Now that I have more time, some points from my POV.
Dmitry Yuri wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 2:27 am
I think the majority of my criticism should probably have been directed at your gunner. But i'll outline some of the issues that I had with your helicopter here anyway because you as the pilot should have had final say over any action the aircraft was going to take.
Dangerous positioning
As the pilot of the helicopter you own the aircraft. Your priorities should be
1) the Aircraft.
2) the Crew / Cargo.
3) the objective / your orders. (includes movement requests from your gunner)
Flying directly over hostile contact is a dumb idea. This violates priority 1, the viper is able to accurately engage contacts from more than 2km away. You are not well armoured and while small arms are relatively ineffective unless you are flying low, the AO was full of armoured contacts that had much heavier weaponry including Anti-Air autocannon (this is why I said I was surprised that you didn't get shot down). It has been suggested that your gunner didn't give you enough information to avoid this contact but in future if this is the case then you need to direct the gunner to give you accurate information about the area you are flying into. But even if this was the case then you should have looked at the map at where friendly forces were holding or moving into and position yourself in such a way to provide support without putting yourself in danger. And if you can hear shots pinging off your cockpit then you are too close. The pilot owns the aircraft not the gunner.
The Shilka's quad gun has a max vertical angle of +85° so technically, the safest place to be is directly over him.
Joking aside, though, I understand what you're saying. We did get spiked quite frequently, at which point I always went defensive towards or over water, but honestly, at no point did I ever get the impression I was flying in positions that would put the helicopter, its crew or the objective at risk. While flying close to / over the AO, I always kept my speed above 150km/h, often at a height of at least 300m (less so towards the end when most threats were dealt with).
The initial reason why we needed to get so close every time, however, was because my gunner had limited visibility because of wrong (default?) ACE View Distance settings. Unfortunately, it took me way too long to realise that I was spotting targets with my Mk1 Eyeball at longer ranges than he was with his sensors. Once I picked up on it, I had to convince him (one of many in-pit discussions, btw) his settings were off and he needed to change them. For some reason, he couldn't or refused to do that while inside the helicopter, which accounts for one of our landings / "rearms" you mentioned.
Even after that, though, had it been up to my gunner, we would've flown even closer a lot more than we did now. Had the impression at times he was so busy head's down that he didn't have a lot of aerial SA (e.g. asking me to turn, while we were already in a 60° bank) but as long as I felt safe and/or functional enough, I didn't move away much from where he wanted me to be.
On your last rearm you temporarily took off without your gunner. As I understand the situation you believed there was a hostile Air target and JTAC/FAC wanted you airborne so you took off. Now this was partially down to a miscommunication as the 2 air contacts had already been destroyed, and JTAC actually wanted to assign you ground targets. But your aircraft is of very questionable usefulness without your gunner. You should not have taken off without him, even if you were just attempting to engage air targets.
That was my own decision, and not a request from FAC, so I take full responsibility on that one.
The way that went down is that as we landed to rearm our depleted A-G armament, I heard calls about the Blackshark and noticed explosions on the hangar right next to us. Looking to my right, I could see the Blackshark and more black smoke trails heading towards us, so I told my gunner to get back in immediately. He "refused" that and began bringing up the ammo instead.
No idea how we survived that, but my initial instinct there was already to get at least the helicopter out of harm's way by taking off without him. As I saw the Blackshark break south (I'm guessing Reaper 1 drew him out), I stayed put, but kept calling for him to get back in ASAP. After yet another minute of back and forth between the two of us, I got on LR comms myself to ask if the air threat was dealt with, someone said it wasn't, so I did indeed take off without my gunner.
Why? At that point, I got the impression that the enemy air was a direct and immediate threat to friendly units, I had a way to take him out (even without my gunner, since the Sidewinders are pilot-controlled) and I was getting nowhere in the discussion with my gunner, so I took off. Was it a smart thing to do? Probably not. Would I do it again under similar conditions? Probably would.
Friendly Fire
[...]
The message your gunner relayed on the air net after the incident was
"JTAC be advised.... we received the hold fire and we {unintelligible} accidentally on the hold fire there"
*JTAC asks for repeat*
"We didn't break off early enough on the hold fire"
Personally I don't think this is a valid defence. Ultimately this was the gunners fault but I think you as the pilot could have helped avoid this loss.
The main thing is that you shouldn't be flying up and down the AO. More distance puts the gunner under less pressure to engage things quickly and should give them more time to PID.
I was the one who told him to hold fire... After our rearm at the airbase, we took off and headed to St. Louis. My gunner spotted contacts below, and I asked him if he was sure it was enemy, as I saw BLUFOR track markers on my GPS. He said he was, so he started engaging. As I looked down, I noticed impacts close to what looked like could be friendlies, so I told him to hold fire, just to be sure. Unfortunately had to repeat that 3 times before the TK message popped up, then a 4th time to actually make him stop. FWIW, I did get the impression he felt genuinely sorry about that TK incident.
You as the pilot should have a rough idea where friendly forces are. In the mission in question all friendly forces were marked on the map with blue force tracking. You should know their positions so that when you select a position for your helicopter to move into you are not going to accidentally hit friendlies by having an unclear backdrop or set yourself up for accidental ricochet. If your gunner is engaging something danger close to friendly forces you should remind him of friendly locations.
I should perhaps note that I have not opened the map (Tao or full screen) a single time during the entire mission, so all my intel on friendly positions came from the radio, the office window or what little I could see in the GPS inset. Somehow, I found it worked remarkably well, despite the lack of comms from FAC.
I've had it happen once too many times that I check the full screen map for just a short while, and go back to the cockpit to find myself in a unrecoverable path towards Terra Firma, so in general, I am reluctant to use the map while flying in ArmA. (read: only if I really need to, or am in a position where I can safely enable auto-hover or hand over controls, or am on the ground). That's also why I don't like how in most cases, only map markers are used when calling in air assets for CAS or pick-up (often urgent as well).
Conclusion
In the real (and in an ideal ArmA) world the gunner is usually the commander of the aircraft. In this situation while he was very eager, i think he was too inexperienced to command the aircraft.
The FAC provided one of the most hands off FAC/JTAC experiences I have ever seen in ArmA, and that certainly didn't help any of the air assets.
You as the pilot should have taken charge of your aircraft and avoid putting it into situations that would usually (and have on multiple occasions during previous runs of that very mission) lead to death and destruction.
Agreed on all points. Lessons learned. Better next time.
Thanks once again for the feedback.