By 1966 the Vietnam War was in full swing and the U.S Air Force was feeling the pressure. Their dedicated close air support plane, the A-1 Skyraider, was experiencing severe losses to enemy ground fire.
The Skyraider was a WWII vintage, prop driven, heavy-hitting beast that proved very successful during the Korean War but was now showing its age. Enemy gunners had begun equipping themselves to shoot down the fast moving F-4 Phantom II’s and F-100 Super Sabres leaving the Skyraider little room to compete; the Air Force needed a replacement, one fitted with jet engines and capable of operating from makeshift airfields with short runways.
Several years previous the U.S Air Force had evaluated a light attack modification to the highly successful jet trainer built by Cessna, the T-37. Although the prototype had done well the Air Force had decided to pass on the little jet and stick with the tried and tested Skyraider. With the Skyraider on the way out the Air Force turned back to Cessna and gave the go ahead for the development of the prototype which would become the A-37A Dragonfly.
Usually when a new aircraft is brought into the U.S Air Forces inventory it is required to undergo 9 months of rigorous testing before being cleared for combat. The A-37 was to undertake a radical path however. 25 aircraft were formed into the 604th Air Commando Squadron and sent to the Bien Hoa airbase in Vietnam for live combat trails. It was an unheard of decision but one that would prove successful.
When the 604th arrived in Bien Hoa they found themselves sharing the airbase with F-100 Super Sabres whose pilots weren’t entirely impressed with the diminutive little Dragonfly although it probably didn’t help that they were delivered in crates.
The A-37 was quite unlike the fast swept wing jets of the time; it featured straight wings allowing it slower approach speeds, a rough handling undercarriage, wingtip fuel tanks and a 7.62mm mini-gun in the nosecone. Furthermore, the A-37 didn’t require a ladder to reach the cockpit; so small was the jet you only had to throw your leg over the fuselage and climb in. Yet despite it’s size the A-37 had 8 hard-points and could carry a wide variety of bombs, cluster bombs, napalm canisters, rocket pods and gun pods; just check out the Resources section of the blog for a look at a weapons chart for the Dragonfly.
When it came to actual combat the A-37 quickly became popular with the troops on the ground. Lower approach speeds typically equated to near perfect accuracy as it gave the pilots more time to focus on their targets. Dragonfly pilots would often be flying so low and concentrating so hard on their target that they’d literally skim the tops of the treelines. Maintenance crews were always pulling out tree limbs and associated debris from out under the little jets. The A-37 would prove to be very resilient to damage however. In one incident over North Cambodia a Dragonfly pilot noticed to late he was heading for a rather large tree and sheared off a good 15 feet at 400mph. Consequently the impact bent back one wing about 25 degrees rupturing a napalm canister in the process. With flammable liquid spraying over his plane the pilot had two choices, either bail out over the hostile Cambodian jungle or attempt to limp home. The pilot chose the latter and with nightfall rapidly approaching managed to get back to base with neither engine on the A-37 failing.
Within a year of establishment at Bien Hoa the combat trials were considered a success; not a single Dragonfly had been downed by enemy fire in over 3,000 missions. Based on valuable experience gained from the field Cessna developed the uprated A-37B of which 557 were built and about 250 were delivered to the South Vietnamese Air Force.
By the end of the war the Dragonfly had flown over 160,000 missions and the USAF had only lost 22 planes. The number is low but one has to consider that the A-37 never flew over the flak ridden skies of North Vietnam and never encountered the heavy resistance that the fast jets had to deal with. Still, the little warplane proved itself more than capable of doing the job laid out for it. When South Vietnam fell to the Communists around 90 Dragonfly’s were captured and pressed into service over the skies of Cambodia and against China during the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 until lack of spares grounded the fleet.
With the Vietnam War over the USAF quickly passed on their remaining A-37’s to both the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve were they served in a forward air control capacity until replaced by the much more powerful A-10 Warthog.
During the 1970’s many Dragonfly’s were exported to Central and South America were they proved very popular due to lost costs, ease of maintenance and capability in counter-insurgency operations.
In 1995 Ecuador and Peru clashed in a border conflict called the Cenepa War and both sides would use the A-37B Dragonfly to great effect. During the war the Dragonfly would display it’s resilience to damage yet again; an Ecuadorian jet received a direct hit from a MANPADS surface-to-air missile yet managed to make it back to base and was fully operational again within a few days. The Dragonfly would prove susceptible to air-to-air missiles; however, as during the conflict an Ecuadorian Kfir brought down a Peruvian Dragonfly with an Israeli missile.
Although the A-37B Dragonfly is now getting on a bit in age it is still in the inventory of many countries throughout Latin America and may be for quite some time. Surprisingly there isn’t a lot of information about the Dragonfly out there and you won’t find many famous pilots associated with the little jet but there’s no doubt that the A-37 was a successful warplane and a success for Cessna.
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