For military vehicles which require substantial special training, such as tanks and airplanes, do the crews generally stick with a single vehicle, or do they move around a lot between vehicles of the same type? Is it different between combat and non-combat vehicles? Different between services? Do the crews themselves generally stick together, or do they get reshuffled on a frequent basis as well, apart from promotions leading to different roles within a crew?
In USAF each squadron owns some number of aircraft, typically all of one type. Any crew in the squadron will fly any one of the owned aircraft on any given day. The crews and airplanes are perfectly interchangeable parts from each other’s POV.
Over time airplanes get traded around between units as they’re sent out for periodic overhaul. A squadron may not get back the same jet it sent out. Likewise there’s slow turnover in people.
I never flew a USAF crew-type aircraft. I always flew solo. My understanding is USAF crews are typically formed as static groups of one each of each required role: Aircraft commander, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, etc. But even then there are substitutions all the time for various reasons; somebody is sick or on vacation or has to attend a class or whatever. So large-scale the individual crewmembers of each specialty are fully interchangeable parts, but for simplicity USAF tends to treat them as a mostly-fixed subassembly unless there’s a reason not to.
AFAIK the USN & USMC work the same way.
You didn’t ask, but …
By contrast, in the airlines there is no concept of a formed crew at all. Every time I go to work I sit in my seat and some other guy/gal selected more or less at random sits in the other seat. And off we go. Perhaps to fly together again next week, or perhaps not again for a year or two. Or never again if one of us quits, retires, or moves to a different base or aircraft or seat before the luck of the draw puts us together again.
Obviously this depends on the size of the organization. I’m one of about 100 identical replacement parts in my work group. In a work group of 15 or a work group of 500 how often someone will cross paths with any given co-worker would obviously be very different.
Airlines tend to have crew bases in a fairly small number of cities and folks generally try to live out their career in just one. Meanwhile, unlike USAF, the airline’s entire fleet of any given type is operated as one big group. You don’t have, say 20 737s assigned to be flown by only the LAX crews and a different 20 737s assigned to be flown by only the NYC crews. The LAX & NYC 737 pilot groups are separate and will rarely fly with one another, but there’s just one fleet of 40 aircraft they share effectively at random every day.
Thanks LSLGuy. Does the interchangeable part also apply to pilot-only planes? Various fictional movies and books lead one to believe that a fighter pilot essentially “owns” a single plane.
Thanks for the airline explanation as well. I had assumed that the flight crews were kept together, for simplicity of scheduling if nothing else. How do you decide for each flight who is the “primary” pilot? Seniority, or does the airline decide for each flight?
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I can only speak of tanks. The U.S. only has one type of tank. A vehicle a similar role is the M1128 Mobile Gun System. If a tanker gets transferred to a light unit with Stykers they are cross trained. I hear that just is soon going to be given to Cavalry Scouts instead.
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Most soldiers have multiple vehicles on their license. From HMMWV to LMTVs.
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Marines and Army are the only ones that have tanks. Both have their initial training at the same Army facilities.
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You keep crews together for as long as possible but that is generally not long. Loaders become drivers. Drivers become gunners. Gunners become Tank Commanders. It all depends on rank and experience. Soldiers not only get promoted but they get their duty station moved, their enlistment is up, new guys show up. Tank crews in National Guard units can sometimes stay together for a while because lateral movement to other duty stations generally does not happen.
Oh I can actually talk about this from an Army standpoint since I started in Aviation. In the Army a crew chief owns his helicopter. He will work on others as needed but one is his baby. Pilots will jump in whatever is available when they need to fly. In an operational environment whether it’s training or real world they will be assigned one aircraft but in garrison on normal training flights maintenance schedules were more important than who was assigned a particular aircraft. At certain flight hours certain maintenance checks and services are required. They range from simple checks to basically tearing it apart and building it back together. A unit would obviously not want too many aircraft down for scheduled maintenance at one time so they have to manage the fight hours with that in mind.
ETA: to cut down on any confusion, in the Army crew chief=helicopter mechanic. In a larger helicopter like a Blackhawk the crew chief is part of the crew and will often fly on missions. But on an Apache for instance a crew chief will only fly on certain maintenance check flights.
In the U.S. Navy, the plane is “owned” by the plane captain, who is a junior to mid-level enlisted who performs inspections, fluid checks, etc. for up to 15 hours a day on “their” airplane.
In this photo, you’ll see the plane captain’s name (AT3 Woolsey) stenciled on the forward landing gear cover.
The guy who gets to fly AT3 Woolsey’s plane is Lieutenant Commander Pat “Yak” Hart.
Thanks Loach. While a crew is together, do they usually drive the same tank every day? Or do they get assigned a different tank within the unit on a frequent basis?
But the fact that the pilot’s name is also on the plane leads me to believe he’s pretty much the only one to fly that plane - that’s my real question.
Military Q:
Back in WWII I believe many USAAC/USAAF crews mostly stayed with their individual aircraft. So in some sense they owned it; painted their wife/GF’'s name(s) on it, marked down kills, etc.
That’s not common US practice since much after WWII.
What was done with tactical aircraft in my era and seems to still be done is they paint the name of *a *pilot on the canopy rail of *an *aircraft. Likewise they paint the name of the “crew chief” (main maintenance guy/gal) on the other side. Two crew aircraft (e.g. F-15E) will also have the name of the back seat weapons dude(tte) painted abeam his(her) seat. (I forget the fancy new name for that role; it was WSO (and exclusively male) in my era.)
The maintenance guy/gal does “own” the aircraft in some sense. He/She works on that same airplane every day getting it ready for each mission. When it goes into the hangar for more significant work, he/she accompanies it there and helps the dedicated hangar workers do their thing to it. OTOH, if the airplane is shipped off-base the crew chief is assigned another aircraft or other maintenance duties until assigned to another aircraft.
By contrast, the pilot has no particular connection to “his” airplane. Any pilot will fly any airplane on any given day. In my era we had about 2x as many pilots as aircraft and so not everyone could have their name on an aircraft at once. The brass all had their name on one permanently, so the ordinary guys had to share naming on the few remaining airplanes. They typically got their name on a plane for only a few months out of a typical 2-3 year tour. Getting your picture taken on the ladder standing by your name on “your” airplane was an important part of the ceremony.
In my era a pilot with his name on a jet was encouraged to take an interest in it, foster a relationship with the crew chief, and be a “dutch uncle” to the beast. This was mostly in service of the idea of promoting maintenance vs. ops cooperation and a feeling of shared mission. Which didn’t really work very well. Most pilots didn’t want to be bothered and over time ops and maintenance generally had a mildly adversary relationship, just like sales and production in a corporation. Each side achieving its individual goals implied some imposition on the other side which interfered with them achieving their goals. Smart leader-managers made sure that each side was judged on the collective results. Dumb stove-piped manager-leaders did not; managing instead by individual unit statistics.
Airlines Q:
Captain and co-pilot are separate and non-interchangeable jobs. Any given pilot is one or the other; never both. In most cases the Captain is senior in the company / employee / union member sense of the word. All pilots start out as co-pilots and, once their company / employee / union seniority permits, have the opportunity to “upgrade” to Captain. Most do; some don’t. And some never have the opportunity due to mergers, layoffs, shrinking employers, other earlier careers, etc.
A scheduled unit of work, commonly a called “trip”, is one or more consecutive workdays with one or more flights per workday all grouped together. A single Captain and a single Co-pilot will be assigned to work that trip together as a team. Long-haul oceanic flying may need a second or third co-pilot and/or in some cases a second Captain as well. If so each position will be filled by an appropriate worker.
The Captain is always in charge. On multi-Captain long haul, one Captain slot is pre-designated as the primary slot. Whoever was assigned that slot is in charge for the whole trip.
Whenever we’re flying, one pilot is the so-called “pilot flying” = PF. He/she manipulates the controls and acts in charge of the operation on a moment to moment basis. Like the “officer of the deck” on a ship. The other pilot fills a role called “pilot monitoring” = PM. He/she talks on the radio, does administrative tasks, and watches and double-checks everything the PF (and the aircraft) does. The PM mentally simulates being the PF at every step of the way.
And, just like on a ship, if something significantly out of the ordinary happens while the co-pilot is acting as PF it’d be common for the Captain to eventually have a “change of control” and take over the PF role once the immediate action crisis is passed and we’re dealing with the consequences.
PM is in no sense an apprentice role, but you can see it affords a lot of opportunity to learn by watching and almost doing without the strain of being fully engaged in driving the beast.
On a typical two-pilot trip, the Captain and co-pilot will alternate taking the PF & PM roles on each flight. There are other considerations, but the general goal is to fly each role on about half the shared flights.
The flights with more than two pilots always have one active PF, one active PM, and the other(s) are resting (trying to sleep in the cabin) awaiting their turn in the driver’s seats.
Bonus nugget:
For those airlines which operate more than one aircraft type, generally speaking each pilot is qualified to fly just one type. That type can change over the years as careers progress and the airline renews the fleet with new types to replace obsolete types. Some folks get on a newly bought type early in their career and stick with it for a whole career; others prefer to hop around to different types every few years.
The military is similar in that pilots are generally qualified on only one type at any given moment. The dynamics of when and why they change types are different. Turnover of personal is faster, but turnover of new types is slower. The military also has the factor of tours spent in non-flying desk jobs, at the training command teaching new pilots, etc. Plus ever-increasing rank. Features the airlines mostly lack.
I shoulda refreshed. Lots of good posts ahead of mine above.
Short version: Not so. Not so even a little bit.
Long version: See posts above.
For all combatants in WW2, after their industries ramped up, the shortage was always of aircrew not aircraft. Not at all the case today.
F22’s at least haveLow Observable (!) bomb markings.
More or less; my grandfather’s crew flew most of their missions on the same plane, but there were a handful where they flew on other planes. I’m guessing based on the time frame (2 days after a major mission, for example) and some of my grandfather’s stories, that their plane was still undergoing repairs when they flew a mission on another plane.
In addition, the aircrews would also fill in piecemeal on other crews in case of injury, etc…
The planes themselves often rotated through a series of crews; my grandfather’s crew finished their 25 missions late in December 1943 and rotated stateside. Another crew was assigned to the plane, and flew several more missions before being shot down over Belgium in early 1944.
LSLGuy:
Which is why your call sign was Maverick.
Pace LSLGuy’s correction/addendum, the general situation of pilot “publicity” in the US and in Israel (I’m not familiar with any extra-military public interactions in other countries) always astounds me.
In Israel things are different, it goes without saying. In interviews or photos to the press this or that paratrooper or special forces guy or even regular soldier as often as not be anonymous and have his face blurred, particularly if it’s an image taken during a live tactical maneuver.
But to this day, the IDF pilots are never identified and let alone having their image pixellated, they often are interviewed with their backs completely turned to the camera. In war or peace, even for general interest “here’s what a cockpit looks like” kind of outreach.
I don’t know the OpSec thinking; retribution to a POW pilot, or even ID’ing such a POW as a pilot to begin with, would be intolerable. (I’m pretty sure I used “OpSec” incorrectly here.)
But it makes me wonder–and a little bit sad–to think that the US is unconcerned about this particular bit of military SOP.
There are a few active duty tankers around here that would better answer that. My active duty time was in aviation. I became a tanker later in the Guard. I’m pretty sure a crew owns a tank and is responsible for maintaining it (and naming it) but I don’t want to speak with authority on the subject. I do know that when we drew tanks for training by the end of a three week gunnery most of them would be broken so the entire battalion would have to hotseat the 3 or 4 remaining tanks.
I spent some time in USMC artillery, for the 155mm M198 towed gun. Gun crews typically stayed with M198s and didn’t switch to the 105s or the 8-inch guns. I suppose it happened, but it wasn’t common.
I realize the M198 isn’t a vehicle but the 8-inch guns were SPs.
Interesting. I’d WAG that the IAF is both small and strategically critical. How many fighter pilots are there? Maybe a few hundred, or a thousand? Any potential enemies could potentially have greater success attacking the air force through pilot assassination rather than air combat.
In contrast, the US has thousands of pilots, most stationed in cities or bases that aren’t directly threatened by anything short of global nuclear war. Assassination isn’t much of a strategic risk.
Idiot Maverick flew a two-seat aircraft with a crew. F-14.
Agreed. Also historically the USAF was prepped to fight signatories to the Geneva Conventions. Not irregulars who tend to slaughter downed and captured aircrew.
It’s also the case that IAF has considered itself on a wartime footing every day since it was invented. USAF has become much more OpSec oriented towards the little shit since GW-I. The stuff that matters has always been well-protected. But since around that time things like names of commanders don’t appear on base websites as much. Lots of basic info has retreated behind logins that used to be on the public facing web. DoD’s budget depends on the public having warm fuzzy feelings towards it, and openness has historically been part of that.
More tank time, but it was all Guard. Some of the experience that came with different duty positions should help on muldoonthief’s questions.
Managing supply accountability means a crew is assigned to a tank. A Tank Company Commander is what we call a “Primary Hand Receipt Holder” in the Army. To not be individually responsible for every loss the first step after taking command is to make sure every single thing you possibly can is then given to someone else with them signing a sub-hand receipt. That person can then be held responsible (and financially liable). That flows downhill. For the tanks themselves that chain flows down through the platoon leader and usually stops at the tank commander. That tank commander signs for the tank itself and the complete list of Basic Issue Items that go along with it (like tools). I’ve seen cases where individual TCs subhand receipted BII to crew members but that wasn’t 100%.
Maintaining crew integrity was a big thing because fighting the tank was a crew level task. Even with common crew drills there are still differences if you haven’t worked together. Because of that readiness reporting that went all the way to DA tracked trained crews for armor units. When I started that meant TC-Gunner combinations (you could swap out loaders and drivers on your battle roster.) Later it became TC-Gunner-Driver. That tends to drive crew stabilization during the periods between gunnery cycles. As much as possible, if a Commander wants to look good in reporting he actively manages to minimize personnel turbulence among his crews.
That doesn’t mean day to day issues “PFC Jones is on sick call” don’t result in filling in holes with people available. There’s reporting and there’s making the best of who’s available day to day.
Even though the Tank Commanders own their tank the Platoon Leader own the entire platoon. It can produce accountability issues when you are swapping around, but there were times as a PL when in the middle of a training operation I waved over my wingman. Waves and runs over “Tanks broke. Fix it. Get the fuck out!” They didn’t like it but…
Gunnery cycles in the Guard could be brutal with our lower funding for parts and longer lead time to get them. We had a great maintenance warrant and a chain of command that looked the other way about carefully controlled “part mining” that of course we claimed was somehow different than controlled substitution (aka cannibalization) that was explicitly not authorized 
We might end up with 3-4 fully mission capable tanks per company at the end of a cycle.
I did have someone I worked closely with who’d been an embedded advisor with the Afghan National Army. In his area they mostly operated in conjunction with Marines. Marines for their HMMWVs at that time were running consolidated motor pools and got whatever vehicle the motor pool assigned them for patrol. It’s a technique. Not one I agree with for several reasons.
I’m not a tanker, never was, I was a Bradley Mechanic, thus spent my military career in mechanized and armored units in the army.
Far as tanks and other Armored Vehicle such as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (in the army), the answer is, no, the crews and vehicles do not shift and rotate within the unit (there are plenty of circumstances that provide exceptions to the rule though). Armored Combat Vehicles are highly complex machines. None of them operate in exactly the same way except within certain parameters. People are highly complex machines and none operate exactly the same way except within certain very broad parameters. Your crew trains together on their vehicle so that they know what to expect from each other and what the quirks of their vehicle are and can operate the machine in the most effective manner possible. This is considered a combat power multiplier since the new guy, while having the same training as the old guy might not react as quickly, or might not predict what the TC (tank commander, also bit of army slang for any vehicle “commander”) wants next because he’s the new guy and doesn’t know yet and while not totally detrimental to the effort, takes a subtle and powerful toll until the new guy is fully integrated into the crew.
Plus what DinoR said.
Also on tanks and Bradley, yes the crew gets their name and rank on the vehicle, usually below whatever hatch is theirs, (driver, commander, gunner and loader etc)