Recent years perspective from just one P3 bubba
The MPRA community since 2003 has been wrestling with aircraft availability both at the FRS and for the Fleet squadrons. The red stripe messages dictated that some severe steps be taken over the years at the Squadron, Wing and Group level. As a supporting community our leadership has done well to bridge the gap and these intervening years. To some degree it is difficult to explain to an outsider all that we have done, and are doing to keep our community proficient, tactically sound, and engaged supporting other communities with the limitations an aging platform has placed on us. Some of the key decisions the community has enacted to preserve the platform and make it to the P-8A:
- Reduced flight hours per airframe category
- Sending planes to the bone yards
- Budget appropriations to get aircraft "re-winged" and brought up to date such as with AIP
- Dissolving the reserve squadrons and incorporating their planes into the active duty fleet
- G limitations
- Pilot manning reduction
- Pilot proficiency and hours to qual reductions
- Improved simulators
These are just a few of the myriad items our community has faced in recent years managing an aging P-3 fleet while supporting 3/5/6/7TH Fleet Commanders. We have watched consolidated maintenance come and go and the joys of fighting over available aircraft and simulator time at Wing allocation meetings. Gone are the days of pride in ownership, as the limited pool of aircraft get rotated between deployed sites that need the best planes, and/or training and readiness requirements for home based squadrons that are in varying stages of their home cycle. Hopefully with the maintenance departments coming back to the squadron, at least some of the aircraft will be kept at the squadron level to be groomed and taken care of. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the number of available aircraft to a squadron fluctuate based on its cycle.
As other, "older" P3 community bubbas on here can attest to, there used to be many P3 aircraft on the ramp, with 7-12 assigned to a squadron depending on which portion of the deployment rotation they were in. A variety of those planes were of different capabilities of course, from U 2.5s, U IIIs, Beam UP an AIP birds (oldest to newest for those that don't speak P3! not necessarily old in terms of flight hours, but with respect to airframe improvements). I was in a squadron when we got the first red stripe that watched ALL of our planes disappear back in 2004, and for a period we were rotating planes between the Wing and other squadrons.
Bottom line, it is a big shell game of moving P3 assets around to suit training at the FRS, deployed warfighter needs, and home cycle squadron training. This is not going to change in the near future. Hopefully as the P-8A comes closer to manning up the first squadron, we will see our community bridging this gap to the newer aircraft. Just cross your fingers that the P-8A doesn't fall on the chopping block next year.
