From my last update of the guide about paratroopers in HOI4, I’ve seen that lot of people search for the question why are the paratroopers not launching. Because of that, I’ve created this article to solve all of your problems. Let’s look at this problem together.
Check if you have enough air superiority
The first and most important thing you must check is if you have enough air superiority. You must have enough fighters to support paratroops because in every air region, you need to have 70%+ of superiority. If you want to send paratroopers far away from the main line, you will need heavy fighters (because of their longer range).
If you don’t have enough air superiority, you can “hover” the green arrow which launches an attack. You can also see where your paratroopers have problems. In the picture presented below, you can see a detail from the picture above where I don’t have enough air superiority in the strategic region of Czechoslovakia.
In the window, you can see “estimated plan value” as well. If this plan value is below 50%, then you don’t want to perform paradrop. All of your paratroopers will probably die.
Be sure that you have transport planes at the correct airport
It can happen that you will have problems with planning. If you have air superiority then you should check if you have enough transport planes on base from which you plan your airdrop. The game allows you to plan your airdrop from all bases you have.
So check you have this prepared. In late game phases when you have a lot of transport planes & a lot of divisions & lot of airports, it is easy for you to make mistakes. You will have paratroopers at the airport A and planes at the airport B.
It’s good to check if you prepared yourself correctly. From my experience, frontal airports are especially good for paradrops. Because of that, check if you have a good defence. After that, you will be able to send paratroops there and after that transport planes.
Not enough transport planes
Check that you have enough transport planes. In point two we discussed the distribution of transport aircraft. However, this is not all. There is also important how many transport planes you have. One transport plane in the game does not represent one plane but rather a “group of planes”.
The amount of planes which you require to paradrop depends on the weight of the the battalions. When planning paradrop, you can see how many planes you will actually need. If you don’t have enough transport planes, then the paradrop won’t start.
Also, don’t forget there is a “base” number of transport planes you need to even paradrop. After assigning troops, the number should gradually increase. In the image above you can see that I prepared a paradrop which requires 13 transport planes in the “base”. In case I add another unit, the paradrop will need more planes. It means that you must focus on the production of transport planes if you want to paradrop.
Do you have enough fuel?
To perform paradrop and to maintain air supremacy you will need fuel as well. Without fuel planes don’t fly. But if you’ve made it this far, I’d expect this to be fine.
More about fuel under the presented link.
One general & paratrooper division & one plan
In case nothing helped I will suggest creating a new general. => Reassign all the paratroopers to a new one with only the divisions that are paratroopers.
In short, you need to have everything in one place and if it doesn’t work, rescheduling everything. I believe that if you go over everything again and see that you only have paratroopers in one place, it will work.
