RTB with an enemy on the tail

[Jorge_Stanbury]

Is it possible to set a doctrine that danger should overrule fuel state?

I have seen that flights will RTB once bingo fuel (or whatever setting is defined), with an enemy dangerously closing or even firing.

This normally ends with an aircraft splashed, but if I catch it, I will un-assign and manually change doctrine to "ignore fuel state" and then order to engage, then order RTB once danger is taken care of.

if it can be dealt with doctrine, please let me know how. If not, then a wishlist

[SeaQueen]

Is it possible to set a doctrine that danger should overrule fuel state?

I have seen that flights will RTB once bingo fuel (or whatever setting is defined), with an enemy dangerously closing or even firing.

This normally ends with an aircraft splashed, but if I catch it, I will un-assign and manually change doctrine to "ignore fuel state" and then order to engage, then order RTB once danger is taken care of.

if it can be dealt with doctrine, please let me know how. If not, then a wishlist

Let's think about this from a pilot's perspective: You're between a rock and a hard place. You can scram and maybe get shot down, or you can fight, maybe get shot down and increase the risk of running out of gas. Which do I pick? One risk or two? I would take one risk and just go faster. There's two advantages to running:

1) It kinematically disadvantages the enemy weapons.
2) It makes them have to chase me until they either have to turn around for lack of fuel themselves, or my friends can kill them.
3) When you're nearly out of fuel, you don't have time to dawdle. Turning around and going back into the fight just makes your fuel situation worse.

That being said, this is a bad situation that could mostly be avoided with better tactics. Where is the rest of the flight? Where are their escorts? Why didn't you tell him to RTB earlier if he was unsupported and nearly bingo-ed out?

One of the ways to avoid this is to always make sure there's some form of DCA as you approach home, so that as low fuel or weapons aircraft pass through those CAPs, the bad guys chasing anything will be engaged by fighters (that have plenty of gas and weapons). You might also have them pass through an area filled with friendly SAMs. You also want to time and sequence things so that everything comes in together and leaves together, that way you don't have anyone out there alone and unafraid, having to defend themselves. If aircraft are forced to retrograde because of their fuel state, there should be more aircraft coming up to meet and defend them. Also, plan your VUL times so that missions end before the aircraft assigned to them bingo out. They should already be on their way home when they bingo out. I usually plan on 2 or 4 hour VULs for fighters, and then create other missions to relieve them, if I need coverage for longer. If you figure 5 minute spacing, though, from escorts arriving in the area to SEAD to strikers, to EW, that's really only 15 minutes from the first aircraft arriving to the last wave. After that, everyone is egressing.

[c3k]

Bingo was just one possible reason the OP gave for the RTB.

If it is not bingo, but they are mission complete and RTB'ing, then what?

[thewood1]

I have done this a few times in the past where I have a heavily contested ingress/egress mission. Because I always play in the editor, its fairly easy to automate as part of mission planning.

I use an event either associated with an area around a specific unit or in a corridor I build for egress for a mission. I set up a trigger to either detect any fighter unit in the area. The trigger uses an exclusion zone and then activates a line of lua code using the common function ScenEdit_SetUnit and the rtb parameter to unassign the RTB. I have the doctrine set to opportunity attack. There are a multitude of nuances around fuel and weapon state you'll have to configure to you specific needs. But the general concept works well.

Another way to do it is use the event engine to assign and unassign various missions to give you more flexibility in RoE and WRA. This is my preferred method because it eliminates lua. It means building a bunch of templates that get activated and deactivated. I use this method in a lot of stuff. Since Tiny opened up the world of multi-mission assignments, I build dozens of mission templates using various WRAs, formations, fuel, and winchester settings. Again, there are a ton of nuances and opportunities.

There are also things you can do by creating an egress mission that takes you to the vicinity of the base before RTB. This allows flexibility in WRA, RoE, etc.

I will say that I use these rtb methods very infrequently, except the marshaling mission one. SeaQueen's comments are very valid though. In most circumstances something has gone wrong if you have a lot of enemy aircraft going after your egress corridor. Your job as a planner is to mitigate that. The above method should be for extreme circumstances.

[Jorge_Stanbury]

Thanks a lot, great answers

The scenario was English Jets over Uganda; there was a lot of circling (the enemy Mig-21 being more maneuverable than the British Lightings), and after some time they decided to RTB, with a Mig literally at 1 nm distance, there were other aircraft that was manually re-directed (before they were all in AAW patrol), but even at high speed, they were a few minutes away.
I think it is a very valid point that the best approach would be to run away at full speed, but they didn't; they just went to cruise speed at high altitude. Maybe if this was in part due to my own intervention, maybe I had them on "do not evade", I don't remember.
If the doctrine allow them to ignore the bingo fuel and run away at full speed, even at the risk of not enough fuel to RTB, then I think it is better than trying to fight.

And thanks a lot to thewood1, I am not there yet in terms of Lua editing, thus I like to supervise how the flights are going. That said flight plans are a really good improvement and I use it all the time for "strikes"; I think I prefer the old method for patrols

[thewood1]

As I showed, there are solutions without lua. Even with lua, its one line. But, just like in real life, it requires some planning and even some testing.

[SeaQueen]

Bingo was just one possible reason the OP gave for the RTB.

If it is not bingo, but they are mission complete and RTB'ing, then what?

Then they still ought not be out there alone and unafraid.