They hit the airfield with drones so where's the Russian CAP?
You can only do so much with saturations attack. The fact that the other 5 Flankers on the ramp were moved out shows they were aware of the target and had an early warning. The ones of the hangar couln't move for whatever reason.
And as pointed out by others, keeping aircraft on the air 24/7 is a waste of resources for diminishing gains.
Unlike the US the Russians and Chinese pretty much keep quiet on the MCR (Mission Capable Rate) of their Flanker fleet but the rumors have been that Flankers are hangar queens and now in time of war it could be the rumor is true.
No ofense, but thats one of the silliests things I've read. It has always been rumor spread by f-16.net types since time inmemorial based on misread reports and bs from Indian media about their Flankers and other similar assumptions taken as gospel by some.
It doesn't make sense for a top 3 air force after two years of war to not have CAP at least the general area where there is war. At least have an AWACS flying so that it can scramble fighters to intercept incoming drones.
The point of a saturation attack is to overwhelm all assets in the target and considering how often the Ukranian try it, that we don't see such things happenings more often and how limited damage usually is points out that they do infact have defences on it.
And there are no signs of Russian air strikes capabilities being degraded despite all the claims about how the Ukranians are destroying dozens of Flankers each week; Ukranian positions are still getting hammered daily by glide bombs while also pretending that whats left of the Ukranian air base network isn't getting hit almost daily to the point we haven't seen many sorties as of late of whats left of the ukranian fleet other than the video of an ancient Yak-52 chasing a drone.
Since we are about rumors, maybe it is true the entire Ukranian Su-24 fleet got wiped out, then.
Anyway, back to the main topic. We know there is a shortage of spare parts for the Flankers because India cannot keep theirs airworthy due to Russian dependency. This goes to issues relating to point 2.
I think India manages to sink the operational rate of evey aircraft they have in the inventory but somehow people don't make assumptions about it for the rest of the worldwide fleet of a type.
