“There was a major in the Air Force… He saw the first couple of ones. He said, ‘Geez, that thing is as ugly as a warthog.’ And it stuck,” Elliot Kazan manager for the development of the A-10 Thunderbolt II
The person popularly recognized as the Fairchild Republic A-10’s founder passed away. In the 1970s, Elliot Kazan oversaw a group of roughly 500 employees as they created the renowned Warthog. He was 90.
According to Newsday, sepsis-related complications caused Kazan’s death on August 9.
According to his family, Kazan was raised in Queens and attended Polytechnic University to study aeronautical engineering, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a master’s degree in 1950. After a brief stint at Boeing, Kazan accepted a position in Farmingdale with the Republic Aviation Company, which ultimately changed its name to Fairchild-Republic.
While employed there, Kazan was appointed project manager for the creation of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, also known as the “Warthog” due to its bulky and ungainly appearance.
“There was a major in the Air Force… He saw the first couple of ones,” Kazan told Newsday in 2003. “He said, ‘Geez, that thing is as ugly as a warthog.’ And it stuck.”
In October 1975, the first A-10A produced was delivered to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. In the 1970s and 1980s, more than 700 A-10 Thunderbolt II airplanes were produced. In September 2007, the upgraded A-10C achieved initial operational capability. The U.S. and its allies have found great value in the combination of its vast and diversified ordnance load, lengthy loiter time, precise weapons delivery, austere field capability, and survivability. The aircraft is equipped with a seven-barrel GAU-8/A 30mm Gatling gun, with a maximum rate of fire of 3,900 rounds per minute, which can be used to take out tanks among other targets.
“He heard one guy after another say to him, ‘That plane saved my life. It was full of holes and it still flew me back safely,” Kazan’s wife of 55 years, Dorothy, said. “It was the love of his life, that airplane.”
Kazan was even more devoted to his family, which included his two daughters, according to relatives.
“He would work 16 hours and he would come home and there was no running and hiding or anything like that… He would have the girls out sleigh riding,” said his son-in-law, Stephen Kazan, who took his family’s name. “He was a dad first and an engineer second… He was one of those guys who got it right.”
Photo by U.S. Air Force
