On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found her.

In an instant the cockpit lit up with warnings, the controls went dead, and the jet rolled hard toward the streets below. What she did over the next hour turned a near-certain ejection into one of the most celebrated saves in modern air-combat history.

One second, everything changed

The missile tore into the A-10’s right side. Shrapnel punched more than 150 holes through the fuselage and tail, opened a football-sized gap in the right stabiliser, and severed both of the jet’s hydraulic systems — the systems that move the flight controls. A hydraulically-flown aircraft with no hydraulics is, in most jets, a parachute waiting to happen.

She had a choice to make, fast, and the ground beneath her was the last place any pilot wants to land by parachute.

Cables and cranks

The A-10 has something most fast jets do not: a manual reversion system, a backup web of cables, pulleys and cranks that lets a pilot fly the aircraft by muscle when the hydraulics are gone. Pilots describe flying it as wrestling a truck with no power steering — at hundreds of knots. Campbell flipped to manual reversion and, astonishingly, the crippled Warthog answered.

With her flight lead talking her through it, she coaxed the shattered jet more than 300 miles back to base, roughly an hour of flying by hand, feeling for every input. Then, rather than eject over friendly territory, she chose to try the landing — and set it down cleanly.

Why the Warthog, and the pilot, are legends

Campbell earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for that hour. The story is also a tribute to the aircraft itself: the A-10 was designed from the outset to be shot and survive, with redundant systems, a titanium ‘bathtub’ around the pilot, and that manual-reversion lifeline. It is exactly why crews and soldiers love the ugly, indestructible Warthog — and why its long-delayed retirement is mourned.

Kim Campbell went on to command, to teach, and to write about that day. But the image that endures is a young captain standing beside a jet riddled with holes, both of them somehow still in one piece.

Sources: U.S. Air Force; The Aviation Geek Club; Task & Purpose; The War Zone; Kim Campbell, Flying in the Face of Fear.