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I'd say the T45 and the T38 are two totally different aircraft, are they both trainers? sure. but the 38 is more difficult to fly, faster, has a more storied heritage, and is far more sexy than it's navy counterpart. many dudes count it as a first love

. If I had a dollar for every time I had to do an in-flight calculation down to the millisecond, then desperately needed a watch to do it... I'd have negative $69. Pilots are cool. Watches are cool. Pilots like watches. Done. Don't overthink it.

This Colonel gets it. Good read. https://www.wpafb.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123430954

McDew or Selva will be the next CSAF. Yeah, put another Herk guy in charge.

Just think of all the nasty ball sweat and flightline kitchen farts that have been right where that gorgeous watch is sitting on that ejection seat. If the T-45 were out in the fleet as a companion aircraft, test aircraft, and adversary (e.g. as the Talon is with the B-2, U-2, F-22, and formerly F-117) they would probably see things differently.

Probably a reaction to FluMist

Don't worry about the odds. If you want a T-38, put that as your #1 choice and see what happens. While I agree with our bros here that realistic expectations are important, don't psyche yourself out at the fear of possibly not passing in a follow on trainer. If you aren't willing to challenge yourself, you'll never really improve and will end up as that copilot/wingman for life. Secondly, if it's been your dream to fly a fighter/tanker/helo/whatever, don't look back later on in life and wish you would've at least tried instead of taking the path of least resistance. My $.02

69

As far as digital watches go, the most accurate I've seen are the Casio gadgets that get a nightly time-hack from one of the 6 clocks in the world that transmit a synchronization signal. If you're in range of the signal, your watch will have a GPS-quality hack. Problem is, many bomb-sponge countries in the world are well outside the range of the synchro signal. As soon as you put on your war pants, your watch isn't any better than a $36.14 watch at the BX. For daily use, however, they can't be beat.

Never thought about it like that before...Thanks for the insight. Excuse me while I go throw all my watches away.

I have no doubt that the joint concept doesn't really save any money. Complexity is complexity, I just get bothered when people go on about how this thing is way too expensive, well compared to what? The first actual F-35 flight was in 2006, everything before that was prototype DARPA type shit. So we're less than 10 years of the real aircraft, so really about on par with the F-22. It's a shit load longer than I'd like to see, but it seems to be standard for the industry. If my google foo is ok the last super hornet buy has a fly away cost about 60mil per bird, I picked that aircraft because it's the newest fighter the DOD has bought in awhile. The flyaway cost for the F-35 is about 80mil if you buy the forecasts for 2018. So the new hotness is about a 30% cost increase. All the LRIP costs are floating all over the place, in my opinion part of the rush to kill other platforms and ramp up F-35 production is to prevent a cost spiral. So there is no doubt that the new jet costs a lot more than the old stuff, but is that worth it? What would the cost be to upgrade the super hornet class of jets to F-35 class avionics? Since the F-35 avionics are a large part of what's holding things back, I don't see how a block XX F-16 with F-35 type avionics doesn't close that gap pretty significantly as well as eat up time. So we might end up with a badass F-16, it'll still have a worse RCS, inferior performance when loaded for attack, and it will be just as shitty for low slow escort, the single advantage of the F-16 is last ditch survivability, it can jettison all the extra weight and turn itself into a BFM monster. When has that been a key player in the last 20 years? As far as the F-35 replacing the A-10, fast movers have been doing CAS for a long time. The marines have been doing it without the advantage of the A-10 for awhile. The biggest problem is the AF will try to multirole the shit out of everything without realizing the biggest reason A-10 squadrons are really fucking good at CAS is because that's what they do. This is more a pink body issue than platform issue. When the F-35 really comes online, the AF needs to not have a blanket DOC statement for all F-35 squadrons, they need to specialize. As far as the A-10 specialty of low slow escort, well we're fucked, we (the slow fat kids)need to take that upon ourselves.

Those are pictures of Tom finally coming out of the closet.

Is the stunt willingly getting aboard an Airbus?