One of my crews has 90 repair skill, I don't know the effect in the hanger but when i land a heavily damaged aircraft in HB i am taking off again about 6 seconds after landing. Same with the reloading. That was before the patch.
Yeah, that´s the repairskill, it´s quite useful. But what is the repairRANK for? It tells me I´m getting free repairs if it´s on the level of the aircraft-tier. How often do I get free repairs then?
Repairrank is for the tier for the aircraft, if you set off autorepair, you get an timer where stands an time which when expended your aircraft is repaired for free, for lower tiers this is something for an few hours, and higher tiers can be up to a few days, If you increase repairspeed the timer will be lowered, but if the repairrank is not on the same rank as the aircraft is tiered then the repairspeed will have no effect in hangar (not sure if this also counts for ingame repair at airfield)
Have not reached the max of repairspeed yet but for lower tiers, full repair for free can be only 30 min instead of 3 hours, higher tiers like 12 can be lower less then 24 hours instead of 3 days.
But it seems they lowered max repaircosts and increased repairtime for free, so it is not so important anymore for saving money.