Somehow I missed the part about not flying upside down with negative g on the jet. I just learned that it's a no no.
I had set up some targets for practicing mk-82 CCIP runs. I did a pop up attack on a fuel truck that went pretty smoothly; I came in from the south at 500 feet with the target at my 2 o'clock. Pulled up to around 40* or so and rolled right pulling into the target nose low again. I only had a few seconds to line up and let the bomb go. The bomb landed about one truck length away and the truck was destroyed - room for improvement, but not bad. Then I did a low angle dive attack on a cluster of trucks -- in this fairly simple attack run I rippled three bombs over the target. First bomb landed a little short, but the remaining two were direct. Now that I had lost some weight, I wanted to try to put a single MK-82 into the center of a ring of containers that I had placed for this purpose. I climbed to 10k with the target off my left wing; thought I'd be smart and watch the target from looking down through the top of the canopy, so I rolled toward the target inverted and pushed forward on the stick to keep the nose from falling. Just as I was about to roll over for a steep dive, I heard the engines spooling down. Rolled wings level in about a 30* dive and hit the emergency jettison. Having never practiced an in air engine start I was a little apprehensive. Pulled the throttles back to off and turned on the APU. Meanwhile I gently pulled out of the dive at about 2000 feet headed out to sea. Airspeed was good so I had some time. Once the APU was spooled up I pulled the left throttle to idle hoping it would catch. It did! Fired up the right engine and turned for home as I reset the HSI and made some lame attempt at recovering the CDU. I'm going to have to learn how to re-align in flight -- if it can be done.

Just pop in the nearest airdrome for a quick top off and bio break and tell that story ^^^ while the jets realigns.

WC

Air re-alignment is pretty simple. On your CDU go to the system page. Then INS. Then Align, and select "INFLT" to start the alignment.

Takes ages to re-align in-flight though.

Just noticed this in the manual and remembered this post:

I don't understand why you would negative-G this aircraft for more than 10 sec though. Rolling in on a target takes... 5 seconds? Unless you are pulling some sort of "watch the birdie" Top Gun stunt, I can't imagine being inverted for extended periods of time in the A10.

Disorientation in cloud or at night?

O.K.



Sheeeooooot!
You think flying inverted is bad? How about jettisoning the canopy and turning off your oxygen supply to experiment with the effects of hypoxia?
How about intentionally trying to enter a stall or a spin? How about ejecting on the ground?... Manual be damned, if I can imagine it I'm probably going to try it!

The best thing is, now that I have experienced it first hand, I certainly won't be flying inverted for long in a combat mission (not that I think I would have anyway -- this was a unique situation). Better to find out in a controlled environment than in the middle of combat, right? And, I may add that some others reading this may have learned something too.