prototype light attack aircraft that’s just been unveiled.

One wouldn’t normally consider an agricultural spray aircraft as the foundation for an attack plane, but it seems that Air Tractor has been thinking outside the box. The company began manufacturing agricultural aircraft after World War II. They’ve been pretty successful in this niche market: their 2,000th aircraft was delivered in 2004.

The Model 802 entered production in 1990, and is available for both agricultural and fire-fighting applications, in two-seat or single-seat versions (the latter, Model 802A, is shown below). Over 200 have been sold so far.

Here are two short video clips, one showing the 802 spraying crops in Iowa, the other of a firefighting version water-bombing a fire in Croatia.

The really impressive thing about the Model 802 is its size and payload. Air Tractor claim it’s the world’s largest single-engined aircraft. Its useful load is rated as 9,495 pounds, or well over four and a half short tons (including pilot and fuel, of course, as well as spray equipment, and chemicals for agricultural use or water for fire-bombing). It’s powered by a jet turbine producing 1,295 shaft horsepower, and in agricultural form (i.e. with spray equipment) can cruise at 191 mph. Its economy cruise range is said to be over 600 miles.

This enormous payload capacity, plus the fact that the 802 is active in South America, where it’s been used by the US State Department since 2002 to spray drug crops, seems to have set the brain cogs a-churning over at Air Tractor. They’ve just announced the development of the Model 802U, a gunship version of their agricultural plane.

On the face of it, the idea seems crazy. A heavy, relatively slow, fixed-undercarriage, tail-wheel, propeller-driven plane as an attack aircraft? Clearly, in any technologically up-to-date theater of war, it’d be suicide to fly such an aircraft. On the other hand, in areas such as parts of South America or Afghanistan, where ground-to-air missiles and radar-guided anti-aircraft artillery aren’t encountered (not yet, anyway), this might make an awful lot of sense.

According to Air Tractor, the aircraft’s old-fashioned fixed tail-dragger undercarriage is actually an advantage in operating from rough, unprepared air strips. It’s far stronger than modern retractable undercarriages. Furthermore, the Model 802U is armored, has a loiter time of up to 10 hours with full fuel, and can carry a very respectable payload of weapons. It could conceivably even be fitted with a laser target designator pod, so that it could drop ‘smart’ bombs or fire laser-guided missiles. To make matters even more interesting, for anti-drug missions (e.g. to spray coca bushes in South America or opium poppy fields in Afghanistan) it could presumably carry both spray equipment and weapons, so that it could defend itself against ground fire, eliminate annoyed drug farmers, and kill their crops, all on a single mission!

I’m irresistibly reminded of the excellent combat performance of the Douglas A1 Skyraider in the Vietnam War. (We covered the Skyraider in detail, among others, in Weekend Wings #31.) It, too, was a propeller-driven aircraft, dating from the last years of World War II, but gave outstanding service well into the jet age, and was beloved of its pilots.

Who knows? Perhaps the Air Tractor Model 802U might begin a new Skyraider-like tradition over Third World battlefields (if the so-called ‘War On Drugs’ can be said to have battlefields as such). At any rate, kudos to Air Tractor for thinking outside the box. I wish them luck.

Peter