Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham Boak
Such pressure would be resisted as grossly unprofessional and downright dangerous. The margins are there for good reasons determined by hard experience. In war there is always the suicide option, but it would not be planned for by the USN.
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No, history clearly shows otherwise. Note again I'm am speaking of the specific margins given in the 'A/c Characteristics' sheets of ca. 1943-44, as benchmark, such as I quoted for the SBD-5. The relatively long ranged (compared to its early stablemates, F4F and TBD) SBD was used in practice in 1942 at radii around equal to the those official 43-44 numbers, or only a little less. OTOH the F4F for example, -4 minus drop tanks, had an official radius in the '43 documents of only a little over 100 miles, but was used out to at least 170-200 in 1942, with, in some cases, heavy fuel exhaustion losses.
Another example is the strikes in the Philppine Sea Battle in 1944. It was well known the SB2C's had less margin than the TBF/M's and escorting F6F's but the strike was launched anyway. The military goal was important enough to risk some a/c, and OTOH not all the a/c would be at great risk. The SB2C's suffered heavy fuel exhaustion losses on return.
I think your point would be valid now in peacetime or even 'war' operations (but where there's often little risk of enemy action to a/c) where the planes cost a fortune and take years to replace. USN operations now would vitiually never violate cast in stone NATOPS safety standards for particular a/c even in quasi-'combat' scenario's. But it wasn't the case in WWII. The benchmarks in those ACP sheets were theoretical guidelines, and shorter legged planes operating alongside longer legged ones were demonstrably more likely to be asked to exceed them and accept more risk of running out of gas, if the mission goal was viewed as justifying it.
On the original point of the thread, if we got all the details of TBD fuel capy and consumption and calculated the radius on the same basis as 1944 document for SBD, it would pretty obviously be well under 170 miles, but that was the range of the strike on Shoho, one in which the SBD's were operating well inside their range equally conservatively calculated. More agressive risks were taken with shorter ranged a/c.
Joe