Any aircraft design is the result of trade-offs that seek a balance between what is desired and what it possible in practice — and affordable. Sometimes, things come together better than others.
The aircraft you see in the picture was the answer the Navy got when it was looking for something to replace the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and the Douglas A-1 Skyraider. They needed something with more range, a little more speed, the ability to carry a heavy payload of weapons, to provide support for troops on the ground, and to deliver bombs on target. It wasn’t expected to be a top line dog fighter, deliver nukes, or go supersonic, but it still needed to be able to put up a credible defense and operate from an aircraft carrier.
The Corsair II was able to do those things, and do them well enough to stay in active use with the U.S. military from first flight in 1965 until 1991. It served in Vietnam, as well as the invasion of Grenada, Operation El Dorado Canyon, and the Gulf War. (It also played a part in the development of the first stealth fighter, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk.) Greece had a few and kept them up to 2014.
Not bad for a plane built to meet an RFP (Request For Proposal) put out in 1963, that got contract approval in 1964 and was flying the next year. Those were the days.
LTV (Ling-Temco-Vought) took an interesting approach to coming up with the design for the Corsair II. They took the Vought F-8 Crusader for a starting point, and scaled it down. Because the A-7 would be subsonic, it could be lighter and less expensive to build. Although the family resemblance is obvious, the A-7 and the F-8 did not share any common structures; the A-7 was shorter, broader, and had a different wing design. The smaller stature of the A-7 earned it the SLUF nickname: "Short Little Ugly Fucker".
(The Navy has done something similar with the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, if in reverse. The Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet (AKA “Rhino”) is about 20% larger, heavier, and carries advanced avionics with increased payload. The Blue Angels recently upgraded from Hornets to Super Hornets.)
The A-7A initial models were delivered and performed reasonably well in most regards, although it soon became clear they needed more power. Later models got several new engines; the A-7E model is judged by some to be when the design achieved maturity — in part because of changes the Air Force insisted on when they ended up with the Corsair II as well. (Check out the specs on the A-7E — turns out you can pack a lot into 46 feet, 2 inches.)
The Air Force needed something to replace their Skyraiders and the North American F-100 Super Sabre. They wanted a new general-purpose supersonic aircraft, but then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara prevailed and the Air Force got their own version, the A-7D in 1965 for their Tactical Air Command forces. (As opposed to Strategic Air Command.)
The Air Force did get a few things with their version to sweeten the deal: a more powerful engine, a Heads Up Display (HUD), upgraded avionics including better navigation systems, and a rotary cannon in place of the two cannons in the Navy version. (Those avionics would play a critical role in the story linked at the bottom of this diary.) The Air Force also got their preferred in-flight refueling system (Boom versus Probe and Drogue.)
How did it work out? Per the Wikipedia Link,
The USAF A-7D flew a total of 12,928 combat sorties during the war with only six losses[24]—the lowest of any U.S. fighter in the theater. The aircraft was second only to Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in the amount of ordnance dropped on Hanoi and dropped more bombs per sortie with greater accuracy than any other U.S. attack aircraft.[27]
There’s a concept called “air supremacy” — the ability to control the skies. The Air Superiority Fighter is how that’s gained, by being able to take out any opposing forces. Obviously, they get a lot of attention, but it’s not the whole story.
The A-7 Corsair II is one of those aircraft that tends to get overlooked, but it did what it was built to do and did it well. Like the A-10 Thunderbolt II of today, it wasn’t the fastest plane in the airspace, or the longest-ranged, or stealthy, but it was there when it was needed. Read the story. The aircraft in it is below.
...In the case of the A-7, McNamara’s “whiz kids” ran studies comparing its very affordable mach 0.85 design against the Navy’s preferred mach 1.5 sexier, faster, much more expensive wet dream. The favored supersonic designs cost 3 times as much (or more), and they could barely hit mach 1 at the low altitudes thought necessary to evade surface to air missiles. They burned far more fuel to go the same distance, which made them that much bigger and heavier. The A-7 at mach 0.85 could fly closer to the ground than the supersonic lawn-darts, which made it less vulnerable to SAMs. The final nail in the coffin for the Navy’s supersonic dreams was this: for the same price as a single supersonic attack plane, you could acquire and send three of the subsonic A-7s, and hence the odds of successfully destroying the target would be much higher...
Read the whole comment. It also applies to the A-10 and the way the Air Force feels about it. The A-10 is one of the things we can thank John Boyd for.