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Then why not add armor protection for the pilot, cooling system etc. to make the aircraft successful in the CAS role? Otherwise you are just throwing an aircraft and pilot away.
Only five hundred A-36's were built. The results of flight tests conducted at Florida's Eglin Army Air Field seemed to reinforce the Army's doubts about dive-bombing, and the A-36.
The A-36 dove at speeds approaching 500 mph; the brakes only reduced the speed to about 350mph. Unfortunately, one of the test airplanes crashed because it lost its wings during a vertical dive. Not surprisingly, Army officials decided that the airplane had great diving capabilities for a fighter, but dove too fast for a dive – bomber. As a result of all this, the Army restricted the plane's dive-angles to 70 degrees. In addition, the evaluators at Eglin recommended that the A-36 be used mainly as a low-altitude attack airplane, and that the dive brakes be eliminated.
One of the challenges faced by A-36 pilots was a lack of specialized training in dive-bombing techniques. A few Navy and Marine instructors were "loaned" to the Army, but most Army aviators learned their trade through improvisation. Dills recalls:
"We had no dive-bombing training in flying school, but when I got to my RTU (Replacement Training Unit) in Sarasota, Florida, they had P-40's. We had little twenty five or fifty pound things with little explosive charges, and we'd drop them on the bombing range. We glide bombed at a sixty degree angle, but we didn't go vertical. People just didn't do that – in any airplane. It would have scared the hell out of them, I guess. But once we got over "there", people starting shooting at you and you did things that you never would've thought of before. Vertical dives worked so well in the A-36, that we didn't think twice about doing it in P-40's (later on) – with NO dive brakes!