Brrrrrt to the Rescue: How Two A-10 Warthogs Saved a Stranded Florida

The A-10 Thunderbolt II is famous for one thing: turning enemy armor into spare parts with its 30mm GAU-8 cannon. But on a quiet evening over central Florida, two Warthogs traded their usual mission for something a little more unusual — saving a 73-year-old man who had fallen overboard into Lake Arbuckle.

A Routine Training Flight Turned Rescue Mission

On May 1, 2026, two A-10s from the 74th Fighter Squadron at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, were running a standard training sortie over the Avon Park Air Force Range. That should have been the whole story. Bombs on target, jets back home, end of shift.

Instead, a call came in from the Polk County Sheriff's Office. They were searching for a missing boater on the nearly 4,000-acre Lake Arbuckle and needed the airspace cleared. The flight lead, a Sandy-qualified pilot trained specifically in combat search and rescue, asked a simple question: could they help?

Night Vision Meets a Dim Cellphone Screen

The answer turned out to be yes — and it played out like a textbook Sandy mission.

One pilot strapped on night vision goggles and started scanning the lake. He picked up the faint glow of a cellphone screen coming from a small boat drifting in the dark. That gave the team a starting point. His wingman switched to thermal imaging and began sweeping the surrounding wetlands for a heat signature.

It worked. The 73-year-old victim was located a short distance from the boat, near the shoreline, with only minor arm injuries. Ground crews moved in and pulled him out.

Why This Rescue Matters

The A-10 isn't built for civilian search and rescue. It's a close air support platform designed to keep ground troops alive in nasty places. But the same tools that make it effective in combat — long loiter time, low-and-slow handling, sharp-eyed pilots, and a sensor suite tuned for finding people — translate surprisingly well to a missing-person call on a Florida lake.

According to 2nd Lt. Kristina Schlemmer, spokesperson for the 23rd Wing, this kind of crossover doesn't happen often. "These requests happen very rarely, but in this case, circumstances lined up to have A-10s in the area," she said.

The Warthog's Quiet Resume

This isn't the first time the Warthog has shown up off-script. Sandy pilots have been pulling downed aviators out of bad situations since Vietnam, and the A-10 inherited that mission set when it joined the fleet. The aircraft has been threatened with retirement so many times it's basically a meme — yet here it is in 2026, still flying, still useful, and now adding "saved a grandfather on a lake" to its resume.

Aircraft: 2x A-10 Thunderbolt II
Unit: 74th Fighter Squadron, Moody AFB
Location: Lake Arbuckle, near Avon Park, Florida
Outcome: Boater located, minor injuries, recovered alive

The Takeaway

Most days, the Warthog's job is straightforward: find bad guys, ruin their day. But every now and then, the mission gets rewritten on the fly. A grandfather went out on the water, something went wrong, and the closest help happened to be a pair of jets built to break tanks. They did the job anyway. That's the kind of story you don't forget — and it's exactly the kind of moment that keeps the A-10's reputation alive long after people keep predicting its retirement.