1. 25 Pilots flew mission.

2. Duration - Aprox 2 1/2 hours

3. Aircraft Involved:

a. 16 x Uh-1h Slicks
b. 4 x Uh-1h LFT
c. 2 x Gazelle M
d. 2 x Dustoff Uh-1h
e. 1 x F-5E CAS

4 Overview - The mission was to re-enforce Kaspi with Infantry to hold against Soviet Incursion - Mission accomplished, estimated Infantry Battalion Minus was dropped at Kaspi.

5. Admin - Fuel, Ammo, "Bullets and beans" was satisfactory to the mission, with resup adequate at FARP Dunhill and Tbilisi Airfields.

6. Move to Form Up - was a little slow and possibly confusing - i will expand further in next operation orders.

7. Lift Off / Take Off - Was done by Company groups with intervals of aprox 5 secs or so. Was some concertina action by waiting companys. - will extend time to lift to 15 /20 Seconds.

8. Flight to Farp Dunhill from Tbilisi was fine however some formations were loose - Need to practice tighter formation flying (Tight formations protect helicopters)

9. Orbit around FARP Dunhill - As commander i should have articulated that the orbits need to be wide of the FARP, probably on a radius of 1 to 2 Kilometers. Otherwise no problems occurred i could see.

10. Push to LZ - I stipulated in orders that NOE was recommended to the LZ and a left turn of 90 degrees to egress out of the LZ immediatly on take off. Most flights accomplished this , but some were high and as a result took fire. In general the flight did a good job but some of the formations were a bit loose. - Once again training in formation and landings is recommended.

11. Suppression of LZ and surround enemy AAA / SAM - Tiger Company did a great job in suppressing and locating and destroying enemy assets. Some of their choppers got destroyed but to be fair the Huey "gunship" wasnt really operating within its limitations in this scenario. As was alluded to by the Master Jedi of Delta himself " that pilots could see the vulnerability of the Huey for themselves". Well done to the Tigers !

12. Lifts
- A Coy did 2 Lifts into the LZ,
- B Coy did two Lifts into the LZ,
- C Coy did one Lift into the LZ ( Slugs)
Please correct me if im wrong on this ?

13. Medivac / Starlight - the two dedicated Medivac choppers were busy with downed pilots and as far as i could see they did a great job.

14 F-5E CAS - it seems the plane had problems in the CAS role and found it hard to ID enemy ground forces, the pilot did a great job of trying to overcome these problems but possibly an A10 or another AC would be better suited. _ Need to test what would suit our Battalion Ops for future missions.

15 - EOM RTB was excuted with out fuss and done as quikly as possible.

16 - "Death is Death" - we wont enforce this again untill we become so profficient that we are flying legends !

17 - Thanks goes to all who participated, everone turned up on time and early and responded to the briefing/ orders. For the Battalions first major mission of that size we did rather well and should be proud of tthe efforts made by all members to make it so. My special thanks goes to Highway, DaBomb and Cib and the Company Commanders for linking it all together and making it a success.

18 All comments negative and positive are welcome ( being mission specific of course).

You left yourself out of the thanks Strut. Without your contributions it would not have been what it was!! Pat yourself on the back mate, and when you buy your next beer, it'll be on the 229th's account.

The Mission as was from today should have plenty of re-playability in it at the company level. I have made some changes based on some of the feedback and will publish a version soon, but to fly this mission successfully, you should be able to get the job done with 4 x UH-1H + 2 x SU-25T or SA342M providing Anti Armour / SEAD roles (6 AC total).

There are not that many anti air assets in the mission at any one time, but as I said the mission has plenty of re-playability, so don't expect to find things in the same place twice...

Changes incoming;
Time of day set to 7am
Possible T-72 MBT's switched out out for APC's
Add 2 x KA50

1. In planning, make use of predetermined holding areas and/or release points.

2. Enroute formation: Gunship dont need to fly close formations. Once engaged, you as a wing are unable to protect your guy in front then since you are in to close aswell. Use combat cruise or trail.

3. Enroute formation. Do not pass the 3-9 o clock of the guy infront (next nr in line) or decent or climb back into formation without first breaking out and make sure you have proper deconfliction. Deconfliction is the wing his responsibility (next formation nr in line).

4. Medevac. At some point Starlight was flying overhead the city taking lots of fire and AA without the rest of the battalion being informed.
Other than that I think they were kept busy and did a nice job.

5. In my opinion we should not rely on A10s or other fixed wing for CAS/SEAD. As a battalion we are to unfamiliar with incorporating those into large scale missions.
Either use the SA342 or Ka50 for the heavy punches or stick with threats the UH-1 can handle. (.50 cal, zpu-1, etc, maybe 1 or 2 MANPADs).

Really nice to do a large scale mission like this again guys. I enjoyed it. Thanks for all the work.

Apologies for my slow response times I was flying at 14-30 FPS which makes life a little difficult.
A GTX1080 should sort that out.
Got 4 armour kills inc 1 AA gun and really enjoyed the mass formation take off.
Thank you to the organisers and mission builders

I really enjoyed this mission from a dust off point of view. Very challenging to get to wounded personal under heavy fire. I also enjoyed flying in the dark and getting some nvg experience in.

I have two suggestions for dustoffs.
1. I believe dustoffs would be more effective with a farp specifically for dustoffs closer to the combat zone. One pickup and drop off was around thirty mins .
2. Have a third frequency dedicated for communication between dustoff and gunships so that we can get more area specific hostile reports and also request covering fire with out clogging up the battalion frequency.

In conclusion me a stingray really enjoyed our role in the mission and both of us would like to be dedicated dustoff in future missions and train as such pending approval.

Thanks everybody for this awesome event! Great flying with you guys.
I also liked to fly into dawn and NVG-conditions.
The mission itself was very nice and very well done with love to the details!

(HHC/229) Strut wrote:8. Flight to Farp Dunhill from Tbilisi was fine however some formations were loose - Need to practice tighter formation flying (Tight formations protect helicopters).

Is that really true?
I heard some of our reallife helo guys saying "close formations are nice to watch at public airshows, but not really the best option in real combat".
Two reasons for this from my point of view:
1. Flying very close is dangerous by nature, especially when you have to concentrate on other tasks than only keeping the formation (monitoring battlenet radio, switching the frequencies, looking out for threats, maneuver to avoid threats, bad light conditions etc. etc.).
2. Due to the fact that we are not trained like the Blue Angels and also we do not flying the same maneuvers over and over and over again (like the Blue Angels or other demo teams do), situations occur more or less unpredictable that the guy in front has to decelerate quite excessive. When you are very close behind it is even harder to avoid a even more excessive decaleration or crash into the guy in front. When you have a bit more space it is easier to compensate and avoid such over-correction situations and snake effects. It doesn't count very much when you have a very close formation but lose helicopters because of crashing into each other or being ineffective as wingmen with its tasks (beside flying the formation).
3. In case of incoming fire it is even more likely to get damaged by the same fire or by a crashing helicopter in front or aside the closer you fly together.
4. See Xtras post: The closer the formation, the worse the situational awareness and look-out ability regarding threats.

Of course - the more trained we are together as a team the tighter the formation can be. But I guess this happens more or less automatically the more often we fly and practice together. But "have to be CLOSE" should not be the No. 1 rule in favour of flight safety.

Just some thoughts on this specific topic; correct my theses if I am on a wrong path (this goes especially to the guys with a reallife background on this).

Painter.
Slicks will stay closer together to provide flight protection with the door guns. Still tight might be too close but close and loose are good for slick formations.
Yes real tight formations are nice for pictures but will only make your workload higher on approaches and enroute. But close should give you plenty of room.

As guns you want more stand off to also be able to acquire and suppress a target once it pops up. Thats why we use combat cruise or trail.

A big thank you to Strut for the effort of organising this event with the time available, a quite monumental task to take my basic brief and come up with such a professional mission brief.
Another big thanks to Highwayman who took my basic mission and created a thing of beauty with such time taken over the placement of all the revetments and the FARP.
And thanks to all the pilots of the 229th that made last night so memorable.

I thought the comms where excellent throughout and without SRS I think we would have struggled to maintain such good practice using just TS
The professionalism of the comms where a big factor in the immersion of the mission.

I was very pleased with B company and the guys stepped up to the plate well especially Milenko who had never flown with us before last night.
Great work from Ivan who led the flight while I handled comms from 2 slot. Apart from a couple of DCS app crashes we had a fairly incident free evening though 2 slicks where lost by ground fire and or pilot error IIRC and I lost a chopper when friendly infantry flipped me over on the LZ:pale:

It was a pleasure to be a part of and I look forward to the next battalion event. Can I suggest the Christmas holiday period may be a good time for the next one?

One thing I would ask is all pilots read up on the 229th SOP regarding lights. We had a variety of differing options on show during the course of the evening

had a good time thanks to all  

After editing the video footage etc I realized it was Bravo that held up Charlie so they could only get 1 drop in. So Sorry I take full responsability:oops:

Just a point. In future I think we should deconflict by height when we have 2 companies orbiting at the same location

...or deconflict by different holding area (e.g. N side of FARP/ S side of FARP) if height is critical due to hostil units.

(B/229) Cib wrote:After editing the video footage etc I realized it was Bravo that held up Charlie so they could only get 1 drop in

No worries Cib

Adding my thanks to all those who made the mission possible, and all the pilots who made the mission successful - it was pretty awesome seeing all those Hueys (and one little Gazelle) lined up on the runway

One bit of SR feedback I forgot to mention during the verbal debrief: when both VHF and FM radios were transmitting, they distorted each other - pretty much as if it was two people speaking on the same freq at the same time. Did anyone else have that?

evilivan

(B/229) evilivan wrote:... Did anyone else have that?
evilivan

Well known in the SR DCS thread for 1.2.6 - fix is out for test with a few extras - VU meters RX & TX I think - at least some people will know when they are loud

(D/229) Gizzy wrote:

(B/229) evilivan wrote:... Did anyone else have that?
evilivan

Well known in the SR DCS thread for 1.2.6 - fix is out for test with a few extras - VU meters RX & TX I think - at least some people will know when they are loud

Roger - thanks Gizz.