LITTLE ROCK — Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz has increased standard combat deployments from four months to six months, with a few exceptions including C-130 flight and maintenance crews.
Even at six months, the Air Force has the shortest combat tours in the U.S. armed forces. But many airmen get only a handful of months home between deployments while other branches get a year or more.
“The impact right now is mostly uncertain,” Lt. Col. Bill Otter, 19th Operations Group deputy commander, said Thursday.
The longer combat tours affect those airmen who deploy as part of a set rotation and will be phased in over the next fiscal year, according to Air Force officials. The demand is so high for airlift - involving C-130 and C-17 cargo planes - and air-refueling tankers that they don’t fall within regular deployment cycles called bands.
The longer combat tours are expected to initially affect only a few more than 100 airmen at Little Rock Air Force Base.
“It has been left to the leaders at the functional commands on whether we stay at 120-day deployments or move to six months with everyone else,” Otter said. “How much flying we do separates us from much of the Air Force.”
Air Mobility Command, which oversees all cargo and air-refueling units, is keeping its flying units on four month deployments because high demand causes crews to hit their maximum flying hours.
Air Force flight rules allow for a maximum of 56 hours of flight time per seven consecutive days, 125 hours per month and 330 flight hours per 90 consecutive days.
That is for just the time in the air, not the hour or more on the ground for flight planning and for loading and unloading people and equipment between legs in an 18-hour day in Iraq or Afghanistan. The time adds up quickly in a war zone.
The longer deployments are phasing in across the force, beginning with support squadrons and the fighter community in Air Combat Command. Fighter crews have high-stress jobs but shorter flying days compared with the airlift units. Fighter sorties last an average of four or five hours compared with 18-hour days for airlifters and tankers.
“We are still in such high demand over there, we are using up our capability, our flying hours [in four-month tours],” Otter said.
He compared C-130 operations with those of regional jets. The jets fly short hops here and there all day long.
Cargo planes and air-refueling tankers fly more sorties and longer missions than close-air support and fighter aircraft like A-10 Warthogs and F-35s.
According to U.S. Air Forces Central Command, combat aircraft and unmanned planes flew a combined 854 sorties in Afghanistan and Iraq last week, the latest data available. C-130 and C-17 cargo planes flew 1,528 sorties and hauled 4,446 tons of cargo and more than 29,000 passengers. Air refueling tankers flew 504 sorties, passing 28 million pounds of fuel to more than 2,000 aircraft.
“For those reasons, the mobility forces are still mostly at 120-day deployments,” Otter said, explaining that the flying time limits are a matter of risk mitigation similar to what civilian pilots are subject to under the Federal Aviation Administration.
Schwartz told the Air Force Times that his decision to extend standard deployment lengths to six months is a way to stabilize deployments and give airmen more time at home. For those airmen in the deployment set rotation, the standard time at home between deployments would increase from 16 months to two years.
In the current operation, that time at home is short in the C-130 world. C-130 airmen in high-demand jobs - such as crew chiefs and loadmasters - are on a continual cycle of a four-months deployed, four-months home and back again. Aircrews also tend to face more than one deployment a year.
The current average deployment-to-home ratio for the flying squadrons of Little Rock Air Force Base is 1-to-2 - one four-month deployment with eight months home before the next deployment.
“Just because we’d be gone six months doesn’t mean we’d be home more,” Otter said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/25/2010