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Kida tend to disagree here ... I'm sure we will still loose a/c in a nose dive with 50 fuel Most importantly: 100 Fuel is what they did back in the day - well, that's what I have been told anyways ... and that's what this campaign is about - well, that's what I have been told anyways. In short: Request Denied!

If the mission took then I will have been killed by stupidity, turning too tight to avoid flak could my new moniker be Major Major please Middle name Major of course

I believe many of our sluggish handling losses like stalls and striking terrain on pullout are caused by simply having too much fuel on board. Full fuel is 1575L (416 usg) at a weight of 2,579 pounds. As seen below in the quote that is fuel for a 600nm radius of action or 1111km. Our last mission was (by my guestimate) the longest mission we've flown to date. Range to target area was almost 200k, return is another 200 for about 400km (240nm) round trip. Yet we carry fuel for over 1200KM ... 3 times the fuel we actually need... You would of course take more fuel for combat but if you added another 200KM range of fuel that still comes to 1200 pounds of extra fuel we were dragging around(picture a whale with wings).... again, this was our longest mission yet. I'm not just throwing numbers out there, one pilot actually did fly our longest mission ever beginning with only 50% fuel and still returned safely to base. And note below we can really stretch our range by reducing prop rpm to 1600 and auto-lean (33 mix). Of course the old argument ... "what if you're leaking fuel"? We haven't lost any pilots from a fuel leak, friendly bases are usually close by and our lines aren't that far away for a worst case bailout. We lost many that couldn't pull up in time. The standard calculation I would have used is to figure the range(one grid square = 10km) and for cruise use 1 liter per km for each engine. Using our last mission as an example, 200km each way is 400 x 2 engines=800 liters. I add 50% as a buffer/combat power reserve, another 400 for a total of 1200 liters or about 75% fuel, again for our longest mission yet. Yet we always take off with 100 fuel for much shorter hops dragging around 600 to 1200 lbs of unnecessary weight. If we aren't going to reduce our fuel load now lets at least start looking at how much fuel we're bringing back to base every time. With a light load the 38 is a remarkably agile fighter. It wouldn't matter if the plane just handles poorly but it's killing our pilots.