Originally Posted by
Mil-26Man
I would suggest that sorties flown on Shader come under the banner of 'operational', which brings me back to my question - for an operational sortie in an active combat zone, would preserving hours of a brand new missile type be a consideration for not carrying it? If it is, how come Meteor is carried on Baltic ops?
Not sure you read the first answer. The point being that you
only get the opportunity to manage via/carriage life on ops as otherwise they are (typically) not fitted to the aircraft at all.
Nobody mentioned 'preserving' either - 'managing' is probably the most suitable term as there are many factors at play. It is usually desirable to deliberately run a select few new missiles hard to provide data on vib/carriage/cycles/loadings to validate or inform modelling and rig tests. When moving from one type of missile to another you also want to 'blend' from one type to the other to make sure new productions runs and out-of-life / war-shot only missiles don't have any cliff-edges in either the stock holdings or the funding & manufacturing profiles.
Again, this is all about getting the best bang for your buck, especially when the actual number of operational air-to-air missile shots taken by Typhoon = zero. Things are very different if you are firing op missiles as fast or considerably faster than the manufacturer can make replacements (eg Tornado GR4 with Brimstone).