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Story time... One drill weekend circa 2014/2015, half the squadron is piled on a bus headed to some off-base training. I was a still in my first year at DAL and I didn't really talk much airline talk in the squadron unless asked. On the bus ride out, someone asks me something about DAL, so I answered. Suddenly, two of our full timers (so self pro-claimed, "never airline" types...) come unglued and bitch me out for talking airline talk. Until I saw their reaction to my laugh, I thought they were joking because I was simply answering a question. They were legit pissed and kept yelling...at which point I told them how, when, where and why they could go fuck themselves. The closest I've ever come to throwing a punch at work actually. I was a prior-e with one of them, so it threw me off guard. Anywho, fast forward a few years and those two fuckheads are flying for the airlines. I'm sitting in a briefing room, prepping for a sortie and I hear them chattering around the corner about airlines. I peak my ugly mug around the corner with a smug ass look and ask them to keep the airline chatter down, I'm trying to prep tactical shit here. It's certainly not for everyone, but Brabus is right, for many years of our careers we've been conditioned against airlines. I guess that's why it's referenced so much now. Don't worry, it will stop in the next down turn... Break Break Some people need their work to give them a sense of purpose and a feeling doing something meaningful, which is great. This U-2 gig seems like a great deal for someone like that. Then there are people like me who do the airlines because it's the best money I can make, in the least amount of time away from home. I've got way too many things I want to do outside of work...no purpose needed for me. Not many places are going to be ok with me dropping my schedule and not showing up for the month lol. I'd rather spend my time traveling with the frau, volunteering at the local aviation museum and flying my own planes. Neither is right...someone will be happy with this U-2 gig for sure.

You're new to Baseops arent you?

How not to fight a war:

Some good points. Definitely correct about holding onto legacy capabilities rather than developing new ones. Modern JFE is a great example...and I'm a proponent of JFE. Also spot on concerning UAS. I'm surprised he didn't talk more about long range fires and counter-fires, which have been a significant emotional event in Ukraine that we need to learn from. However this article stinks of Army centric vision. He decries that deep strike is a waste...when with modern full spectrum US capabilities, deep strike can almost completely prevent a force from moving TO the jump-off point, not to mention killing them AT the jump-off point. Standard article about "our" joint capabilities...spelled ARMY. Their concept of broad vision means looking at another ground force and saying "they're doing it better" instead of looking at the international arena, and then our JOINT force, and then saying "here's how we can do it better". I've never been impressed with our ground force's ability to actually think outside the box.

Nailed it. The unappreciated factor here is that both sides have employed relatively effective air denial. With effective defenses against the air and surface domains from the surface and on both sides, maneuver warfare rapidly becomes attrition warfare. That doesn’t mean we should resign ourselves to that form of war (though we should probably invest more in air denial… https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/airpower-after-ukraine/air-denial-the-dangerous-illusion-of-decisive-air-superiority/). The human expense and geopolitics of surface mass alone are untenable if we intend to maintain the ability to win wars in all the places we intend to win wars. We should build our forces to achieve conventional overmatch through asymmetric means. That means enabling maneuver warfare on the ground by doing more than denial in the other domains. To massively oversimplify it: there are two options to prepare for when the balloon goes up: pay in cash and risk now or pay by consuming a generation of humans later. Against a peer, to win we’ll unfortunately likely have to do both.

I definitely can. Can you you point to EVEN ONE incident where a white pilot who should have been fired was retained because he claimed "you're firing me because of my race or gender"? Melatonin content and wedding tackle should have absolutely no bearing in the hiring process because gender and race have no discernable impact on the capabilities of a pilot. The moment they are introduced as any form of discriminator, the quality of the force goes down, because they stop hiring for quality and start hiring for diversity. That's how DEI bullshit is diluting the gene pool. That's basic logic. Can you not see that? Following your rules, the NFL and NBA would be better if they hired more white guys and asian girls, and the oil fields would be more productive if they had a quota of weak armed trans-men work the rigs. The logic of DEI is completely false. Removing some barriers to entry makes sense, enforces quotas does not. Also basic logic: it's impossible to prove a negative. Asking someone to do so is violently ignorant. If you make your world view decisions primarily based on "statistics", you're putting yourself at the whim of any tool who knows how to twist numbers to his view. Logic and reason. Use logic and reason. When you stop hiring based on ability to do the job, you get a lower quality product. When you DO hire based on ability, you'll get all the diversity you need as a side-effect. You want a stat? Ok. An airplane was crashed (and yes, one is too many) by a man who should have been fired based on his performance but was retained predominantly because of his race. Show me a stat that proves diversity has IMPROVED the safety of the airlines. (that's a positive by the way...those can be proven)

@Smokin I agree with what you're saying. I would like to massage something though: FIFY. Some people have this notion that the military road is somehow in-expensive. It's not. It costs over a decade of your life (minimum), tons of deployments, untold stress on family and relationships, and a significant opportunity cost of what you might have otherwise done with your career on the outside...all with no union or work rights protections of any kind. Make no mistake: any man or woman who has the aptitude to be a pilot in the military can make immensely more money at immensely less personal risk on the outside if the same level of effort poured into the miliary pilot career was poured instead into a civilian pilot career. Is it easy? NO. They are both expensive roads. BTW, the 'traditional' civilian path is no more. No 4 year degree required. From highschool student to right seat in a heavy jet can be as short as 4-6 years now. 1-2 years of zero-CFI land and building time, 2-4 years in a regional with the R-ATP, then ACMI. I know, because I sat next to that guy in my ACMI indoc class. The only reason (by his own account) he was 26 instead of 24 in that class is because he took 2 years after highschool dicking around before he got serious about the flying gig, and his process was hardly streamlined as it could have been. I'd call him an average joe. That dude sat right seat at an AMCI before getting hired by delta. He's 27. He has no student loan debt, and his 'building time' debt is already paid. Zoom out a little. Find me any career where you can make 6 figures in a union protected job within 5 years of starting that path with little to no college or training debt. This isn't about airline pilot hiring. This is about America deciding to not charge the next generation a $300,000 entry fee before they start a career where they can prosper. Removing the 4 year degree requirement did exactly that for the airlines. There's still plenty of barriers to entry, as there should be for a multimillion dollar, high-stakes job that places other people's lives in your hands on a regular basis. But it's certainly not the 'traditional' path any more. I'm not sure that's the right answer, but it's where we are. I will definitely reinforce that America needs to reduce the cost of entry into the higher level, high-skill, high value added work force. That starts by chopping the cost of university education, (imagine if universities didn't pay $13.1M for a DEI department salary...Link) and opening up the aperture to enable the opportunity to enter those high-skill avenues to those who traditionally don't have them. That means removing barriers to BEGIN the process, while retaining the quality control within the process. Equal opportunity is not, and should not mean equal outcome.

Good question to ask. Consider starting a new, relevant thread on the topic.

This is bullshit. You asked for some evidence, got it, now you're moving the goalposts.

I don’t think that at all. But I do think the airlines is a very good post-mil flying career that is widely misunderstood by many who also are the ones giving “career advice” to their subordinates and peers. That’s the main reason for openly discussing it in these boards, in hopes of increasing the amount of valid data available for people to make informed decisions.

I'm too important to block. Sorry.

Asking for a specific proof as you are is a false premise. You want a specific proof that you know doesn't exist because...again...you can't prove a negative. Is there some playbook of poor debate tools you're reading out of? Fact: Focusing on anything EXCEPT the task at hand (i.e. hiring with DEI in mind instead of solely based on ability) dilutes and diverts your efforts, thereby making your operation less effective and less safe. You as the challenger in that debate bear the burden of proof. In you own words, diversity does not improve safety. Therefore, logic dictates that a focus on diversity thereby distracts from the focus on safety, thereby making the process less safe. There is no proof of this aside from logic, as it's a negative, EVEN THOUGH we've presented examples as proof...which is the only logical way to demonstrate the 2nd order effects of a negative. Have you put no effort into learned logic, reason, or rational thought? End game and back to the topic: the polarization of left and right has led to what I believe are hiring practices that are making the airlines less safe. I've experienced first hand CA's and FO's in the industry who demonstrate sub-par skills, yet are adament that they are being discriminated against due to race, gender, or even political affiliations, when in fact they were simply bad pilots. All of those individuals refused to acknowledge their lack of piloting skills and blamed critics of their skills on biases in other areas. That bullshit makes crews less likely to call out aviation deviations...like taking off without clearance...as the crew members now live in fear of reprisal or even time in court because of perceived slights and biases against the thin-skinned poor pilot they are flying with. It's happened to me first hand and I've watched it happen to others. It's unsafe. If you can produce no evidence to support your claims, not even a single example, that focus on diversity is somehow improving the airlines, I recommend you re-examine your view point.

FIFY

@thebleakmw Awesome! Thank you so much for the insight and really appreciate the quick reply.

There's lots of information available on the subject of excess deaths. So far no one has drawn a definitive conclusion on why it's happening. However the phenomenon seems confined to heavily vaccinated locations with other variables negligible, ergo logic dictates one of two possibilities most likely: 1. C19 vaccines are killing people. 2. C19 is still killing people in heavily vaccinated populations. Either way the "safe & effective" chant that NIH/CDC/DNC used to force vaccine mandates has been disproven, must immediately end, and consequences for those individuals must follow.

I just meant in life, compared to all earners. Top 5% and up for potentially 20+ years, quite fantastic. Not meant to mean uncommon for legacy carrier airline pilots (or doctors or lawyers etc.)

Oh it’s the most boring thing ever (hopefully). but the pay and free time is absurd.

That’s 5-6 year narrowbody captain pay at delta just flying an average line … with no contract ninja-in. you can be a narrowbody captain the same year you’re hired currently. It’s not fantastic nor out of the ordinary. That’s everyday, walkin around Money. (expectation management)

I have friends flying for CalFire and also firefighting in the northwest. Police ISR, medevac, or have flown contracting for state and fed government. Long line work, overseas support (both mil and civ stuff). There’s more out there. Using firefighting as an example, depending on region you might only fly from April-October so the rest of the year is yours. I have a buddy who lives on a diveboat in Palau during the off-season. Lots of options out there. The caveat is I don’t know of any that pay what you’d make after a few years in the airlines, but you can live pretty comfortably.

Is it a minority? Perhaps. It just irks me that the common subtext on this board is that flying for the airlines post-military is the only viable, worthwhile option. The truth is a really good, comfortable living can be made in flying positions outside of airline/cargo flying.

For the most part agree with all above. I passed off the deep strike part as being more about unsupported Army helo aviation than anything joint or AF centric. In that the authors may have a point worth discussing. The portion on JFE is certainly interesting and something worth discussing. Vertical envelopment and amphibious assaults are going to be increasingly difficult to accomplish with widely proliferated, cheap and mobile ADA, anti-ship missiles, and loitering, kamikaze UAS. Not to mention any adversary with heavy artillery. I’ve worked with a pretty wide cross section of Army guys over the years, some fall into the above category you describe, others realize that we (The US military) isn’t getting anything done without the other services. The two authors of the above article probably fall into the former category if I was to guess, but they still make some valid points.

Anyone here familiar with the Giant 3591 crash? Yeah, that. The FO hid his training failures during the hiring process, had multiple training failures at Atlas, and was almost scrubbed from their program...which is saying something...but wasn't because he played the 'you're firing me because I'm black' card, and was retained. That asshat had no business behind the controls of a coffee machine, muchless a heavy jet. That's the kind of incident that will become more and more prevalent.

I know guys who flew airlines or cargo and hated it, even though they made a shit ton of money. They are now flying in other careers and are happier than ever. To each their own.

TLDR version: Biden’s fault.

Interested story from the good old days https://theaviationgeekclub.com/foxhound-vs-blackbird-former-mig-31-pilot-explains-how-to-intercept-and-shoot-down-an-sr-71-mach-3-spy-plane/amp/ Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

J6 was a violent riot. Tucker's reporting says that as well. However Congress, the president, the vice president, and multiple news networks have been telling us it was an armed insurrection & worse than 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. On a scale relative to those events, it's accurate to say "J6 wasn't that bad." It's also lazy to rely on the "both sides bad" comeback. I recall during the height of ISIS our MSM networks would cautiously report on a dozen children roasted alive by the Caliphate (or whatever latest barbarity) while reminding us that Christian extremists also exist and are bad. My reply then & now is "you're not wrong but GMAFB." there can be no unity or reconciliation in our country without accountability for shitty behavior on any side. On that I hope we agree and if focused on that these conversations can be more unifying and productive. If a J6 or BLM rioter is caught, throw them in jail. If Trump breaks the law, investigate & prosecute. If Biden has been taking Chinese bribe money through his crackhead son, investigate & prosecute. Unfortunately a politicized and unethical DOJ/FBI is only weighing in against one side on those above examples and that is clearly apparent now. I want one country under God with liberty and justice for all.

Not exactly F1 but still fun to make fun of Ferrari.

A whole lot of us in Eucom at the time we’re waiting while one of our poorest foreign policy leaders dithered and conducted poll’ing. The media narrative of “little green men” paralyzed us resolve combined with an IO campaign that it was a populist revolt by locals, because we couldn’t prove to the average person what the smart people in the room knew, that those were Russian troops from VDV and Spetz units. By the time our administration got off its ass to “do something” the Russians had all the key terrain and the Ukrainian military of them was not the military of today (a decade of FID/training saw to that). Also geographically Crimea is a much smaller operation than trying to take a region the size of Massachusetts (vs a country of 40+ million people that is the size of Texas). If we had responded militarily to it we would have been executing a joint forcible entry scenario to restore Crimea. And we’d have largely been doing it alone considering how Merkle ran her seat at the NATO table. We thought repositioning rotational troops and throwing some sanctions on the Russians would be enough to deter further aggression, but the whole time we prepared the Uke’s in case it failed. And yes failing to act then was one of our dumber mistakes and another big show of why Obama was a pretty awful leader in the form of foreign policy, and we all owe Mitt a public apology. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Guys, y'all arguing with @BashiChuni on this is as pointless as Putin throwing away too many young Russian men against the hard rocks and advanced weapons in Ukraine. Probably time to quit.

@BashiChuni Perhaps I was a little harsh. So we can understand the context of your masculinity...when was the last time you caught a fist to the face? Fair, this was weird. Allow me to rephase it: You sound like a weakling who doesn't understand the need for, or purpose of the use of force. Inter-personally or internationally.

1 - We, the officers of the USAF who choose to post on BODN, aren’t defeating anyone. Our country, the one you swore allegiance to, has collectively chosen to stand up to a strategic enemy as they fail. You should support that if your allegiance is to the USA rather than to some failed politician. 2 - the results of AFG and Iraq don’t rest on our shoulders. Bush, Obama and their secretaries aren’t posting here. You know damn well that if we had a say the policies involved in prosecuting those wars would have been different. 3 - Everything you argue for amounts to appeasement. Read a Fvcking book about the first half of the 20th century. Educate yourself.

That's fair enough. I will point out that past failures are neither acceptable nor an excuse for future incompetence. We need competence in the FAA and in transportation right now. An administrative leader with some vague experience would definitely help with prioritizing some things in that realm. I'll agree that mastery is not a necessity for administration. However a basic familiarization is probably a good idea. When's the last time an AMC guy led ACC, for example. Your point is fair, and open to opinion. Not mandatory, but again, familiarity is probably good. So, I'm assuming you're ok with this: Reminder, Phil Washington has managed two major airports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Washington#:~:text=Phillip A. Washington (born 1958,Joe Biden's transportation transition team. Should he be able to answer all those questions? Absolutely not. Should he be able to answer at least one of those questions? DEFINITELY. Any pilot, dispatcher, or certified airfield manager would have gotten at least two of those questions. This guy's been a CEO of Denver and LA Metro, and can't even talk about at least ONE of these topics...especially considering the most recent history of air traffic close calls? That's not lack of expertise, that's just doing your homework before getting interviewed by Senate of the United State. It's simply lazy. We don't need any more lazy. But by your logic, that's ok. The predecessors were ignorant of the specifics, so the next guy can be ignorant. Experience entirely gained by OJT for a federal administrator is cool. But bear in mind that a Senator, who's job is even more general than this guy's would be at the FAA, did some homework and was able to talk with even a fake level of expertise. Again. Lazy. FFS, this guy was an Army CSM. He should know better. This kind of political appointee laziness needs to stop. I don't give a shit how bad they were in the past. I am very concerned about our future. Considering the fact that you have adamantly reinforced that you agree with this administration and all it's been doing: the disastrous and treacherous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our completely opaque and apparently open ended involvement in Ukraine, the suppression of a free investigation into hunter biden's dealing, dismissal of President Biden's own mishandling of classified documents while vilifying Trump doing the same exact thing, a suppression of fossil fuels production in the US for no obvious reason...except...the uplifting of green renewables despite overwhelming science to counter their sustainability, the affirmation of providing gender transition surgeries to minors without parental consent, and in general endorsing an agenda over and over that gender and skin color make a difference in one's ability to do their job, the intentional increase of inflation through endless spending of money we don't have, and on, and on, and on...I'm not surprised.

My favorite part about dodging wx is having an on coming car flash his lights at us as we're scud running around 15 feet AGL in a snow storm. I really wish that I would have WX CNXd that one.

Rico got another Fulcrum in Allied Force. All the Eagle kills in OAF were interesting for one reason or another, but Claw Hwang’s 2 Fulcrums are my favorite. I can’t remember all the details, but he basically screwed up everything in the engagement and was given extra TI rides in his 4 FLUG even though he killed 2 migs haha. @Steve Daviesprobably had the details on that. There was another (I think) Mig-25 kill a Viper dude got in a D model while on a checkride with an F-4 wingman. He got a 4 on his grade sheet and EQ on the eval.