“You can always count on Air Force maintainers … to work miracles like this,” Carr said. “But the A-10 is one of the easier aircraft to get back in the air after shelling out an engine.”

An initial estimate suggested the repair crews might have needed weeks to finish their work. Five days after setting down on the runway, the Warthog took to the air again and returned to the 332nd’s home base—apparently in neighboring Kuwait.

Air Force and Marine personnel delivered spare parts and other equipment to help with the repair effort. The Americans also scrounged gear and improvised tools in order to get the jet back in working order.

For instance, to get the A-10 into a hangar, “we tried to back it in using the [Marine’s seven-ton] truck … no joy,” Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard Stroh, the head of the maintenance team, explained to the service’s journalists. “We tried to use a large Marine fork lift to push it in … no joy.”

“In the end, 12 airmen and two Marines pushed the 40,000 pound aircraft 70 yards uphill into the hangar.”

Once inside the shelter, the repair crew swapped out the broken engine with one taken from another A-10 in the region. “Having a ‘CANN jet’ on hand is a standard practice,” explained a public affairs official with the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing, using a term for a spare aircraft that airmen can quickly “cannibalize” for replacement parts.

The 386th, headquartered at Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base, oversees the day-to-day activities of the 332nd.

The Air Force plans to take apart the malfunctioning motor to figure out exactly what went wrong, the public affairs officer added. The investigation might show the situation was not as serious as it initially appeared.

The original month-long repair time frame could have been based on the needs of more complex planes under the same conditions. With decades of institutional experience under their belts and a rugged aircraft, Warthog mechanics know what sort of problems to expect and how to fix them quickly.

And despite Stohler praising the skill of the pilot of this “difficult-to-handle” plane, the Warthog is “not … ‘difficult to handle’ with an engine out,” a former A-10 pilot told us on the condition of anonymity.

Military and commercial crews both train to deal with these sorts of emergencies with all sorts of aircraft with multiple engines.

Still, the incident in Iraq does show that the Warthogs are tough enough for combat now … while its supposed replacement is not. The Air Force’s F-35 stealth fighters — which the service expects will also replace the remaining F-15 and F-16 fighter jets—don’t work always as advertised even in heavily scripted tests, and are years away from being fully operational.

Yet even with the straight-winged jets continually demonstrating their strengths, the Air Force refuses to back down in an increasingly public fight with American legislators over the aircraft’s future. The flying branch insists it needs to ditch the venerable A-10s to free up money for other projects, namely the troublesome F-35.

But “if we put all of our eggs in that basket, we’ll end up with an Air Force incapable of providing what ground commanders need and should be able to expect,” Carr noted.