John Dough

Politicians in Washington tried for decades to retire the A-10 Warthog attack jet, calling it too slow and outdated. Then U.S. Air Force Captain Kim Campbell flew hers home from Baghdad with zero hydraulics, one damaged engine, and over one hundred and fifty shrapnel holes in the tail. On April 7, 2003, American ground troops were pinned down under heavy fire in the middle of Baghdad. Twenty-seven-year-old Captain Campbell dove through thick clouds to deliver close air support with her thirty-millimeter cannon. As she pulled up after saving the troops on the ground, an Iraqi surface-to-air missile exploded directly against the rear of her aircraft. The blast severed both of her redundant hydraulic lines at the same time, punched a football-sized hole through the right tail stabilizer, and damaged her right jet engine. Instantly, the flight stick went dead. The nose of the aircraft rolled violently toward the streets of Baghdad below. Why did she not pull the ejection handle? Because ejecting over central Baghdad meant parachuting straight into the hands of hostile militia, and forcing dozens of American soldiers to risk their lives in an urban ambush just to rescue her. Sitting inside the A-10's twelve-hundred-pound titanium armor tub, Campbell flipped a single emergency switch on her console called Manual Reversion. That switch locked the flight stick directly to physical steel cables, pulleys, and cranks running through the wings. Flying an A-10 on steel cables is like steering a heavy dump truck with no power steering at three hundred miles per hour. For one full hour across three hundred miles of hostile sky, Campbell hauled the heavy stick with both hands using sheer muscle power. The hardest part was landing. Without hydraulics, she had no wing flaps to slow down, no speed brakes, and no nose-wheel steering. If she touched down and the tires blew, the jet would cartwheel in flames. She brought the crippled Warthog down onto the runway at nearly two hundred miles per hour, fighting the rudder pedals with her legs until the battered aircraft rolled to a stop. When her crew chief climbed the ladder and saw hundreds of holes in the aluminum skin, he could only shake his head in disbelief. Never mock old American steel, and never bet against the pilot sitting inside it.