comms

What did you say???

Stalker 3 Leave a comment

During my time, with a combat flight sim group, I learned that communication was the most effective thing that you have in the air. Combat situations call for precise, short, and quick communication. You may only have a matter of seconds before a SAM hits you or an enemy jet fires on you. So what do you do in these situations, you use what the military calls brevity. Brevity is basically a slang term describing a person, place, situation, or thing. So why do you want to learn this? If you ever have a multiplayer game and you get the opportunity to work with any military personnel, then you will understand how many more things you can get done, targets you can identify, and maintain good situational awareness, by using brevity. Here’s an example: let’s say you’re flying at fifteen thousand feet, you have one wing man, and you were approaching your target. All of a sudden, your buddy see’s an enemy jet closing in on your position. Instead of bumbling around and trying to figure out how to tell you that you are about to be blown out of the sky, wasting precious second’s, he gets on the radio and says this instead ” Falcon 51 this is Falcon 52, contact 219, bandit seventeen thousand feet and closing, how copy over.” now there’s a lot here.
Falcon 51 is you and the other guy is identifying himself as Falcon 52. Contact 219 means that he sees something at 219 degrees on his compass. Bandit means it is an enemy jet, it is at 17 thousand feet and closing means it is moving towards you and could be above or below you depending on your altitude.  (example would be if you are at 10,000 feet, then he would be above you.)  How copy is telling you that he wants to know if you can hear him talking to you  and to report back over the radio that you clearly heard his transmission. Over, means this is the end of this part of his communication. So as you can see, there is a lot to this. It’s not something that you learn overnight but if you look below you will see a link to the USAF brevity handbook. This book will list every term you need when doing radio communication’s.  Now as far as organizing it, you’ll have to do some searching. A lot of military videos will give you a good idea how to use brevity codes.  So break out the handbook and start squawking.
USAF Brevity Handbook