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Wouldn’t be an aviation forum without people going full rage mode with notional or incomplete data.

I hope this is true! Nothing yells buffoonery like allowing in house flight evaluations to see if you’re safe to fly a multi million dollar airplane, but have a “fitness cell” at each base to administer PT tests because they don’t trust commanders.

I must be getting old and senile because I'm totally fucking lost.

Well this has caused quite of bit of stir amongst the thread... They received between 70-80 hours in the T-6. I'm not implying that this alleviates all the concerns voiced about these folks having in-air experience (versus the 160-200 that a normal UPT stud might get through Phase II & III), but experience at 30hrs vs experience at 80hrs is a non-linear increase in experience level. As far as the CAF folks, they did get specific "IFF Type" instruction in the T-6 from instructors with experience in such. There was a point in their syllabus when the class "tracked" and the training syllabi diverged to accomplish an end result tailored to either CAF or MAF/SOF. I'm not making excuses for these folks not attending IFF but it does show the program has a process to produce a desired end result.

I think these guys used the same production company. Dead ringer for a Kenny Powers video!

Let’s let this play out. And then what happened?

confirm BASIC fighter fundamentals? also confirm INTRODUCTION to fighter fundamentals? not some super secret spec ops 5th gen fighter pilot shit? basic right? like bedrock fundamental principles that have probably applied since eddie rickenbacker? lead, lag, angles, energy management, station keeping, bombing range patterns? if kids do IFF in a 50+ year old jet i'm sure they can get the required learning points out of a T-6 im willing to give it a chance and see the results. some of you guys sound like the navy telling billy Mitchell he could never sink their battleship from the air. rickenbacker and mitchell in one post...my history teacher would be proud.

Good point - here's a few other situations I thought of that are sure to cause grief if an in-house requal costs 3 years: 1) MWS pilot gets tagged for non flying 179 or 365. The only way to insure yourself is to take an I/Q checkride right before you leave, so when you come back you aren't unqualified, just non current. That does take sq/cc approval for an out of zone check, and given what I've read in other threads about some sq/CCs, that may be easier said than done. I don't think that would work for your Cessna problem though, because once you get the qual in the Cessna, it voids your previous MWS qual, no matter how current the form 8 (no dual qual for the average joe) 2) MWS female pilot gets pregnant - during her DNIF period, her checkride expires. So does she pick up 3 years just to requal once she pickles? (This can also expand to any pilot who has a long term DNIF) 3) MWS pilot gets a Q3 and is directed to fly X sorties/sims before refly - does this count as an in house requal? Again, who is gonna track down every "RQ INST/QUAL" form 8 and attach an adsc, I have no idea. But it seems like the AF didn't think this one all the way through (shocking). It used to be clear that they were picking and choosing what they wanted to follow - now they just muddied up the waters.

He's gunning for Bendy's drunken poster status.

Any second assignment RPA folks that tack on an extra year or three at the end of their UPT commitment for the privilege of meeting airline hiring mins are chumps. Any three letter contractor will pick them up for equal to or better than airline pay starting on day one. The folks that do take the bait are going to end up eating 365s and other shit deals and never see the flying experience they hoped to get. Not to mention the ops squadrons would be getting inexperienced copilots that are mostly worthless training burdens with no return...as majors...with huge chips on their shoulders. But you know YOLO. Let me know how it goes. AFPC counting on RPA returns to backfill demand is a pretty dubious proposition in my opinion. All those folks are getting out. Ask me how I know.

And then?

Fuck 'em all.

Dudes, operational flying has changed, we need to update how we train. Most new jets don’t even have CCIP bomb capes. Hell, even in the hog most stuff is PGM. BFM hasn’t been used in usaf combat in 40+ years. Should a new F-35 pilot understand BFM...sure, should they be to the level a 1980’s viper pilot needed to be at? Do they need to dedicate hours at the range to practice with their 169 rnds of gun? I was at UPT last time the sky fell when fix to fix was axed....geezus, you should have heard the experienced old fighter dudes talk about how sh-tty of a product we could expect etc etc. A lot of time/gas is being wasted everyday in the USAF getting proficient at obsolete or soon to be obsolete warfare. I’m thrilled people care enough to look into updating things.

I am not in a position to speculate about the fighter world, IFF or UPT syllabus changes. However I do want to share an anecdote about the technology. I went through Rucker having built a $2000 home VR set up in my office with a Huey model that performed surprisingly honest compared to the real thing. We had guys come through in the evenings sometimes to have a go and it seemed to help dudes out quite a bit for part-task training. In particular we had one stud in my class who just couldn't learn to hover for the life of him. He was getting extra rides, special emphasis from his dedicated IP (our IPs were all old savage vietnam legends), etc. The kid was getting real frustrated. Personally I think he probably just needed a change in instructional style but anyways, I had him come over for some stick time on my VR setup. In about two hours in my home office we fixed what ~10 hours in the actual helicopter wasn't getting him. We all flew our sorties the next morning and he never had a problem hovering from that point on. And by the way he is a solid 60 pilot now. Having seen a few things like this, I will say that I personally think VR is a game changer from an instructional technology standpoint. How it is implemented and what it can replace is beyond me but I would not be surprised if it's capable of substituting more than some would give it credit for. As far as 30 hour T6 pilots going to Vipers that's a realm of analysis that I can't get my head around. Will be interested to hear about the learnings from all of this...hopefully doesn't involve any fatalities.

For all the purists out there that did UPT back when it was difficult (like me), how much of that syllabus time was spent learning the airplane and local trainingisms that had zero effect on your follow-on jets? At least for me, understanding when I could request closed or find the VFR entry point at Hacker (which I never did right) didn’t help me much in IFF/FTU. IFF could be taught in any airplane because the program is an admin course. If you incorporate those IFF expectations earlier on and influence guys when they’re learning how things are done than you can pick that up as you go. Sure, having Air sense helped by accruing hours but that can be augmented well by high quality sims, in my opinion. Based on my limited knowledge of this program, I honestly think these students are going to pleasantly surprise people. Standing by for Spears.

For fvcks sake, quit with the melodramatic bullshit. You act like the end of modern aviation is at hand because an experiment in training modernization is ongoing. Have some faith in the FTU IPs to keep these dudes safe and provide them the instruction they need.

I get URT is all in the sim, I’m a graduate of the course. All I’m asking is that if UPT Next works out and it’s 90% sim and only 30 hours in the T-6 then why even keep URT as a separate training pipeline at all? Seems like squeezing drone drivers through the course would provide flexibility to flow into other airframes instead of being limited to just the MQ-9 and RQ-4. Apologies for the thread derail.

I prefer manually pinging G2 and the scheduling Lt to improve my schedule. Much more interactive that way.

From what I hear tell, SWA has it pretty good in this regard. Maybe cause all their trips seem to be 3 days it makes it easier to plug and play, dunno. The last part is true. 3-days are the easiest currency to work with in our trip-trading systems and are the majority of what scheduling builds. One of the recent articles from SWAPA had the 2018 breakdown as 9.5% turns, 11.5% 2-days, 64.9% 3-days and 14.1% 4-days (rounded). The 3-day number is actually down a bit, but the 1- and 2-day numbers are up. I've found the 4-day trips to be the hardest to manipulate when tweaking my schedule. However, completely dropping trips (you giving back to the company) is impossible except for mil leave, and vacation drops. Giving away trips (someone else taking a trip from you) is a bit easier, but is highly dependent on the quality of the schedule you were able to bid (weekdays, 3-days, start time, commutability, etc). A lot of guys try to maximize their schedules by "clearing their board" and picking up stuff that pays better and/or playing the premium game - which hasn't been too great lately. But again, success with that is highly dependent on seniority. Just my perspective three years in and coming up on 50% seniority in seat/base.

Meanwhile I’m just sitting here waiting for my DD-214 to post... Au revoir boys!

Those were the days...

FIRST FEB at Dobbins because of drama. My ex tried to commit suicide via gun after I broke it off... yeah. They went deployed, never evaluated ect, huge sweep under the rug. ENJOY! Form 8 :(accused of unhooking myself aft 677- never took place* and tried to unhook another crewmember with doors open* again never took place. 3 loads hooked to 1 location.

I know, situation smells like REALLY OLD CANNED TUNA!!