Aircraft Usage

[Liebchen]

Air Unit Availability

After being used in an air strike, air units must become available before they can be used in another air strike. The time required for an air unit to become available is variable and depends on Parameter Data (see the Parameter Data Dialog in the Main Program). In addition, if the AA fire associated with the air strike caused the air unit to become Disrupted or Broken, then this represents partial damage to the air unit associated with the strike and this must be recovered from before the air unit becomes available again. Normal Fatigue accumulation and recovery effects apply to air units and although these do not affect the availability of the air unit, they do affect the effectiveness of the air strike.

Example: with an Air Availability value of 20%, an air unit that has carried out a mission will have a 20% chance of being available on the next turn. If it were to fail the availability check, it remains unavailable and rechecks for availablity at the start of each turn until it returns to available status. With a 20% Air Availability value you might expect an air unit to be available on average for 2 air missions per day (assuming 1 day = 10 turns), not counting other combat effects like Disruption and Broken.

The availability of an air unit can also be affected by specific changes to availability as part of the scenario. The Units Menu in the Main Program and Scenario Editor display the changes in air availability that have been defined and allow these changes to be edited.

Low Visibility Air Effects

This is an Optional Rule that causes conditions of low visibility to result in reductions in air unit availability. The exact reductions are determined by parameter data. See the Parameter Data Dialog to determine the exact values that apply to a given scenario.

Whether you want to use them all now and hope that some become available again soon, or save some for later, is entirely up to you, depending upon the variables and the situation, obviously.