CAS pilots! Don't be afraid to...

[ma21212]

I dont think so, first its very simple to Laze then tell him what the coords are cuz ussualy ur SL and you can put a marker on the laze and give exact pos. second its almost impossible to find the laze if you dont know were it is. third....AA! AA will rip you a new one if you fly too low hell TANKs could be just as dangerous as my gunner has shot down a few low flying jets trying to A) dumb bomb us or B) use thier MG while our tank is in full health

[CAS_117]

Flying CAS is all about probabilities, efficiency, and risk management.

For the following examples assume you are in a Fighter, with an Attack Aircraft, a squad leader
is lasing for you, and one other observer with any kit with binoculars. The purpose of these is to help give examples of when it is worth risking your aircraft to ground fire, when it is not, and what kind of possibilities you need to be able to infer. All of the stuff I have written is based on my personal experience, and may not reflect yours. These things might not happen exactly this way, they might not happen at all, but the idea is to be able to comprehend the available actions and the kind of outcome your decision in the cockpit makes.


Scenario 1 (AA + Ground Advantage): You destroy both enemy aircraft within the first minute while your ground forces are winning (tank squad has say 13 kills and 0 deaths). You do an intel pass over bunkers at 500m to see if you are tracked. No lock is received.

Action 1: Attack enemy infantry and logistics forces.

Outcome 1: Possibly trap enemy team at main base. Will mean a higher probability and strength of a counter attack. Formerly unmanned AA vehicles and kits will be armed. High visual exposure to enemy.

Action 2: Maintain CAP and ambush aircraft at first allowed opportunity within server rules. (possibly have a spotter near their main to get an initial intercept heading on their aircraft). Hit designated targets when needed or low risk passes on flags etc.

Outcome 2: Low exposure to ground forces will mean less AA manned and shooting at you. There will be less damage done to enemy ground forces, but you will be in a position of advantage when enemy aircraft respawn.

Scenario 2 (Air disadvantage + Ground Advantage): You and the Su-25 were shot down by the F-16 within 5 minutes of the round start, but your team is still winning most engagements and capturing flags. Your jet just respawned. Since your tanks and infantry have taken few losses and are moving well into enemy territory the expected AA threat is low.

Action 1: Immediately ask for intercept on enemy aircraft from SL or in team chat. Ignore CAS requests.

Outcome 1: You manage to kill their aircraft, but because you weren't available for lases meant several targets were missed. Your wingman was able to destroy several, but not before some casualties were taken.

Action 2: Ask for lasers on enemy targets. Attempt to pursue aircraft when they present themselves or a sighting is given.

Outcome 2: You manage to hit several lased targets, but fail to locate the enemy aircraft and they destroy several tanks and an infantry squad, leaving a flag exposed.


Scenario 3 (Air Advantage + Ground disadvantage): This is common on disorganized servers, or more organized ones where clan members have moved to one side or the other. You are in an F-16, have killed all enemy aircraft, but most of your anti vehicle ground forces have been destroyed, leaving some infantry caught inside bunkers, and one more at north village pinned down by armor. You have 18 minutes till the enemy aircraft spawn.

Action 1 (Low risk): Stand by at high altitude waiting for lasers. With all your armor dead, and all your infantry cut off, their anti-aircraft may fire on you unhindered. And with their jets dead, it is very possible that the previous pilots hopped into some unused Anti-Aircraft.

Outcome 1A (Low risk best case): The infantry at bunkers are all wiped out, but the ones at north village manage to hold off the enemy until your tanks respawn. They are able to lase only a few targets due to the amount of fire they take. You spend most of the time with all weapons on board.

Outcome 1B (Low risk worst case): Infantry remain pinned down, give poor lases, and fail to inform you of what/where they are. Only one hit is scored, and with nothing to stop them, MEC armor rolls into village and bunkers taking out all US forces and capturing the flags.

Action 2 (measured risk): Not wanting to risk your aircraft, but not wanting to lose the map completely, you immediately have your squad leader fall back to US outpost and wait for armor to arrive. Because all the armor is far away and mobile, he is unable to lase. You attack regardless.

Outcome 2 (measured risk most likely case): You kill a number of transport trucks and choppers that attempted to rush the flag and build a firebase with their tanks moving from north village. Since you predicted their move, your SL is ready to give enemy positions. Because their team moved so quickly so far, their AA teams don't catch up until your team reinforces. Luckily enemy reinforcements take longer to arrive giving you time to reload. The loss of infantry at bunkers and NV cause a high loss in tickets, but you did manage to prevent ticket bleed.

Action 3 (high risk): You attempt to support infantry at bunkers and village without lasers until armor respawns and reinforces for 15 minutes.

Outcome 3A (High risk, worst case): You manage to kill a firebase, but are shot down in the process by an SA-18. Enemy aircraft respawn before yours can. Because you are not alive to deal with the enemy aircraft, all your armor is killed a few minutes after respawning. Round over.

Outcome 3B (High risk, best case): After reading teamchat and your squad leader for a few minutes the locations of enemy armor become obvious. You attack, killing several tanks, and continue attacking lased targets when available, and unlased ones otherwise. Troops at north village survive until reinforcements arrive.

TL;DR version: You can attack without a laser, you can fly low, but you need to 1. know what you are doing, 2. understand the potential threats involved 3. determine if it is actually necessary or even beneficial in the situation you are in (if they have nothing but AA and infantry, let your guys deal with it). This does increase chances of being shot at when the enemy planes are down, but it also means your ground forces will take fewer casualties.

Staying high and only attacking when you have a lased target is just as bad as only flying low recklessly into AA ignoring intel and lasers. Both extremes are ultimately selfish, waste the aircraft and ultimately stem from a poor understanding of both threat and risk. There are many times when I have a spotter but he can't stick the target and I just need to take a deep breath and do some target practice.

Sometimes you just have to stick your neck out for the good of the team. No, getting shot down doesn't help, but flying around 20 minutes without hitting anything doesn't either, which is pretty common. As a rule? After killing their planes, you should go and do 10 tickets worth of damage then analyze the situation. If you're not getting locked, try and take another truck or enemy trans helo. If you get locked on climb back and reevaluate. Otherwise just use common sense.

[Dev1200]

What 117 Said

[chrisweb89]

The only thing here is that if I'm in the fighter and killed all of the enemy air. I would much rather let the attack jet do most of the runs and me fill in when he is reloading and be alive for when their jets respawn, than leave him all alone verses 2 jets. But like Cas said it all depends what the situation is like.

[Hunt3r]

If someone is giving bad lases, the Mk82 is what you want if you're facing off armor.

Unless he is severely off, then you're screwed.

[killonsight95]

The only thing here is that if I'm in the fighter and killed all of the enemy air. I would much rather let the attack jet do most of the runs and me fill in when he is reloading and be alive for when their jets respawn, than leave him all alone verses 2 jets. But like Cas said it all depends what the situation is like.

fighter jets are there to take out enemy aircraft and protect the bomber, they should be used to attack ground targets when either the bomber is reloading or is avoiding AA or enemy jets
reason: fighters are fast therefore hard to lock on also if you can fly an attack fighter well then you are msot likly more expereanced than the bomber

[Herbiie]

With the Squad Leader radio this will no longer be a problem in v0.9

ALSO if you have a commander, this sin't a problem

@ Kill on sight: There are no fighters, just fighter bombers. All Jets can and should engage ground targets.

[Cassius]

Relaying Coords is easy, just do it. I know there is a marker system now, but I still prefer if you type out the coords or use mumble, because its more reliable and precise to tell me where your marker is. Give accurate coordinates and the 16 can do a gun run on approaching infantery.

[llRvXll]

the A10 can destroy ANY target without laser target
just lauch some flares when diving, fire your 30mm at the target and you will be fine.

once i was playing on kashan, i was a rifleman, my squadleader was killed and i saw a enemy tank, i told the exactly coord of the tank for the A10, but he was too afraid to dive and use his 30mm, after some time he was shot down by a mig and didnt help our team :]

[Huey]

Charge blindly into the night. Fear only death.

[Imchicken1]

The other day I was flying the eurofighter on SEagle. I was flying around 200 for most of the time, and didnt get any locks. What worked to my advantage was i kept my speed up and used the contours and environment. I didnt get locked for longer than a fraction of a second, except for one point where i flew around 2000 and got chased down by the mig. Not only did i put on a show for people (yes, not important) but i also managed to constantly nail their Cows (russian transport choppers) and Havoc.

Point is, on some maps where there are many ground features you can use to block AA locks (tree's, hills, etc) you shouldnt be afraid to fly low. Its extremly effective, and it presents you more targets and a more fun time flying.

Because PR is all about fun right?

[Lacrosse4Life17]

Never let me fly jets.

[SlLeNceR]

Cause the laze target pops up to late and doesn't give us enough time to move there or there.

[RealKail]

The problem with flying CAS is alot of the time, the ground forces aren't being as helpful as they should be.

For instance, I like playing on HOG 24/7 muttrah, and the ground forces there almost never actually request the cobra come in and support them.

Other times, they call in a request and we're left with too little information to provide effective support. In maps like Muttrah, we typically do need some coordinates, because every MEC there has a hard-on for killing off the cobra and bragging about it to the rest of the server. The cobra is #1 on their kill list, and we can't hover around an area long to hunt down a target. If we stay still too long, or we're flying a "hunting" path, we typically get a HAT rocket lodged in our exhaust.

We're not afraid to get our hands dirty, but we need the infantry to help us so we can effectively help them.

[Qwertfyu2]

lol. I was flying low in kokan once and I was doing these tactics. Little did I know that Gary had a suprise for me. So note to yourself, make sure Gary is dead dead before staying low in one place for more than 10 seconds. XD

[KillJoy[Fr]]

The pilots are not wrong , in the real life the pilots engage only confirmed targets by the ground troops when its possible or their asking the permission to engage and make a low pass to spot targets its SUICIDAL

[Cassius]

Squadleaders should ALWAYS use the binocs to set an CAS marker, additionally to voice communication. For starters the marker might be needed on the runway if its a difficult runway like on silent eagle. Also the Squadleader of the CAS squad might be busy flying so that the aicraft responding to a cas request might not have a communication on mumble to begin with if the pilot is not in the squadleader spot, because the squadleader being busy with flying is telling the rest of the CAS squad squat.

If there is a CAS marker at the very least the pilot knows where a laze is likely to pop up. While you should understand how to set the CAS marker it does not need to be pinpoint accurate. Thats what you paint the target for.

Also I saw somebody wondering what a JTAC is. If one uses military jargon it should be linked to a wiki entry or something.

[Stemplus]

Squadleaders should ALWAYS use the binocs to set an CAS marker, additionally to voice communication. For starters the marker might be needed on the runway if its a difficult runway like on silent eagle. Also the Squadleader of the CAS squad might be busy flying so that the aicraft responding to a cas request might not have a communication on mumble to begin with if the pilot is not in the squadleader spot, because the squadleader being busy with flying is telling the rest of the CAS squad squat.

If there is a CAS marker at the very least the pilot knows where a laze is likely to pop up. While you should understand how to set the CAS marker it does not need to be pinpoint accurate. Thats what you paint the target for.

Actually, markers on runway are only an option when the map just came out. Most maps have custom out of bounds areas (Iron Eagle, Silent Eagle, Black Gold) which means that the map border continues out of bounds and still forms an "edge" so you can just follow it untill you can see the main map and from then all it takes is just general knowledge of the map. Also some maps have landmarks on runway aproaches. If it's a completely flat map like kashan or khamisyah then you can either learn how the icons/marker lines act when you're out of bounds (for example if it shows you in a corner of the minimap you're in that square of out of bounds that has no contact with main terrain, or that the distance from the end of the line connecting you and the marker to the opposite edge of the map is your distance to the main terrain etc), or you can just learn how to aproach the runway just by knowing where it is. For example if you're playing kashan as US, fly at normal altitude (1500) towards your base from the south and as soon as you're about 2 grids from your base start diving towards the center of the runway and holding S. Then when you'll be 100-200m out of bounds strat flying at about 50m altitude and do a hard 45* turn to the right, then emidiately do a horizontal 180 to the left, then again emidiately a 90* turn to the left, followed by a 45* turn to the right. At that point you'll be at perfect altitude, perfect speed and perfect angle to the runway. This maneuver works on almost every single map.

As for CAS markers, well they are bad as they don't always apear where you put them which will mess up the aproach. Grids/indication points are much better. I don't see how it can be hard for a jet pilot to put a marker, it takes less than 5 seconds, of flying straight, and for helis, well, heli pilot should never be SL, and if he is then he can use the minimap to find out where that grid is, and then just pull the nose up a bit, pull the map out and put the marker which takes just a bit of practice to do.

A visual version of what I mean, easier to understand

[Cassius]

A jet pilot can put a marker if he is the squadleader. On a large map you have 2 jets and attack helicopters rolled in the cas squad. That no CO and no SL is coordinating cas oftentimes a reality of the game. Also the binocs give you pretty much the accurate distance, so I do not see how putting a cas marker within 50m of the target is a problem.

In an ideal case scenario you have a CAS squadleader communicating and putting out markers as the squad needs them, but squadleaders on the ground should always assume they do not have an ideal case scenario on their hands and make use of the squadleader radio and the binocs in addition to using mumble. Many squadleaders need to get the habit in using those anyway.