The callsign “Sandy,” used by U.S. Air Force aircraft and pilots conducting combat search-and-rescue operations, traces to late 1965.
Capt. J.W. “Doc” George, a U.S. Air Force A-1 Skyraider pilot, arrived at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, as part of a CSAR replacement rotation from Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. When asked what callsign his flight would use, he suggested the one he used at Bien Hoa: “Sandy.”
The name stuck, was passed to his replacement and soon became the standard callsign for all A-1 Skyraiders flying CSAR missions protecting downed aircrews.
The Sandy role was later transferred to the faster LTV A-7D Corsair II in 1972 as the last Skyraiders were withdrawn from Southeast Asia. However, the A-7 struggled in the role due to its higher maneuvering speeds, which made it less effective for low-and-slow visual searches and close helicopter escort than the A-1.
In the late 1970s, the Corsair passed the CSAR baton to the A-10 Thunderbolt II Warthog, which offered excellent loiter time, survivability and firepower suited to the mission. The A-10 airframe and its pilots still carry the “Sandy” callsign today.
As the Air Force accelerates plans to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II by fiscal year 2029, the service faces a growing set of unanswered questions about what replaces it in combat search and rescue, one of the military’s most specialized mission sets.
More than an analysis of replacement aircraft and their capabilities, the transition raises concerns about the pilots in the cockpit, who for nearly five decades have received specialized training in the combat search-and -rescue mission and built trust within the CSAR community. With congressional oversight and legislation underscoring concerns about CSAR operational readiness, and on the heels of a CSAR mission over Iran that brought two F-15E airmen home, the stakes of those unanswered questions have taken on a new sense of urgency.
Highly skilled Sandy pilots
In the past several decades, A-10s have assumed the Sandy role in CSAR operations in the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and most recently in the April 3, 2026, operation that recovered two American F-15E Strike Eagle airmen from Iranian territory. One supporting A-10 sustained heavy battle damage during the mission; its pilot continued flying long enough to eject safely over Kuwait.
During an April 6, 2026, press conference detailing that mission, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the role of a Sandy: “A Sandy has one mission: to get to the survivor, bring the rescue force forward, and put themselves between that survivor on the ground and the enemy,” Caine said. “They are committed to this. This is what they live for. And this is what they’ve trained for, for many, many years.”
Only the most experienced A-10 pilots are selected for Sandy qualification, which requires specialized training in CSAR tactics and procedures as part of a full CSAR task force, including HC-130 tankers and HH-60 helicopters.
This advanced training takes place primarily at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, home of the 357th Fighter Squadron, the Air Force’s formal A-10 training unit. Here, Sandy pilots participate in integrated exercises, local ranges and large-scale events like Angel Thunder, the Air Force’s largest and most comprehensive CSAR exercise. Additional operational integration takes place at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia.
In a typical four-ship A-10 Sandy CSAR formation, each aircraft has a specific role, according to USAF documents. Sandy 1 is the lead pilot, serving as the rescue mission commander and on-scene commander, responsible for overall command, survivor authentication and threat suppression. Sandy 2 provides cover and backup leadership. Sandy 3 and Sandy 4 focus on the escort mission, protecting the HH-60 rescue helicopters throughout.
For nearly five decades, the A-10 has proven ideally suited for the Sandy role.
Still, the Air Force is moving forward with plans to retire the A-10 by fiscal 2029. What replaces it in the Sandy role, and whether any other platform can replicate what the Warthog and A-10 Sandy-qualified pilots bring to the CSAR mission, are questions the service has not yet answered.
CSAR in a world without Warthogs
The Air Force has confirmed there is currently no formal or informal transition underway for the Sandy 1 rescue mission commander role — the on-scene command function of every CSAR operation — to any other specific airframe.
“Discussions are still ongoing regarding the use of multi-role platforms serving in the A-10’s Sandy 01 RMC role,” an Air Combat Command spokesperson said. The same applies to the Sandy 2, 3 and 4 escort roles, the spokesperson said.
The service’s stated transition strategy centers less on the aircraft and more on the expertise of A-10 pilots themselves, suggesting the F-35A as the likely destination platform for Sandy-qualified A-10 pilots.
“The Air Force is leveraging the extensive experience of its A-10 pilots to ensure a successful transition to other aircraft,” the 355th Wing Public Affairs office said. “A-10 pilots bring a wealth of expertise in close air support and combat search and rescue experience, which is invaluable as the A-10 continues to divest and they transition to 5th generation assets like the F-35.”
The service also acknowledged that standards for validating successor-platform performance in the CSAR mission are a work in progress.
The Pentagon “is carefully reexamining future Close Air Support and Combat Search and Rescue requirements,” the 355th Wing Public Affairs office said, “including how the Air Force will validate the effectiveness of its multi-role fighter fleet in performing all aspects of the CAS mission.”
No specialized Sandy qualification program for any successor platform, such as the one that existed for the A-10 for many years, has been confirmed to exist or be under development.
Lt. Col. Joel Bier, a retired U.S. Air Force Weapons School instructor pilot and Sandy 1 instructor with more than 2,500 hours in the A-10, said the service’s transition strategy underestimates the complexity of the Sandy mission.
“No other pilots train to Close Air Support, Forward Air Control (Airborne), and Combat Search and Rescue with the ferocity of the A-10 community,” Bier said.
The challenge, Bier said, is not simply whether the F-35A, F-15E or F-16 airframes are capable of performing the Sandy mission, but whether the pilot is properly trained for it.
“A jack of all trades is master of none. Each of the fighter communities trains to a half-dozen or more equally complex missions, but CSAR is fundamentally different. It is friendly-centric and combines elements of air superiority and contingency planning at lower speeds and longer durations that fighter platforms do not routinely train to.”
A-10 versus F-35
In 2016, the Air Force conducted testing to evaluate potential Sandy replacements at the 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Lt. Col. Joshua Wood, the squadron’s commander at the time and an F-35 pilot, was on record expressing skepticism about direct platform comparisons.
“When you try to have a comparative analysis of a single-mission platform like the A-10 against a platform like the F-35, which is fundamentally designed from the ground up to do something completely different,” Wood told Combat Aircraft magazine, as reported by War is Boring in 2016, “you run the risk of drawing unrealistic conclusions.”
Still, Wood described what happened when a former A-10 Sandy 1 instructor who had recently cross-trained into the F-35 stepped into a lackluster CSAR exercise.
“No kidding, he shows up and within five minutes on station he’s quarterbacked the whole thing,” Wood told the magazine. “They’ve rescued the survivor and everyone goes home.”
Wood attributed the result not to the F-35’s capabilities, but to the pilot’s CSAR background and Sandy training. “I would say 75% is the pilot,” he said.
Bier said the test results underscored the importance of Sandy training more than the F-35’s suitability for the mission.
“Would the F-35 pilots have stepped in if an F-16 or F-15E CSAR test had been going smoothly? Would they have intervened at all if they weren’t both recent A-10 Weapons School graduates and Sandy 1 instructors who had only transferred to the F-35 six to nine months earlier? And in the decade since, has anyone in the F-35 community created a single new Sandy qualified for the mission? The answer to all three is no,” Bier said.
“Those F-35 pilots, who I personally know and respect, never even flew another CSAR in the F-35 outside that test environment — a fact that speaks volumes about how the Air Force has prioritized the Sandy transition plan," he added.
A separate 2022 Pentagon test report comparing the F-35A and A-10C, obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, found that F-35A pilots reported a significantly higher workload than A-10C pilots in the forward air control mission, a role closely aligned with the on-scene command demands of Sandy. The report also noted that pilots from both aircraft found that the A-10C and F-35A performed more effectively together in contested CSAR than either platform did alone, pointing more toward a combined model than a direct replacement.
The test report was completed in February 2022, nearly three years after testing concluded in 2019. The report was finally made public more than six years after the tests took place — years after Congress had already begun approving the A-10 retirement the test was meant to inform.
CSAR community trusts the Warthog
The flight characteristics that define the Sandy mission present their own challenges for potential successor airframes.
“It’s fast enough to stay ahead of the rescue force, but slow enough to scour the ground for threats to it, and rugged enough to take hits from that threat when necessary,” Bier said of the Warthog.
The A-10’s unique capabilities extend to the rescue helicopter crews the Sandy pilots are tasked with protecting.
“A-10 Sandys serve HH-60W Jolly Green crews as their Rescue Escort — ensuring they arrive safely and with all the pertinent information at the downed aircrew,” Bier said. “Fighters will struggle to expose the small arms and AAA threats from medium altitude, while shifting to rotary wing fires sacrifices speed, armor and communications relay. These shortfalls increase risk to both the Jollys and the isolated personnel.”
The relationship between the A-10 and the accompanying CSAR aircraft is not incidental, Bier said, but rather by design.
“Calling the HH-60W or HC-130J flawed in the Sandy role is like saying the A-10 is deficient in the Jolly or Crown missions. It’s not intended as disrespect, nor is it a design flaw — it’s an intentional symbiosis. That’s precisely why Sandy, Jolly and Crown are synonymous with the CSAR mission.”
Lt. Col. Ryan Rutter, commander of the 357th Fighter Squadron at Davis-Monthan, described the relationship between the A-10 community and the rescue force in a recent 355th Wing release.
“The trust between the A-10 and the rest of the rescue community is absolute,” Rutter said. “They know we will do whatever it takes to protect them while they work to bring our teammates home.”
On April 3, 2026, the same day A-10s in the Sandy role helped recover Dude 44 Alpha from Iran, the 357th Fighter Squadron graduated its last class of A-10 pilots.
In official photo captions, the Air Force called the ceremony “the end of an era for A-10 training.” Air Combat Command confirmed the 357th is on track to inactivate in fiscal 2026, although specific timelines were not available.
Whether the closure of the 357th marks the end of the Sandy qualification pipeline entirely, or whether the Air Force plans to establish a similar program for successor platforms, remains unclear. Neither the 355th Wing nor Air Combat Command Public Affairs responded specifically to questions about the future of Sandy qualification training by the time of publication.
Congressional oversight
The fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law in December 2025, was the latest in a series of congressional measures aimed at slowing the A-10’s retirement. The measure required the Air Force to deliver a detailed briefing to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees no later than March 31, 2026, on the status of A-10 aircraft inventory and the service’s transitional plan for divesting all A-10s prior to fiscal 2029.
That deadline has passed. The Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs office could not confirm whether the briefing had been delivered. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has pushed to stave off the A-10 retirement, did not immediately respond to questions about whether the committee had received the briefing.
It is unclear whether the A-10’s recent effectiveness in Operation Epic Fury factors into the Air Force’s transition briefing or divestment plans.
The NDAA also mandated that the Air Force maintain a minimum inventory of 103 A-10s through Sept. 30, 2026, an amendment authored by Scott, reflecting congressional concerns about the service’s transition planning and potential gaps in mission readiness.
In a statement provided to Defense News, Scott cited the A-10’s recent performance in Iran.
“For 50 years, the A-10 Warthog has reliably supported critical military missions. I was proud to lead an amendment in the FY26 NDAA blocking the premature retirement of A-10s currently in service today. Because the fleet is alive, the A-10 is proving why it’s critical to our forces, providing air power for freedom and leading the rescue efforts for our airmen that were recently secured from hostile forces in Iran,” Scott said. “I will continue to work diligently to ensure that our military is properly equipped with the best weapons systems available.”
Scott pressed the issue at an April 15 HASC Subcommittee on Readiness hearing, when he asked Gen. John Lamontagne, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, what the service was doing to prepare for CSAR operations when the A-10 retires.
Lamontagne responded: “It’ll be a mix of platforms, just like it’s been a mix of platforms in the past with HH-60s and overhead folks doing that coordination role that the A-10s have done very well over the years.”
Scott noted that the HH-60 is a helicopter, the rescue platform, not the Sandy escort. Lamontagne clarified he had understood the question to be about CSAR broadly, rather than the fixed-wing Sandy escort role specifically.
Despite these unanswered questions, Lt. Col. Bier offered a potential path forward.
“If the Air Force proceeds with final A-10 divestment in fiscal year 2027, significant CAS and CSAR capabilities risk being lost due to the compressed timeline,” Bier said. “Extending the remaining A-10 squadrons until a viable replacement is identified offers a logical bridge.”
Bier noted that, barring congressional intervention, an indefinite extension is unlikely given the service’s well-documented intention to move on from the A-10.
Absent extending the A-10 platform, one of the multi-role fighters already slated to replace A-10 units would likely inherit the Sandy mission. But platform selection alone is not enough, he said.
“The key is selecting an aircraft to deliberately carve out dedicated squadrons with a Designed Operational Capability statement for the Sandy/CSAR mission,” Bier said. “This must include a dedicated training mandate — modeled on the A-10’s current Ready Aircrew Program tasking — and unique Air Force Specialty Codes to prevent diluting that training in the larger multi-role platform community. These actions protect the Sandy community from mission creep and preserve its unwavering commitment to the CSAR covenant: that others may live.”
Bier warned that the Air Force cannot afford to ignore the hard-won lessons of the past.
“As the old military saying goes, lessons are written in blood,” Bier said. “Sacrificing over 50 years of hard-won institutional knowledge dooms our future warriors to relearn them the hard way.”
