The tooling, the mylars, the analysis, everything, gone gone gone (well, Northrop and the AF have the docs, allegedly)
And the people, who are absolutely the most important component, cuz they know where the bodies are buried in the design...dumped. Gone. Dead (really).
Funny, since Boeing won a $2 billion contract in 2007 to build new A-10 wings.
I guess they're scratching their heads right now and cruising the bingo halls of The Villages looking for retired Republic engineers...
In a lot of these contracts that's exactly what they do. They bring in retirees as contractors. Whether Boeing needs to do that with the information they have or not, I don't know, but it's a pretty common practice. Right now, there are at least 3 guys within earshot of me in my office who fit that description. We couldn't have met contractural obligations without them.
Note also that it's 2 Billion just to have the wings built on contract...at least at this point. Just the wings for 240 airplanes. Now extrapolate that to the entire airframe, and remember that Boeing has existing plants that do contract work.
So did it make sense to let Republic go down the drain? Was it fair to them after they produced the original airplane?
The point is that the re-start costs in both dollar and human terms are enormous.