Leaderboard

If there are any bros who either have a plane, or would consider purchasing (with or without partners), consider putting it in a club out of a local airport. It probably won’t make money, but it’ll offset costs for the owner(s) while providing a fun environment to fly in...notably without the AF bullshit or other things that come with flying out of a FBO. You’d be surprised how many people you can have in a club per aircraft while not having much, if any, scheduling conflicts.

Part of the problem is that the "training" between MAF deployments is normally operational requirements. You can't say no to an HHQ order to move a fighter squadron's DDF to their exercise or moving some broke MRAPs back stateside. So you might be leaving end of August on a deployment, you are required to get your Vol 1 beans prior to departure, you also want to take some family leave prior to deployment, and you have to fly tasked lines. The only one you have a choice in is choosing to give up your family time for a week to head out to a Flag exercise. For a long time I was an advocate for crewdogs to do exactly that. "It'll be your pink butt on the line in that fight..." But now that I'm approaching 20, the Lt Cols who were Lts when I told them that have flown their entire career in CENTCOM and AFRICOM against low end threats. And along the way we've been out on the ramp to admire the small arm holes in our airframes, or watched the SIPR porn of unsuccessful SA-7 shots due to our tactics. And it gets harder and harder to convince guys that they need to give up their family time to focus on the high end fight even though not one of us has ever been looked at in anger by a near peer. Instead they've seen the only "danger" come from shots in CENTCOM and AFRICOM. And that's what our local training focuses on the most. We'd all love to reduce our CENTCOM and AFRICOM commitments to focus on EUCOM and INDOPACOM. But the Pentagon actively fights back against that. So it gets very hard to say with a straight face to the young guys that "No, I promise, this will save your life in the next major conflict. When you receive a laydown with double digit threats in it are you going to be happy you skipped a Flag to see a few tee ball games?" Especially when they ask if myself or anyone who was an FGO when I was a CGO ever flew in that scenario. And if the Flag is going to help them on their next deployment to Africa this fall. I've also signed up for COCOM exercises and taken a group of young copilots along to get them some "OPLAN integration experience". Only to fly an uncontested airdrop on the first day because no one wanted to take away from the partner flying to provide a scenario for the airdroppers. And the Army didn't want anything complicated because they just wanted troops and equipment on the ground ASAP with 100% success so they could begin the maneuvers portion of the exercise. Then the rest of the "exercise" is just moving DDFs and JMRS around theater. We were only invited to shuffle equipment around major airfields with 10,000'+ runways. And the host nations won't allow you to do more than high altitude IFR to an IFR approach and landing. Nobody in leadership within 3 levels of a flying squadron has the ability to push back against COCOM taskings. So until you actually see Pentagon and COCOM leadership commit to EUCOM and INDOPACOM, you will continue to see people focusing on what will realistically get them killed or their wings taken during their 20 year careers. And that'll be in CENTCOM and AFRICOM until we are allowed to actually retrograde. Not just reposition it to another corner. Which of course increases airlift demand building new bases to get out of a named country without actually leaving the theater.

Pirelli has some ‘splainin to do. Would love to see a second or even multiple tire suppliers come back to F1.

Spend your 5 hour locals refueling fighters instead of heavies. Scoff the C-5 and non-airdrop C-17 receivers.

Here’s a controversial opinion: I don’t care about near peer/GPC. If it happens, I’ll have time to get smart because other taskings will be zero. If it happens and I don’t have time to get smart, I’m screwed anyway because I can’t keep that level of proficiency concurrent with maintaining my CVEO specific skill set. Also I don’t think it will happen. We have an almost zero percent accuracy record predicting future conflicts (seriously, look it up, the US has been awful at this).

In here again. Bonus is some good Ann Margret footage.