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Well I hope he had a reflective belt on. That road walking can kill you.

BQZip posted this sign in his yard after people started hazing his mom.

Welcome to the aviation community... we complain about everything, all the time, because nothing is ever, ever good enough for us. Interesting thing about aviators: the fact that we are amazing at everything we do is also our downfall, we actually expect other people to at least be decent at their job... and unfortunately everyone else just sucks at their job (over generalization?), oh and we are slightly arrogant. Hence, we complain a lot. Just because there are more AF aviators here than other communities does not provide any statistical meaning. If you gave us a job where we flew once a week for two hours between two tropical islands with hooters flight attendants (and $500K starting pay) we would complain about the quality of the hand jobs. AF has most of the best fixed wing, Army has most of the best Helos, Navy has the most challenging...er... life? landings? and one of the best aircraft of all time, the Marines just get away with whatever they want... and pretty much all of them would do it for free. Other than that they all have many goods and bads, you can't make a decision based on the "everything else" you have to make a decision on who you relate with the best. I was personally too lazy to be a pilot anywhere except the AF. There is a decent chance you won't fly until your 65, a back up plan (education/leadership roles/marketable skills) should be a huge factor in the decision.

You're 100% correct, I don't think the AF is looking to not train or qualify anyone. The concept of TA is great, but on the officer side what they are doing is shooting themselves in the foot by forcing a Masters and now looking at your Masters completion date to determine your "promotability". Think of it this way... how many guys out there who are young Capts flying the line are saying, "This is great... trying to upgrade to IP as fast as possible AND I get to spend all this time getting a Toro Masters!!!" TA should be used as a retention tool. My personal opinion is that the AF would be much better off if they legitimately kept a Masters masked... not sure you can change that cultural mindset though. Even when it was masked, my Sq CC's used to use a Masters as a discriminator when ranking PRFs. The point is that if you could use TA to get a legit Masters at even a descent State College or University in something that actually interested you or was going to be useful on the outside then people would look at it as a good deal. Instead what we have is a corps of Lts and young Capts who are more worried about a useless Masters and SOS in correspondence than learning how to fly their jet because they are worried about OPR Strats for future promotion and avoiding the next UAV drop (because we all know that in the CC's UAV rack and stack list of candidates there is a Y/N column for Masters/SOS)! Baseops.net forums prove my point! I've seen several posts on here talking about the Post 9/11 GI Bill and how good of a deal it is that you can pass it on to your kids/spouse, etc. I'm still looking for one that sings the praises of how great TA is for getting the incredibly useful Toro and Embry Riddle Masters!!! TA is a good program, unfortunately it has been perverted into a self-induced colossal waste of taxpayer dollars to essentially keep barely ligit online universities in business.

Obviously money well spent. Uh, No. This is just back to the way it was in the early and mid-90's when you only got 75% TA, unless you were in a missile silo. And later that was determined to be not IAW the regs so they went ahead and gave 100% TA to all. That was also back in the day when only about 85% got promoted to Major IIRC.