Iranian Pilot Attacks US A-10 — Huge Mistake!

[00:00:09]An Iranian fighter pilot just broke a ceasefire, hunted down a USA 10 Warthog over the Persian Gulf, and put a bullet through its spine, then called it dead over open radio. What he didn't know is that the A-10 wasn't built to survive being shot. It was built assuming it would be and kept flying anyway. That single miscalculation didn't just cost him his jet, it cost him everything. If you want to see how one cocky radio call turned the hunter into the wreckage, hit subscribe because this one ends in a way nobody saw [music] coming.

[00:00:42]The ceasefire nobody trusted. In 2026, Iran and the United States weren't at war, but they weren't at peace either.

[00:00:51]Both nations had agreed to a ceasefire over the Persian Gulf, but American and Iranian jets were still flying armed patrols within miles of each other every single day. The US Navy logged over 300 close intercepts in the month before this incident alone. Each one a coin flip away from becoming a shooting war.

[00:01:12]Iranian pilots had been buzzing American ships at dangerously low altitudes so frequently that US commanders had quietly updated their rules of engagement three times in six months.

[00:01:23]The ceasefire wasn't a handshake. It was two men holding knives behind their backs and smiling, but what nobody outside the cockpit knew that morning was that one Iranian pilot wasn't smiling anymore, and he had already decided that today was the day he stopped pretending. The pilot built for this moment. Major Reza Dari wasn't a reckless pilot. That's what made him genuinely dangerous. He had logged over 1,400 flight hours in the F-4 Phantom, one of the most demanding jets still in active service anywhere on Earth. A machine that kills inattentive pilots just as efficiently as it kills enemies.

[00:02:04]Iranian Air Force records show Davari had been recommended for promotion twice and passed over both times. Not for incompetence, but because the wars that would have given him the combat record he needed kept ending before he could prove himself. He was exactly the kind of pilot military psychologists warned about technically [music] elite emotionally primed and waiting for a moment that justified everything he believed about himself. His commanders >> [music] >> knew his profile. They flew him anyway.

[00:02:34]What they never told Davari and what he never bothered to ask was the full combat history of the exact aircraft he was about to attack. The Warthog's dirty secret. The A-10 Warthog is one of the most shot at aircraft in American military history. And it has the engineering to prove it. During the Gulf War alone, A-10s flew over 8,000 combat missions, took direct hits from surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft fire, and small arms on hundreds of occasions, and still returned their pilots home at a mission success rate that shocked even the engineers who built them. The airframe was designed with full redundancy on every critical system, two engines [music] positioned far apart so one hit couldn't kill both.

[00:03:20]Flight controls that could be operated entirely by mechanical cable if all hydraulics failed, and a titanium armored cockpit so thick [music] it could absorb 23-mm cannon rounds without penetrating. The US Air Force had tried to retire the A-10 four separate times since 2012, and Congress blocked it every single time because the pilots who flew it refused to give it up. [music] Davari saw a slow, ugly, lumbering target. What he was actually looking at was 47 years of combat proven engineering that had been specifically updated to survive exactly the kind of attack he was about to run. But the Warthog's most dangerous feature wasn't its armor.

[00:04:04]>> [music] >> It was the single system bolted to its nose that Devary had completely dismissed. The gun that ends conversations.

[00:04:12]The GAU-8 Avenger cannon mounted in the nose of the A-10 is not a weapon in the conventional sense. It is an industrial solution to the problem of armored vehicles existing.

[00:04:23]>> [music] >> It fires 30 mm uranium tipped rounds at a rate of 3,900 per minute.

[00:04:29]>> [music] >> And each round carries enough kinetic energy to punch clean through the top armor of a Soviet-era main battle tank from 4,000 ft in the air. The entire front section of the A-10 was physically redesigned around this gun [music] because it was too large and too powerful to fit into any existing airframe without rebuilding the nose from scratch. When it fires, it produces [music] so much recoil that the aircraft momentarily decelerates mid-flight, a phenomenon engineers measured, documented, and then simply accepted as a cost of doing business. In testing, a single 1-second burst from the GAU-8 destroyed [music] six armored vehicles simultaneously. Devary's F-4 Phantom had a maximum armor rating designed [music] to stop 20 mm rounds. He was about to find out what a 50% size increase in ammunition does to that calculation. But before the gun ever came into play, the Warthog pilot had to do something that most trained aviators would consider physically impossible with a jet in that condition. Flying dead metal by hand.

[00:05:36]When the A-10's hydraulic systems failed under Devary's fire, the aircraft should have become uncontrollable. And on any other jet, it would have been. The F-16, the F-15, the FA-18, all rely on fly-by-wire computer systems to translate pilot inputs into flight surfaces, meaning a hydraulic failure on those aircraft is effectively a death sentence at low altitude. The A-10 was deliberately engineered to be the exception. Its manual reversion system allows the pilot to physically override every electronic and hydraulic system and fly the aircraft using direct mechanical cable connections to the control surfaces alone. Using nothing but raw physical strength to move a 29,000-lb aircraft through the sky. Test pilots who trained on manual reversion described it as trying to steer a freight train through a curve using your bare hands, exhausting, imprecise, and brutally demanding on the body within minutes. The pilot holding that Warthog together wasn't using skill anymore. He was using something closer to stubbornness and physical will. And while Devari was watching the impossible happen in front of him and trying to process it, he was about to make the one decision that transformed a surviving target into an active threat. One roll, one second, one winner. The moment Devari broke away, he [music] handed the engagement to the Warthog on a plate.

[00:07:03]Rolling the Phantom to escape exposed the entire ventral surface of the aircraft, the softest, least armored section of the F-4's fuselage directly across the A-10's nose for approximately half a second. The GAU-8 doesn't require more than that. At its firing rate, half a second produces roughly 30 rounds downrange. And at the engagement distance Devari had closed to, those rounds arrived in a grouping tight enough to destroy a vehicle the size of a tank. The F-4 Phantom's fuselage, built in the 1960s to Cold War armor standards, came apart under that volume of fire the way engineers at Fairchild Republic had specifically calculated an enemy aircraft would, if it ever made the mistake of presenting itself [music] broadside. Devari ejected into open water with nothing left of his jet behind him. Iranian military analysts reviewing the incident later identified at least four separate decision points where Devari could have disengaged and survived with his aircraft intact. He ignored all four. The American pilot said nothing after the engagement except a single radio transmission. Then he flew home on one engine and landed a jet that three separate ground crew supervisors later stated should not have been flyable and filed [music] his post mission report without listing the engagement as a close call. Devari went into that engagement as a hunter and came out of the water as a lesson one that every pilot in his squadron now recites every time the radio crackles his call sign. The A-10 didn't just survive that day. It proved why four decades of politicians trying to kill it kept failing because some machines earn the right to stay alive. If this story hit different, hit that subscribe button and the like button right now because the next one is already going to make this look like a warm-up.