Operational air loses Newbie question

[tonyscrase]

I am playing the allies and it is 1944. My operational air loses seem to be running at 30%-40% of total loses

Am i doing something wrong
What can I do to reduce losses

THANK YOU

[loki100]

Not much to be honest.

Op losses are caused by:

a) flying in poor weather;
b) damage from flak or enemy fighters;
c) low experience
d) low reliability planes (actually this means planes with a high score)
e) fatigue

You can manage c+d. You have enough trained pilots to make sure that you can set your squadrons to TPI (ie they will only take trained pilots). At the start, the Stirlings in particular flop out of the sky, by 1944 you should be using pretty decent planes.

a+b you can partly manage. Key is that planes pick up damage, this lowers morale (among other things) and makes them liable to crash (ie ops losses). So for strat bombing only raid 2-3 days a week, at least if you pick a well defended targets your planes are not going back day after day. Clearly post d-day you need to keep up a high tempo so at that stage just take the losses but most of the time you can rest and opt out.

You can do clever things with setting the % to fly, but this is tricky to get right. It can help in that a beaten up squadron will rest rather than fly but it can also limit your air effort.

e) you can manage by setting any unit > 10% on fatigue to rest for the week. Also set low morale to rest.

But you are not going to avoid these losses, esp for bomber command at night you take few outright losses and a lot of secondary operational losses - this is how the air war works out.