When I give a history tour with young flight students in Pensacola, I always show them the score board of the Hornet with all those Japanese air to air kills (over 600) I would point and tell them to imagine the opening days of the war with China and being on the 7th fleet watch floor and hearing and seeing all the PLB’s going off over t…
When I give a history tour with young flight students in Pensacola, I always show them the score board of the Hornet with all those Japanese air to air kills (over 600) I would point and tell them to imagine the opening days of the war with China and being on the 7th fleet watch floor and hearing and seeing all the PLB’s going off over the South China Sea and Sea of Japan. I pointedly ask them: “Since this WILL be you or squadron mates. HOW will we rescue you? Submarines will be too important and critically employed to risk for a rescue. The rotary assets will be busy engaged in ASW or the DDG won’t be in the area due to tasking, and the CV will be busy engaging in reducing the LLOA for its next strike or its survival. What is the plan?!?”
The look on their faces is profound and I can tell it’s a thought and discussion they haven’t had up until then.
Rotary rescues provide an advantage over latency. Because a helo can hover and recover. But the environment must be semi permissive and with in range of the rescue. This makes a sea plane the best choice based on range alone and chance of success and survival of the rescue asset.
Admiral Aquilino is missing an opportunity to save training dollars to replace our airman and more importantly he is missing an opportunity to maintain the fighting spirit of those squadrons when they are tasked to fly and fight knowing they or their squadron buddies have a legitimate chance of rescue. To pretend or ignore that rescues won’t be an outcome of our war with China is a moral hazard and criminal.
I would hate to be the TFCC or Battle Watch Captain when the opening blows begin knowing we can’t rescue those aircrews.
The military industrial complex if any has had the populace watching the wrong movies, then. The consumer certainly has the expectation that for their tax dollars they get those Hollywood rescues. They always have. Weeks of briefings with numbers of pilots drowned are going to be some kind of lit television.
The cost to replace these aircrews is going to be on order of magnitude due to the particular skill set and years to grow them. We can’t afford to not have a plan to recover them and get them back into the fight. Imagine if we wasted / sacrificed our airwings from Yorktown, Lexington, Wasp, and Hornet? We would have had no instructors to rotate back and train our new pilots. The thought process is very short and direct when understanding that value.
Grandpa Scoobs' ticket to the war zone was expedited by the events of the Battle of the Philippine Sea - namely the (in)famous "Mission Beyond Darkness" that left scores of aviators scattered in the ocean west of Mariannas. Initial reports were that all these missing airmen were permanently lost and replacement squadrons were needed ASAP; fortunately due to massive air-sea rescue efforts the vast majority of these missing airmen were eventually recovered - a luxury I doubt we'll be afforded in the future. As it was, Grandpa Scoobs & Co. joined Lexington CV-16 at Eniwetok three weeks after Phil Sea in time to cover the landings on Guam - how quickly could we reconstitute one (let alone multiple) decimated carrier air wings today?
I am privy to the current production rates of SNA. Current Navy (start of API / NIFE. These are under ideal conditions with availability of aircraft and timing of student loading and notional. Some may be faster but most are average or later:
P8 pilot - 18 months
P8 NFO - 12 months
E2/C2 - 18 months
F18/EA18 - 18 - 24 months
F35 - 36 months
Rotary Navy - 14 months
So you can see the production latency. We would need to pull in recently retired and cadre instructors to rebuild an airwing and that would take time in itself to imitate a CAT 2 syllabus and have the aircraft for flights.
It’s cheaper and more effective in a long term war to keep what we have and recover them when we can. Massive losses and writing them off in the beginning will take years to recover from. Of course that is relative to a loss of carrier as well. It would take a decade to build a new one even if we have control of our grid and our yards aren’t destroyed.
When I give a history tour with young flight students in Pensacola, I always show them the score board of the Hornet with all those Japanese air to air kills (over 600) I would point and tell them to imagine the opening days of the war with China and being on the 7th fleet watch floor and hearing and seeing all the PLB’s going off over the South China Sea and Sea of Japan. I pointedly ask them: “Since this WILL be you or squadron mates. HOW will we rescue you? Submarines will be too important and critically employed to risk for a rescue. The rotary assets will be busy engaged in ASW or the DDG won’t be in the area due to tasking, and the CV will be busy engaging in reducing the LLOA for its next strike or its survival. What is the plan?!?”
The look on their faces is profound and I can tell it’s a thought and discussion they haven’t had up until then.
Rotary rescues provide an advantage over latency. Because a helo can hover and recover. But the environment must be semi permissive and with in range of the rescue. This makes a sea plane the best choice based on range alone and chance of success and survival of the rescue asset.
Admiral Aquilino is missing an opportunity to save training dollars to replace our airman and more importantly he is missing an opportunity to maintain the fighting spirit of those squadrons when they are tasked to fly and fight knowing they or their squadron buddies have a legitimate chance of rescue. To pretend or ignore that rescues won’t be an outcome of our war with China is a moral hazard and criminal.
I would hate to be the TFCC or Battle Watch Captain when the opening blows begin knowing we can’t rescue those aircrews.
The military industrial complex if any has had the populace watching the wrong movies, then. The consumer certainly has the expectation that for their tax dollars they get those Hollywood rescues. They always have. Weeks of briefings with numbers of pilots drowned are going to be some kind of lit television.
Drones somehow?
The cost to replace these aircrews is going to be on order of magnitude due to the particular skill set and years to grow them. We can’t afford to not have a plan to recover them and get them back into the fight. Imagine if we wasted / sacrificed our airwings from Yorktown, Lexington, Wasp, and Hornet? We would have had no instructors to rotate back and train our new pilots. The thought process is very short and direct when understanding that value.
Grandpa Scoobs' ticket to the war zone was expedited by the events of the Battle of the Philippine Sea - namely the (in)famous "Mission Beyond Darkness" that left scores of aviators scattered in the ocean west of Mariannas. Initial reports were that all these missing airmen were permanently lost and replacement squadrons were needed ASAP; fortunately due to massive air-sea rescue efforts the vast majority of these missing airmen were eventually recovered - a luxury I doubt we'll be afforded in the future. As it was, Grandpa Scoobs & Co. joined Lexington CV-16 at Eniwetok three weeks after Phil Sea in time to cover the landings on Guam - how quickly could we reconstitute one (let alone multiple) decimated carrier air wings today?
I am privy to the current production rates of SNA. Current Navy (start of API / NIFE. These are under ideal conditions with availability of aircraft and timing of student loading and notional. Some may be faster but most are average or later:
P8 pilot - 18 months
P8 NFO - 12 months
E2/C2 - 18 months
F18/EA18 - 18 - 24 months
F35 - 36 months
Rotary Navy - 14 months
So you can see the production latency. We would need to pull in recently retired and cadre instructors to rebuild an airwing and that would take time in itself to imitate a CAT 2 syllabus and have the aircraft for flights.
It’s cheaper and more effective in a long term war to keep what we have and recover them when we can. Massive losses and writing them off in the beginning will take years to recover from. Of course that is relative to a loss of carrier as well. It would take a decade to build a new one even if we have control of our grid and our yards aren’t destroyed.
How fast can we build replacement airplanes?
It will be a come as you are war. If it's not on hand now, we're not building a Willow Run factory to crank out a B24 every hour
That’s why we need the sea planes now to be able to rescue our current inventory of aviators…. Is this thing on?!
"The military industrial complex if any has had the populace watching the wrong movies, then.
FBI "Hold my beer".