Quote:
Originally Posted by emsoy
Markus, I hear what you're saying and it is our intention to add quick-turnaround.
But there is no way a combat aircraft can fly 40 combat sorties in a row with 30 min turnaround. Or 10. Or 5. The latter have been achieved, but only a handful times by just a few pilots. So its not something we'll base an air ops model on.
Flying a combat mission is like running a marathon. Pilots and aircraft need to rest. They can do about one per day sustained, 2 per day during surge (which is an impressive achievement - try running 85km per day for 5 days straight!), in very rare cases 3, and almost never as many as 5. The latter happens once or twice in extreme cases during a war, which is not often with 10 000+ sorties flown.
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sorry to interrupt, and I hate to point out that it sounds bureaucracy to me.
it's more like the officer saying, hey, my pilot will get tired, and you should not fly a second round right now, have to wait for 6 hour interval.
Again, I think the right way to do it is to calculate the fatigue of the pilot and crew, as well as the mechanical failure rate accumulated by frequent action. ie. 24 AC in the beginning, and after the first round 1 is grounded due to failure. Then when it comes to 4 intensive mission within 24 hours, 18 of then will be grounded for different reasons and ready time will vary from the reason.
Different aircraft has different ready and maintenance time. It depends on basic design, proficiency of the crew, mechanical and electronic failure rate, in flight damages, plus some factors accumulated in high intensive mission.
You guys are pro, and I believe you have the right formula to calculate the real readiness of AC in combat.