Originally Posted by
HuggyU2
"Sorties" is a pretty good measure too. Better than hours when it comes to how much time you spend "preparing, flying and debriefing"... though you may have fewer "hours".
4 or 5 years ago, there was some informal discussion in the USAF fighter biz about using sortie count instead of hours as a measure of experience.
The reason for that was the 2004-2007 timeframe in Iraq, where fighter AEF deployers were performing 4-6 hour sorties of "pipeline patrol" and similar non-tactical missions. The result was that there were some guys tagging 1,000 hours on their FIRST OPS TOUR, yet had little to no tactical prowess because so much of that time was on these AEF sorties.