Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Peleliu

Thank you for the reply. I need to clarify the issue. My land based aircraft and float plane units on BBs, CAs, CSs, etc. will reduce airframe fatigue when I stand them down or they can't fly due to weather. The fatigue even drops if they are running missions, but have some percentage resting. Fatigue is also reduced when they are taken out of service for maintenance or repairs. My carrier aircraft, however, never seem to reduce airframe fatigue when resting or stood down (except those occasions when taken out of service for maintenance). All of the air groups are carrier trained and capable and the carriers are undamaged. The only way I can recover airframe fatigue is to fly the airgroups to a land base and park them there until fatigue drops...then of course they get more fatigue flying back to the carrier.

On a related note, isn't 30 days maintenance for a Mavis a little excessive? I discovered one of mine flying from Tokyo had 20ish fatigue and was out for a month. I would figure with all of the excess air support and base level in Tokyo of all places they could fix a plane faster than they could build one...

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ORIGINAL: Trugrit


Carrier planes suffer a lot more stress than ground based air or float planes.
A lot of this is from short full speed take offs and the shock of deck landings.

I would say that 30 days is excessive but not unusual for the Japanese during the war.
They had problems getting spare parts.

The Japanese were not very good at maintenance during the war.

I’ll quote from the book Fire in the Sky The Air War in the South Pacific by Eric M. Bergerud, page 23:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1498194.Fire_In_The_Sky

“...However whenever U.S. troops occupied Japanese air bases, they invariably found aircraft scattered about,
often with no obvious serious battle damage. A dramatic example of this is described by Fred Hitchcock,
a ground crewman in the U.S. Fifth Air Force."

"In 1945 we flew into Clark Field in the Philippines. One of our work details was to help clear the hundreds
of Jap planes that were scattered all over the base. They told us there were 1,100 planes and I believe it;
the number was staggering…. I’d say most of them had something like a spark plug missing, or a wheel off.
But the Japanese didn’t seem to have a coordinated salvage effort. I was on the detail that tried to reorganize
the mess. One plane might be lacking a carburetor when another one, a hundred yards away, had a carburetor.
But they never had the coordinated effort to pool the parts and get the maximum number of planes up.
When we raided the place their planes were so dispersed they couldn’t get their flights in the air fast
enough to do serious damage. Some were a mile or so from the runway. It was an unbelievable sight.”

I highly recommend his book, about 700 pages of in depth analysis of the air war and the planes and men.
A very good read with lots of first hand veteran accounts.

Is this not a great game?

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The only way I can recover airframe fatigue is to fly the airgroups to a land base and park them there until fatigue drops

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

If you rebase the air unit to another base on the same rail line, for some reason the maintenance delay is usually reduced.

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Reserve airframes might help with that - it seems that switch to maintenance occures more readily when reserve airframes are present.