4JUL2026 - Air Mission Planning Form 5 version 1.6b
 
This form is now designed to work both for Command at Sea and Harpoon 5. See below
1) There are now two load statuses - Normal and Loaded. Loaded is triggered when the Load equals or exceeds 50% of the possible load. Earlier versions of the form had 3 load statuses:Unloaded, light load, and loaded. The load affects the fuel used in each leg, as load can change during the mission. You don't see it in the "Initial Range" field, but it will increase the fuel used in an individual leg. Note that you can decrease the load in a leg (by dropping ordnance perhaps) below 50% and the reduction for that leg will not occur.

2) Added some new mission types

3) Formations.
Formations are not used in H5, but are used in CAS. The formation logic is invoked by putting a number in the "Formation" field at the top of each mission. This is the number of planes in the formation. For H5, leave this at 0 (the default) and formations are ignored. However, the form doesn't know whether you are using CAS or H5, so if you put in a non-zero number here, the formation logic will be used. Note that the text of the field says "CAS only" to remind you not to use it.
The relevant CAS sections are:
4.5.1 Landing - A carrier can land 1 plane every 45 seconds, or 4 planes/3 minutes
4.5.3 Launch - carriers can launch 3 planes/minute
7.1 Formations
Formations affect the mission in several ways. Formations
a) must fly at cruise speed
b) take time to form up (Formation Table)
c) use more fuel depending on formation size (Formation Table)

First, the time for launching, landing, and forming up is estimated based on the size of the formation.
This time is used to estimate the fuel used based on the low altitude cruise speed and then subtracted from the initial range calculated from fuel load and drop tanks.
You will see this immediately in the initial range field at the top of the mission.

Secondly, each leg of the mission can be affected by formation. There is a checkbox in each leg to say whether the mission is "in formation". If it checked, the mission may use at most the cruise speed for the aircraft type. Also, the mission will use more fuel than the basic mileage based on the Formation table. Note that this effect is in addition to any load reductions. If the formation breaks, just uncheck the formation box and the effects will not happen. Note that the fuel lost by launching, landing, and forming is not added back in.

4) Overload - Earlier versions of the form limited the load carried to the nominal maximum payload. In this version, the edit was changed to a warning - overloaded planes are allowed. They are considered to be at full load for fuel use. The game will limit them to an ATA of 0.5 but that does not show up in this form.







