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Subject:
China Takes The High Road to Carrier Operations
SYSOP
7/17/2014 6:19:21 AM
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keffler25
7/17/2014 12:19:41 PM
It’s unknown if the Chinese are also following the pre-World War II Japanese Navy approach to carrier pilot selection in training. The Japanese entered World War II using a system similar to what China is using now. In 1941, a Japanese pilot trainee needed 700 hours of flight time to qualify as a full-fledged pilot in the Imperial Navy, while his American counterpart needed only 305 hours to serve on U.S. carriers. About half of the active duty pilots in the U.S. Navy in late 1941 had between 300 and 600 hours flying experience, a quarter between 600 and 1000 hours, and the balance more than 1000 hours. Most of these flight hours had been acquired in the late 1930s.
Thus at the beginning of the war nearly 75 percent of the U.S. Navy's pilots had fewer flying hours than did the least qualified of the Japanese Navy's pilots.
And it showed in battle.
The early carrier battles between the Japanese and their British and American opponents revealed three things...
a. Japanese pilots could formate and fly off as coordinated strike groups in as little as fifteen minutes after the first plane lifted off from their flight decks. This was astonishing, when you realize that this was their performance level at Midway!
One Japanese carrier hit the Yorktown twice with strike packages spaced no more than five hours apart.
b. What Japanese training did for their pilots extended to their carrier air divisions. Specialist with hundreds of hours experience in maintaining arming fueling and moving planes manned Japanese carriers. Japanese industrial management experts had worked out an extremely dangerous strike below arm refuel and move above deck aircraft cycle that allowed the Japanese carriers to retain relatively uncluttered decks during carrier operations. This made for a sortie tempo that at times was twice as fast as their American counterparts, who as late as the battle of the Eastern Solomons still had not worked out the US decklanding recovery spotting and arming procedures. American practice as it developed was to refuel and rearm on the deck, which cluttered takeoff runs and crowded a flight deck. It might take an American carrier an hour to get its strike package off in the middle of 1943. Japanese sorties could take as little as thirty minutes and this after their China war veterans were mostly dead., The allies do not like to mention exchange ratios and losses from this part part of the war. It is rather embarrassing.
C. While the sheer speed and professional offensive oriented procedures the Japanese adopted bore early fruit, it proved disastrous in a sustained operational tempo by the numbers naval war. The law of averages catches up when a training program that produces thousands of 200 hour pilots wipes out the 2000 600 hundred pilots you had, and you are left with 90 hour wonders to face veterans who have accrued a thousand hours apiece in COMBAT over two years of very hard fighting in the Solomons . Wrong deck handling procedures and a fatally incompetent firefighting doctrine and I can see where the the outcomes in the Pacific campaign at sea came..
I hope the Chinese are stupid enough to follow Japanese and Russian naval practices. .It will make them easier to KILL.
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Damage Control
7/17/2014 8:28:21 PM
I have always believed that part of the reason for the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy was Hubris. The Japanese Navy had been undefeated since the Russo-Japanese war 40 years before Pearl Harbor. They had dedication, equipment, training and leadership and they knew it! We still believed in Battle Ships. When Battle Ship Row went up we were forced to rely on carriers with wooden flight decks, a few pilots, and a lot of planes that were out of date (remember the Buffalo Brewster?). In our insecurity and fear of paying an even bigger butchers bill, we developed Damage Control Sections (DC), trained our sailors to be firefighters and practiced worst case scenarios. We took a beating, but learned lessons. Damaged aircraft with ammo and burning aircraft were pushed over the side. Bomb slides were rigged to push explosives into the sea, safety personnel were stationed at key points. When enemy aircraft were sighted, carrier fuel tanks were vented and the air was replaced by Carbon Dioxide Gas. Fire retardant suits, hoses, breathing equipment and specialized DC personnel were on station - even emergency electrical and communication lines were laid out in case of need. Ships Officers, Chiefs and Sailors trained as hard as the Pilots, and that's what won the carrier war. Go aboard any US Navy Ship today and you will find that Fire Fighting Drills are a constant. :7)
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tteng
7/18/2014 3:30:53 PM
To bring it up to speed, wouldn't it be easier to go to various PLAAF units and pick the 'cream' of its 4/4+ gen pilots (whom already routinely fly 200 hours annual), and retrain for carrier training/duty?
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keffler25
7/18/2014 4:09:34 PM
Nope.
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keffler25
7/18/2014 4:10:18 PM
To bring it up to speed, wouldn't it be easier to go to various PLAAF units and pick the 'cream' of its 4/4+ gen pilots (whom already routinely fly 200 hours annual), and retrain for carrier training/duty?
Nope.
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Photon
7/23/2014 6:11:38 PM
I think what the Chinese are after is to build a cadre of well-trained naval aviators, then worry about expanding its corps of naval aviators. Highly skilled and technical positions like carrier aviation and operations is not exactly something one can cut corners. As for the qualitative factor, they do not necessarily have to match their US counterparts; if they can hold against other Asian air forces, then they are in a good position. As a student of the Cold War, they are less likely to stumble into the kind of US-Soviet arms race. (Chances are, they do not have to, as the US is going through imperial overreach which means it cannot leap into another arms race. Will US allies increase their burden on military spending? So far, this has not taken place.) The expansion of military power is only one of the components of Chinese strategy; economic and diplomatic weights against their neighbors play bigger roles.
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