Military Flight Planning

[QXDX]

What does flight planning look like in the military world? Whereas airline dispatchers plan routes and calculate fuel burns for flight crews, what happens in the military world?

I gather that it's done by pilots, but I'm curious what kind of details are considered when planning a flight. How does it differ in the fighter, tanker, and transport communities?

 

[MikeD]

What does flight planning look like in the military world? Whereas airline dispatchers plan routes and calculate fuel burns for flight crews, what happens in the military world?

I gather that it's done by pilots, but I'm curious what kind of details are considered when planning a flight. How does it differ in the fighter, tanker, and transport communities?

depends what you are talking about

a single aircraft doing a routine flight from point a to point b like a civilian flight? The pilot or crew do their own planning.

A large force mission of multiple or many aircraft, you’ll often have a mission planning cell of personnel whose job it is to get all the various pieces (aircraft types) melded together to make the particular mission work. The crews involved receive a mission package “smart pack” created by this cell, with all kinds of planning information for the various players, targets, altitudes, deconfliction times, threats, routes, fuels, ordnance, delivery options, codes, etc.

 

[Hacker15e]

Some of the heavy communities have full-time mission planners, the "desk jobs" of both pilots and navs. I was a mission planner for the U-2, which is a job generally staffed by recce Navs, but there were a handful of pilots in the shop, too.

In my experience in the fighter and trainer communities, most of the things the civilian world would consider "flight planning" were canned profiles that many times didn't even get updated with that day's weather and winds. What *was* more intricately planned were the tactical portions of the flight.

So, notional airspace boundaries and locations. Threat and target laydowns. Altitude block allocations for formation deconfliction. Radio freqs, IFF squawks, radar channels. Joker and bingo fuels for various times/locations/scenarios. Weapon attack profiles. Navigation routes, system updates, ground attack targeting plans. Post-target rejoin and egress plans. Production of briefing materials and in-cockpit reference materials for all of the aforementioned stuff.

For most missions some kind of computer-based software was used to produce nav points and reference data for the aircraft. Often production of the hand-held mission materials came from these software programs, but rarely was it limited to that.

It could be up to 5-6 hours of planning preparation for a single mission that might include 1-10 aircraft.

Mission planning for the U-2 was very similar, even using the same software (AFMSS), and the same concepts used in fighter/bomber attack planning except applied to the various sensors the airplane was equipped that day, and what specific products the Intel cell was looking for.

 

[QXDX]

What goes on in the transport/airlift communities? My perception is that they do a lot of A to B flying, and there might be bear more of a resemblance to air carrier flying.

 

[MikeD]

What goes on in the transport/airlift communities? My perception is that they do a lot of A to B flying, and there might be bear more of a resemblance to air carrier flying.

again, it depends. Depends on type of mission they’re being assigned. There’s no singular one-size-fits-all answer here, just due to the diversity of mission types even in that community.

For example, for preplanned pax/cargo missions, there’s a Tanker Airlift Control Center planning cell at Scott AFB, Ill. However if a tanker is going to do a local mission on their own, or a mission to air refuel that isn’t related to transporting stuff or such, they may have their own preplanned or canned mission profiles and flight plans that are filed, without any overhead organization doing it for them. Same with tactical missions in C-130s, for example, that aren’t related to hauling cargo or pax from A to B.

 

[Low_Level_Hell]

I usually just wrote local on the flight plan then went and did something.

 

[Lawman]

I usually just wrote local on the flight plan then went and did something.

That’s because outside of few organizations and entities, the Army doesn’t encourage any actual planning.

In some ways it’s downright critical the way the flying hour program and training is both allotted for and spent. I’ve internally in my career been told “just go fly these guys 6.0 in the dark,” with no guidance and well beyond many of their ability to retain any useful training because they didn’t have the endurance for 6 hours of training, just 2 and 4 extra with the blades spinning.



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