Surely a system of systems approach involves worrying about the role played by carrier personnel (throughout the ship) as much as the aircrew?
I tried to point this out over on the
Harrier thread, and so have others on various threads - see the comments of Bismark, Not_a_boffin, orca, and Whiteovies.
Bismark:
As I am sure has been said elsewhere, the aircraft and pilots just represent the front end of the carrier strike capability. The idiocy of the SDSR decision, which the PM is about to compound in the FR/UK Defence deal (FT Today), is that we risk losing the capability to operate jets off carriers. All of the expertise on the current CVSs will have gone (we are getting rid of the CVSs), the aircrew will have gone (either PVRd, redundant or moved to other aircraft types, the command experience will have gone (as will the met, ATC, FC, deck handlers, planners etc, etc).
Bismark:
But what is missing in 2020 is the crews on the ships with any experience of aviation - from the CO downwards....I am sure the MAA will have something to say about that, indeed I wonder whether they are doing anything about it at the moment?
Not a boffin:
I'd put a fair bit of money that the guys who've done exchange tours have not done time in CATCC, Wings / Little F (Air & mini-boss in USN), handlers office or the squadron engineering and logs posts.
While they may be adept at doing the mission plan, launch, mission, recovery thing, they are unlikely to have a great understanding of how to spot a deck, arrange aircraft for servicing vice maintenance, weapons prep and bombing up and how all the various departments both in the squadrons and on the ship work to deliver the sortie rate. People thinking just about aircrew and (to some degree) chockheads are missing the point - it's the corporate experience of how to put it all together that is about to be lost. Nor can that be maintained at HMS Siskin - that just gives the basics of handling, not the fine art of pulling it all together.
As SDSR says "we need a plan to regenerate the necessary skills"- all I can say is it had better be a f8cking good one, cunning eneough to do more than brush your teeth with!
WhiteOvies:
The bigger issue is getting everyone else to be ready for a large, busy flight deck. At least there is a team of people looking into this issue and both deckcrew, aircrew and engineers are being appropriately positioned to give them some exposure to this dangerous environment prior to QEC.
orca:
All we need to see is a signed document from CAS saying that he will embark his jets as soon as the CO indicates his ship is ready in all respects to conduct aviation.
The second sentence will indicate that he will disembark them only when the Air Management Organisation is fully up to speed, the Air Group is fulfilling ATO tasking, the Air Weapon supply team have produced weapons to surge capacity and these have been loaded on jets and dropped, the Yellow Coats can marshal, chain and chock a fourship in all weathers, whilst another fourship is taxying for take off. The jets will remain embarked until every Fighter Controller in the fleet has worked a fourship through Red Crown procedures and the JFACCHQ have established resilient comms for a week or two and Flyco have exercised being b#ggered about from dawn to dusk. Repeat all for night ops. When all this is crimped the TG in its entirety will take part in a COMAO based exercise of Neptune Warrior type scope and we'll call it good.
The third sentence will indicate that the jets will be back as soon as any of the above notice any degree of skill fade and the process will start again.
Back in early 2007, a Chockhead told me that post Sea Harrier, there were too few embarkations of fixed wing aircraft to retain skills. Later that year, I spent a little time aboard a CVS and learnt pretty much the same thing, and that the dangers of skill fade were real. In late 2009 I heard the FAA Command Warrant say that having more jets at sea, for longer periods, would be key to preparing for CVF/F-35.
Are we doing enough to prepare? Is sending
eight Chockheads on exchange enough?
This 1987 article is interesting:
The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization: Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
Operations manuals are full of details of specific tasks at the micro level but rarely discuss integration into the whole. There are other written rules and procedures, from training manuals through standard operating procedures (SOPs), that describe and standardize the process of integration. None of them explain how to make the whole system operate smoothly, let alone at the level of performance that we have observed. It is in the real-world environment of workups and deployment, through the continual training and retraining of officers and crew, that the information needed for safe and efficient operation is developed, transmitted, and maintained. Without that continuity, and without sufficient operational time at sea, both effectiveness and safety would suffer.
Moreover, the organization is not stable over time. Every forty months or so there is an almost 100 percent turnover of crew, and all of the officers will have rotated through and gone on to other duty. Yet the ship remains functional at a high level. The Navy itself is, of course, the underlying structural determinant. Uniforms, ranks, rules and regulations, codes of conduct, and specialized languages provide a world of extensive codification of objects, events, situations, and appropriate conduct; members who deviate too far from the norm become "foreigners" within their own culture and soon find themselves outside the group, figuratively if not literally.
Behavioral and cultural norms, SOPs, and regulations are necessary, but they are far from sufficient to preserve operational structure and the character of the service. Our research team noted three mechanisms that act to maintain and transmit operational factors in the face of rapid turnover. First, and in some ways most important, is the pool of chief petty officers, many of whom have long service in their specialty and circulate around similar ships in the fleet. Second, many of the officers and some of the crew will have at some time served on other carriers, albeit in other jobs, and bring to the ship some of the shared experience of the entire force. Third, the process of continual rotation and replacement, even while on deployment, maintains a continuity that is broken only during a major refit. These mechanisms are realized by an uninterrupted process of on-board training and retraining that makes the ship one huge, continuing school for its officers and men.
When operational continuity is broken or nonexistent, the effects are observable and dramatic. One member of our research group had the opportunity to observe a new Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as she emerged from the yard and remarked at how many things had to be learned before she could even begin to commence serious air operations. Even for an older and more experienced ship coming out of an ordinary refit, the workup towards deployment is a long and arduous process. Many weeks are spent just qualifying the deck for taking and handling individual aircraft, and many more at gradually increasing densities to perfect aircraft handling as well as the coordination needed for tight launch and recovery sequences. With safety and reliability as fixed boundary conditions, every moment of precious operational time before deployment is devoted to improving capability and efficiency.
The importance of adequate workup time--for flight operations to be conducted safely at present levels of technical and operational complexity and at the tempo required for demonstrating effectiveness--cannot be overemphasized. During our research we followed one carrier in which the workup was shortened by "only" two weeks, for reasons of economy. As a result, the ship was forced to complete its training during the middle of a difficult and demanding mid-ocean exercise; this placed an enormous strain on all hands. While the crew succeeded--the referees adapted compensating evaluation procedures--risks to ship's personnel and equipment were visibly higher. Moreover, officers and crew were openly unhappy with their own performance, with an attendant and continuing impact on morale.