Spockvarietyhour

Thoughts on the FMA IA 58 Pucará?

A neat looking ground attack light aircraft which on paper packed quite the punch, with 2 20mm cannons, 4 .30 machine guns, and about 1.5 tons of ordinance, either bombs, rockets or s combination of both.

In practice though, it was a bit of a paper tiger, as while both tough and fast, it had a massive design flaw in which the faster you were flying, the stiffer the controls got, to the point that if you were ever to reach the maximum speed, the plane was effectively uncontrollable, made worse the lower you flew, meaning that it couldn’t really aim during combat runs unless it slowed down, so either you actually hit what you were aiming at, and ensured you yourself were an easy target, or you prayed to god whatever you wanted death actually died the moment you pulled the trigger, which the Falklands War proved barely of ever happened.

So yeah, good in theory, shit in practice, made worse by the fact that it was designed around an engine that became obsolete the moment the plane entered service, effectively killing its export potential, hence why it only had three export customers, Colombia, Uruguay and Sri Lanka, with only two of them actually buying the damn thing (Colombia’s were a donation), and only seeing real combat outside the Falklands in Sri Lanka, with a combat record so poor most planes were lost to accidents/combat, and the survivors were retired early due to lack of spare parts, courtesy of the aforementioned shitty engines.

In Colombia, a country desperate for combat aircraft to deal with the massive surge of attacks from communist guerrillas, the damn thing was never used in combat, it was that bad.

What a shitshow of a plane.