Your Brave Airmen

This portion of the Bomber Crew guide is devoted to the valiant men and women who subject themselves to your crummy management.

Abilities

Every class of airman has unique abilities. Read these and use them when is most effective so maximize your chances of survival. I will talk about a few critical ones below.

Gunner

Focus. Focus is incredibly effective for destroying enemy fighters. It boosts the aim of the gunners, making each shot count. The best time to use Focus is when a wing of fighters makes their initial attack approach. The fighters fly stable and mostly in a straight line at your plane. Easy pickings. Do not use this ability before they get in range. That is just a silly waste.

Use focus when you are trying not to die

Engineer

Boost and Lean. These abilities change the rate of fuel consumption for your plane, and the rate of travel for your plane. Use Lean over friendly territory to maximize how much fuel you will have for the tricky parts. Use Boost to get out of a pickle or to beat a countdown timer. If you are hoping to shoot down an enemy Ace, Lean will keep you in the fight longer giving your gunners more opportunities to destroy the Ace.

Pilot

Emergency Dive. While this ability is supremely effective at murdering crewmen on the wings, it serves a couple other functions. First, it can change altitudes in a hurry. If you are close to a bombing target and you need to get to the low altitude, hit emergency dive, and then the low altitude button to maintain that elevation. Second, emergency dive can put out engine fires. And third, emergency dive can buy you some breathing room from enemy fighters.

Radio Operator

Mark Fighters. An advanced ability of the radio operator is to target fighters for your gunners to shoot, rather than doing it yourself. This can help sooooooo much when you are in the middle of a bombing run and a million fighters pop up. Try to keep your radio operator alive to have this delightful ability.

Radio for recon can be helpful too…

Secondary Classes

Each crewman has the ability to take on a second role. Pick a second role that works for your strategy. I like to have the bombadier and engineer double as gunners. I like the map guy be an engineer, and the two gunners as first aid so they can heal each other. This may not be the best strategy for you. Just pick a strategy and try to remember it.

Completed missions level up both classes

Wearing Fashionable Outfits

If you love playing dress-up as much as I do, you are going to love this section. What your crew wears is incredibly important. I prefer to maximize defense on the pilot and gunners. The only non-defense oriented item on the gunners is their shoes. The toughened leather boots add marginal defense, but reduce mobility by a lot. The plimsolls make mobility go way up, by sacrificing little defense. With a gunner fully loaded out for defense they walk incredibly slow.

I get the bombadier, radio operator, and navigation to have a mix between armor and mobility, but keeping the bombadier a little more heavily armored than the other two. I keep the engineer in a mixed position, but a little heavier on mobility.

In the later part of the game, some people build a high altitude setup. This can be effective as you stay out of reach from flak and fighters. Just a thought.