My early experience with the new strike planner is that it works pretty well up to when the lead aircraft in a formation reaches the Initial Point (IP). Between the IP and the first Turning Point (Egress) after the target, however, CMO still introduces a number of unexpected flightplan deviations that frequently require player intervention. To illustrate this, I’ve attached a save from the Dawn Strike scenario in which flight Bat21 with four Fireflies is about to reach its IP (waypoint 7) for a trail-attack strike on Haeju airfield with rockets. In the Flightplan Editor, all four aircraft are set to Military speed and 500 ft AGL at both the IP and the Target. At the first Turning Point (Egress)---waypoint 9---, they are all set to cruise and 4000 ft ASL.
Assuming the lead aircraft isn’t shot down by AAA (which causes another set of problems that I won’t address here), the Bat21 strike consistently shows three kinds of flightplan deviations that are common to many strikes I’ve set up in the new Flightplan Editor:
- As pointed out here, only the lead aircraft obeys the set flightplan altitude at the IP. When the other three aircraft reach the IP, they default back to a different altitude based on the loadout. This is not so significant with the Bat21 rockets (500 vs 300 ft AGL) but in another strike with AD-4B Skyraiders, the loadout default altitude is 650 ft AGL even though the loadout includes a mixture of M47 napalm (800 ft AGL minimum) and M57 250 lb bombs (650 ft AGL minimum); the lead AD-4B follows the flightplan altitude of 1000 ft AGL and is able to drop all its bombs, but the other aircraft in the formation approach the target at 650 ft AGL and are unable to drop the napalm.
- Once the lead Firefly reaches egress waypoint 9, all four aircraft are immediately set to the cruise speed and 4000 ft ASL altitude assigned to that waypoint in the Flightplan Editor. Two of the following aircraft are still on their approach to the target, and the last aircraft has not even reached the IP, yet they all have backed off to cruise speed and started climbing to 4000 ft ASL. This continues until the three following aircraft reach their next waypoint (either the IP or Target).
- Rather than continuing on their way along the flightplan and leaving the AAA threat behind them, the first aircraft reaching egress waypoint 9 decide to go into a holding pattern and wait for the others to catch up. This puts them at increased risk from the nearby AAA. Often, this first egress point is placed to avoid known threats or to take advantage of terrain masking, so having the aircraft go into a holding pattern at this waypoint is not generally a good idea.
