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The dreaded "you have to fly it on steam gauges" approach. Scary stuff. Kind of like the T-38C "no HUD" approach & landing. I'm sure it has stymied many a great pilot. Or the "I've failed your primary GPS,... you'll have to use the secondary nav system to find your way." No WAY we would want to use a sectional chart. That's craaazy. Every Air Force flying unit should have a Companion Trainer. And it should probably be a piston-powered aircraft that has only one instrument in the cockpit: an oil pressure gauge about 4 inches in diameter, smack in the middle of the panel.

I just have a hard time taking anything a Lt says seriously.

Excellent idea, and I might add that it should be a Super Decathlon or Maule. Get those feet off the floor and have some tailwheel fun! Most of the GA world is heading down the same path as the Air Force. G1000s in every cockpit, three-axis autopilot in C-172s...the era of pilotage and dead reckoning is coming to an end for many. Hell, I used to fly a 152 that I thought was fancy because it had VOR/DME/ADF. Send the average pilot (civilian or military) out for a DME arc or NDB hold with no GPS and watch what happens.

Sooo.. was she hot?

I thought the rules for Lts were: 1. Never miss an opportunity to shut the fuck up. 2. Life is not fair. 3. The jalapeno popcorn doesn't make itself.

Great at queep, shitty hands. Gonna be a superstar.

I'll bet that Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski could show 1st Lt. Michelle Bosch what "good hands" can do!

I just saw a story about a heritage flight in honor of Bomber Command's strike on the Ruhr Dam in Germany: https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/daring-dambuster-wwii-mission-remembered-vintage-flight-164910484.html At the end, they compare the movie's final scene with the trench run in Star Wars, and I found this:

Dallas to Fairbanks to Dallas. 22 days. '75 Yamaha RD350. I had some troubles along the way, such as having to replace rear tire in Fairbanks, roadside repair of alternator, my friend (he was on a SV650) had to replace his chain and sprockets, my right muffler fell off 20 miles from home, and the rings in the right cylinder needed replacing. My friend also crashed somewhere between Alaska and Canada. But it was a good adventure.

Like with everything else, the military cares more about appearances than results.

I stopped reading after "she".

Wrong. Young guys, pay no attention to this.

My money is on "NO".

I've said it before and I'll say it again-- this reliance on automation has a direct negative impact on pilot skills, and when that automation goes away (and it always will at some point) what is left is the skills you may or may not have. Reference Air France 447 and tons of ATC deviations because automation let the crew down. An analogy I use with students is a guy going out and buying an AR and putting a $500 optic on it right away, never learning how to shoot with iron sights. Yes the optic makes it a lot easier to shoot, until the batteries run out and you're left with iron sights. That is what determines if you are a marksman or whether you can simply push a button and get a banana. The same holds true for pilots. PS: If she's only training post-trans students to rely on the autopilot/FMS she's doing it wrong. I regularly turn off the MFD on my students and force them to use their instruments/hand flying for approaches.

As a legacy guy turned J, I still sometimes just want to click George off and hand fly. Automation frees up a lot of brain bites, but it is still all stick and rudder landing at Salerno max gross weight.

I see MQ1 pic in the background. Her future track to see what "good life" is.....

MX gets bashed over the head via metrics that some pencil neck back office weenie manipulates. When various percentages look red, Sr MX get all spun up. So there is high incentive to fudge and cheat to their advantage. The Ops side fighting MX over delays and cancels is just us fighting back against that stupid mentality and/or let MX try to walk all over Ops. When the worker bee level cooperates and takes action to get the mish done, it had better be in accordance with the MX rules. Example, "hey chief, this gage is out." If it gets swapped out with one from the truck without the chief/crew doing a write-up and big supervision finds out, get ready for a nut pounding. I swear that some of the crap that staff-level A4 pushes down leads me to believe that they've gone full ape shit retard. SOF. Ours don't really do much. Every AETC plane is full of instructors and thus rarely insert themselves into EPs. The DOs handle any Ops/MX issues with lates/aborts/cancels. Out

I never wanted to leave, I just wanted to do the job in a place other than Del Rio.

Some pretty impressive splats so far, but no junbug strikes!

I'm a T-1 guy at CBM and it's amusing to see the perspective difference between FAIPs and MWS dudes. FAIPs tend to thing it is a bad deal, and MWS dudes tend to think it's the best deal ever! I think she's in for a rude awakening. I give her less than a year in the "real" world before she is LONGING for a return to the easy life and freedom of the schoolhouse.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/how-do-i-land-skywriting_n_3276795.html

So, just wrapped up day two of a semi epic 7 day ride from FL to DC and back. Riding a fairly stock '02 883...forward controls, no windscreen. Just wanted to see if anyone else had an epic cross-country ride story they wanted to share that's not already on this thread (obviously I'm not a regular visitor to this thread). Prior to this, my longest ride was in the UK...Cambridge-Oxford-Birmingham-Cambridge...shorter ride, more rain, same bike... Edit: structure

Guess we'll see if she can land the -135 in five flights.

1. Life is not fair. 2. Timing is Everything. 3. There is no Justice. Chuck

Hope she enjoys her first double track w/the autopilot inop. Or hell, first sortie downrange with the autopilot inop. Hello 10 hours of hand flying.

You are ranked based off of everyday events such as tests, simulator sessions (T-6 and T-1), and flights including T-25 sims (this being the big one esp. checkrides and/or end of block rides in the T-25), your flight commander ranking goes in there as well. When I went through I never really saw people "throwing people under the bus" but what I will say is that you can def. tell who in your class is struggling and who is not. Help out those who are. I remember sitting down with a couple of guys and helping them out when they hooked checkrides or even daily rides. Do it for the right reason though! Don't do it to hold it over their head like they owe you, do it because these are guys that you want to see graduate with you and not get rolled back.

Don't ever talk to the media. Ever.

It is spelled y'all .

Will never forget this: One muggy Pcola day I crawl into a T-39 at VT-86 for a low-level ride with two of my other buds. G-man and myself have our self made low level charts and radar predictions for our portion of the flight. Third guy gets in...C/S "P".... and pulls out his chart and predictions. He then proceeds to pull out individual low level charts and predictions he created for the instructor and the TRACOR T-39 pilot. Now our instructor was a salty, bean-stalk tall A-6 B/N who a few years earlier earned some air medals for flying under power lines in Iraq avoiding AAA/SAMS (GW#1) and still managed to get his LGB's on-target/shack, and our TRACOR pilot was a A-4/A-7 Vietnam vet with more green ink in his logbook and things shot at him than Jesus Christ himself. The look on their faces was priceless when Q handed them their own personal charts. G-Man and I were just sitting there ready to pound this bag of douche. The pilot just threw his someplace in the cockpit to his left (I was sitting in the rear[sTS])...and the instructor just rolled his eyes and handed them back (he could fly the route with no chart as I found out on a later flight). Don't be a D-bag trying to snob the teachers or leadership...help your buddies that might be struggling. Party on your time off and put your nose in the books and chair-fly the shit out of things to get ready for game time. My class leader was a Marine Capt who had just come from OV-10's as an observer and was tracking/transitioning toward the F/A-18D WSO program. Nobody has ever had higher grades in VT-86 before or since 'Hap'. He already knew how to do everything, heck...he was forward observing and telling half the VT-86 A-6 Intruder pilots and B/N's instructor staff where to put their bombs a few years earlier (again, ref GW#1). **It wasn't the grades that he was known for...it was the fact that every day he was in the ready room quietly talking to the instructors and looking over grades to see who in the class was struggling and he went out of his way to help those students improve**. He would chair-fly and critique in a non-hammering way and that was priceless. I pink slipped my low level check ride on my ######ing birthday not soon after the above D-Bag event (with the same salty instructor, who cut me some slack because of the haze on the route and gave me a two below = no pink). Hap was right there the next day offering advice and assistance to get my head back in the game. Hap went on to a fine career (sqd CO) and I even think he was in county when I was (we might have shared some airspace in a stack or two). Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to thank him since he passed a few years ago in a civil air accident. Be Hap, don't be "P". Apologize for the long read folks. Cheers Collin Edit: damn font size, and changed the C/S to protect the guilty.