OA-1K Skyraider II

The armed crop-duster that beat the Super Tucano — the OA-1K Skyraider II is what happens when you bolt armor, Hellfires and a surveillance ball onto an Air Tractor agricultural plane and hand it to Air Force special operations. It won the US Armed Overwatch contract in 2022 over the A-29 Super Tucano, and the two aircraft are perfect mirror images: the OA-1K has the American buy and no export customers, while the A-29 it beat has twenty-plus operators and no US order of consequence. Named for the legendary A-1 Skyraider, it is a cheap, austere-strip gunship for the counter-insurgency wars — arriving just as the Pentagon pivots to China and questions whether it still needs one.

Overview

The OA-1K Skyraider II (company name AT-802U Sky Warden) is a US light-attack and armed-ISR turboprop built by L3Harris on an Air Tractor AT-802 agricultural airframe — the militarized crop-duster that won US Special Operations Command's Armed Overwatch program in August 2022, beating the A-29 Super Tucano, the AT-6 Wolverine and the PZL M28. Designated OA-1K and named for the Douglas A-1 Skyraider AFSOC's forebears flew, it is a taildragger with a ballistic-armored "bathtub" cockpit, 10 hardpoints, and a mission kit — Hellfire and APKWS-guided rockets, Paveway bombs, gun pods, and WESCAM MX-15/MX-20 EO/IR turrets — that turns a $2 million farm plane into a special-operations gunship costing about $2,500 per flight hour, a tenth of an F-16. Its pitch is cheap, persistent, austere-strip close air support and armed overwatch for irregular warfare, with rapid disassembly to fit inside a C-17. But the OA-1K arrived at an awkward moment: with the Pentagon pivoting to high-end conflict with China, its buy has been repeatedly cut — from 75 aircraft toward roughly 45–53 — and its survivability against a peer questioned, even as 18 have been delivered by mid-2026 and initial operational capability is targeted for the end of the fiscal year. It has no combat record yet, one hull lost to a training accident, and, unlike the A-29, no export customers — a US program of record hunting for a mission as the wars it was built for recede.

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