Effectiveness of ASW air patrol

[ChezDaJez]

My experience is based on flying ASW and surveillance missions during the 70s and 80s in the P3C Orion. I have about 9000 hours in them as an acoustic ASW operator.

You do bring up a good point about range but most patrol missions didn't extend more than 200 miles from their base. Only at Midway and Hawaii did they routinely fly to their range limits. The longer the range requirement, the more aircraft and crews needed to conduct an effective search. You need 18 operational aircraft to fly a 180 degree sector search out to 400nm with a 50% probability of detection. Thats a bunch of aircraft that weren't often available early in the war.

Chez

[Buck Beach]

ORIGINAL: ChezDaJez

My experience is based on flying ASW and surveillance missions during the 70s and 80s in the P3C Orion. I have about 9000 hours in them as an acoustic ASW operator.

You do bring up a good point about range but most patrol missions didn't extend more than 200 miles from their base. Only at Midway and Hawaii did they routinely fly to their range limits. The longer the range requirement, the more aircraft and crews needed to conduct an effective search. You need 18 operational aircraft to fly a 180 degree sector search out to 400nm with a 50% probability of detection. Thats a bunch of aircraft that weren't often available early in the war.

Chez

I'm not that fimiliar with any actual methods of searching, but, wouldn't a AWS search consist of going over an area with repeated passes to discover the subs in a shipping area to discover hidden targets as opposed to a higher less comprahesive search to spot task forces consisting of various numbers of surface ships, each leaving wakes. Hey, I do respect your experience here, but, it seems the passage of eras and the lack of such TFs in modern times would sort of make a normal search more of an ASW mission in your time. My comments are based on no facts or experience.

[Mr.Frag]

The game model basically runs it like a higher level of search over a smaller area. Basically better odds on the detection roll.

[ChezDaJez]

Yes, ASW patrols did routinely linger over certain areas. But it was a tradeoff of area searched for a higher probability of detection. Increase the POD and you reduce the area searched and vice versa. Also, aircrew suffered from extreme eyestrain due to the bright sunlight and lack of decent sunglasses. After about an hour of searching, their eyeballs were fried and often failed to spot small targets. Often the first indication of a sub operating in the area was a flaming datum and you would flood that area with aircraft and ASW vessels.

Also, most submarines remained submerged during the day and would surface at night to recharge batteries. They only ran surfaced in daylight when absolutely tactically necessary such as to make a high speed run to get ahead of a target. Even then they were very hesitant to do so because their lookouts ability to detect aircraft was degraded by spray. Most conning towers (now called sails) were very wet when running at high speed and lookouts had a hard time keeping their binoculars dry.

Much has changed over time in the way we conduct ASW and surveillance patrols. We no longer rely on the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball to scan the horizon. Radar can do that much better. I was an acoustic operator and used active and passive sonobuoys to detect nuclear submarines, which believe it or not, are much easier to detect than a diesel sub. Diesel subs in shallow water <100 fathoms are virtually undetectable when running submerged. Diesel submarines still tend to operate the way they did in WWII, submerged in daylight, surfaced at night.

I think the ASW search results in the game are fairly realistic. It was often a matter of luck to spot a sub, let alone sink one.

BTW, I'm no expert, I just happen to have some experience conducting visual and electronic searches. They did a lot of things differently back then and sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder why!

Chez

[Djordje]

ORIGINAL: 2ndACR

As the Japanese, I have yet to have a ASW a/c hit an allied sub.

I did have a bunch of Vals on regular naval search pound the snot out of a bunch of Ron's subs. Not sure how that happened. Have not seen it occur since.

First of all, they have to have exp of at least 80. Next, you need some high exp planes on ASW, and then your naval search planes will start attacking.
Reduce their range, naval search to the half of ASW search level (so if your ASW patrol group has patrol range of 4 set your naval search range to 2).
Drop their altitude to 1000 and watch all those attacks and hits, but also watch those ops losses rise... And it is painful to see that 90 exp kate pilot was lost because of that...

This is useful tactics for your KB when you force your enemy to abandon his sub base
(SRA bases in the first 6 months), attack port to force him to form sub TFs that will sit in the port (to avoid further hits in next port attack), then move in with your KB to one hex away from it and set your planes like described above. It surely helps that port hexes are not deep water...
Just make sure you bring enough DDs with you to take care of those subs he will surely send into the hex where KB is [:)]