Serendipity
I find it uncanny that in 2010 I participated in a QWI presentation as part of my Hawk QWI Course.
The subject was COIN aircraft. We used the Spad as our historical case study and considered aircraft such as Super Tucano, Texan 2 and the Air Tractor.
Interestingly we selected Texan 2 mainly due to its large scale US backing and potential for mixed load out. We touted it as dual use aircraft for training and Ops.
L3 are currently marketing a weaponised Air Tractor as a COIN aircraft.
Now I’m not suggesting for one second that anyone listened to us or that we started something in motion but it does prove that it wasn’t just us lowly scrotes that could see the obvious.
BV