יום שלישי 03/05 בשעה 21:30 קמפיין BIGWEEK משימה מס' 1

Hi all,
thanks for all those who took part to this mission!
For us bomber it was really an awesome and fascinating experience, flying close formation in the hearth of Germany with enemy fighters roaring and flak burst around us!
For our flight, things went relatively well. We joined over Margate as planned, found there our "little friends" and headed to Germany.
The trip was difficult, we were attacked several times but our escort made a really great job. I think there was not a single moment when enemy fighters could attack us undisturbed. They could make passes on us, sure, but always there was some friendly fighter chasing them.
Unfortunately we had arranged for a collective bomb run, but this did not work well over Duisburg, some planes could attack the secondary target Essen. I was the only one who decided to make a bombing run on my own over Duisburg. I think that losses in our group were just two bombers (Aquila and Anton), plese correct me if I am wrong.

Things that worked well:
- great fighter escort
- acceptably good formation flying for bombers, despite not being quite trained to that

Things that could work better: this mission was planned in haste so we did not have enough time to decide some key things, that will work better on next missions.
- we need absolutely to make a rejoin and make a single bombers formation. This is the key thing for this type of mission. We must decide a rejoin point and proceed to the enemy territory as a whole. Fighters will also escort us more easily that way.
- we need to do better sorting of targets and have several pilots doing the bomb run on the bombsight, otherwise (as it happened in this mission) if the leader has a problem or is hit, the bomb run of the whole formation is wasted
- we need to have MORE BOMBER PILOTS. We cannot have AI flying as bombers. Also, we need to be more deadly in the bomb drop. We will try and arrange some training session for those interested in flying bombers. We also need to know in advance the number of bomber pilots that will be available for the mission, so that we can avoid having AI flying bombers.
- We need better communications. We have to establish Channel whisper to communicate among various flights.

If we can do all the things above, we can reduce losses and be more deadly on enemy factories. Anyway, I repeat, these are things to make better but the first mission, as a start, was very good IMHO, because we damaged several factories.

Maraz