Sending fleets back home. What happens to the airgroups on board???

[Tanaka]

Just wondering if you didnt take the airgroups off of ships (carrier planes or search planes) and you send them back to the home reserves to be repaired what happens to those airgroups???

[Full Moon]

They enjoy a vacation at home port. (Tokyo or Pearl Harbor)
When the ship returns (if it returns), they come with the ship.

[Feinder]

The wrinkle on this is that the PILOTS stay with the carrier (you'll be able to pull up the carrier and then see the squadrons are assigned). The planes in the groups tho, will be returned to the replacement pool if their are zero of that type of plane in the pool. So it's possible that you'd see the airgroup with 0 planes if they have been sent back to the pool, or with a full number if the pool already has an excess of that type.

If, for whatever reason, the airgroups are NOT fleshed out by the time the CV begins it trip BACK to Noumea/Truk, it will draw replacements from the pool to flesh out it's squadrons (even while it is en route, and not even arrived yet).

-F-

[Mr.Frag]

The other piece that has caused great confusion in the past: CV airgroups will upgrade even though they are NOT in the game yet, seemingly stealing planes from you. Always keep that in the back of your mind when looking at your aircraft pools. Odds are some other air group will upgrade before the one you have in the field, just due to the mechanics of the game.

[demonterico]

Before sending a carrier back to Tokyo I've always removed the air squadrons. Is there any good reason not to do this? Seems to me its best to keep my hands on every available squadron.

[Feinder]

It doesn't really hurt to keep the squadrons in theater, as you can certainly make good use of them.

But after a while, it gets to the point where don't have room the carrier based squadrons. As USN, I've got all sorts of airfields, and all of them are stuffed full of land-based squadrons. I started off not sending back my fighter squadrons from the carriers, and I did make some use of them initially as stop-gap, but it's now November (Scen 19), and they're all just sitting training in Noumea.

IJN may be a different story. But as USN, by October, you've got plenty of land-based air.

But no, it doesn't hurt them to keep your squadrons back.
-F-

[Mr.Frag]

If you have space, you can keep them flying some trivial missions like CAP or Search purely to keep the pilot skills increasing while waiting for the CV's to return. Kept at a low level, the operation losses will be nill, coupled with a little skill gaining for free.

Who knows, you might just bag the odd sub for your efforts with ASW missions at a rear area port...

[Full Moon]

I tend to keep the airplanes when I send the ships back. But as IJN I can barely support land-based airplanes, so I'm having trouble to support all of them.

[Yamamoto]

Originally posted by Full Moon
I tend to keep the airplanes when I send the ships back. But as IJN I can barely support land-based airplanes, so I'm having trouble to support all of them.

What a huge contrast between what problems the Japanese and the allies have. The Japanese player doesn’t take planes off his carriers because he doesn’t have enough support for the few land-based planes he has. The allied player doesn’t do it because his airfields are too crowded with planes (which he has plenty of support for).

Yamamoto