Soviet air attrition late 1942 onwards

[JamesM]

I have noticed that from late 1942 onwards that my aircraft attrition rates seem to be vary high 500+ per week. For example on a complete mud turn (April 43) I have lost 491 air craft mostly IL2's and Pe's. This is very annoying as I am now unable to build any reserves of air craft. So my question is this normal or is it a glitch in the game?

[mmarquo]

Do not fly in the mud....

[76mm]

I think I read that in a recent patch Soviet training flight losses go way up once the Sov plane numbers reach a certain level (apparently as some sort of lame balancing mechanism).

[JamesM]

This is really annoying. I have the percent required to fly down to 25% and ground support turned off, during the Axis turn no ground attacks were lunched and the only air missions were recon sorties. This screen shot shows a mud turn and the attritional losses seem way too high!

[JamesM]

The event log showing over 600 aircraft lost in training!

[JamesM]

This same overly high attrition rates are also affecting ground units.

[davetheroad]

The russians suffered a general shortage of aviation grade fuel throughout the war and although by 1943 they had over 21,000 aircraft in their inventory they certainly could not fly them. The actual operational total in '43 was just over 12,000. Even so those 12,000 planes could only fly on average once or twice a week!.

In fact for both planes and tanks etc there was always a enormous reserve pool in rear area depots. however unlike the game these did not come with attached crew.

given the manufacturing and logistical capabilities there must have been limits to the maximum size of fieldable forces and historically they probably fielded the absolute max they could.

I understand the increased training losses are a method of restricting the absolute size of the russian airforce to reasonable limits.

[ComradeP]

Whether these losses are high all depends on how many aircraft you have and how many units are directly adjacent to the frontline (for ground attrition). With around 4000-5000 planes, you can count on around 200-300 losses, so if you have double that amount you can get the results you get in bad weather turns.

[Jakerson]

Germans have lost 10 000 planes air ratio 1:3 for Soviets is not total disaster. IMHO Best ratio in air losses Soviet can get at that point is 1:2 but that is hard to archive. Soviet always lose tons of more planes than Germans unless German player is nut. 

[pompack]

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.