pompack -> RE: Soviet air attrition late 1942 onwards (8/1/2011 1:34:03 PM)
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Well, flight schools do not have a monthly quoto of crashes they must meet to stay in business; instead, no matter how hard you try, noob pilots crack up aircraft. If you have one student, you have an excellent chance to get through the week without a crash; if you have 10,000 students you can expect hundreds of crashes each week. Now what is true for new pilots is also true for experienced pilots today and that is with a/c that are literally hundreds of times more reliable than 1942 a/c in spite of being thousands of times more complex. If you fly military a/c at the edge of the envelope bad things can happen to the best pilots. So the bottom line is that if you fly more than you crash more. And if you fly more with dangerous a/c and inexperienced a/c than you crash a lot more. And the higher your combat attrition, than the more new pilots you must train and noobs crash a lot more than experienced pilots. So I guess I don't see anything odd at all historically with a weekly lose of hundreds of Soviet a/c in this period. And note that the same thing happened to the Germans in late 44; the only reason their training losses were so low was because they stopped training due to lack of fuel.
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