Leaderboard

When I was a SQ/CC I sent alot of guys to get seaplane and tailwheel rated at a 2 week civilian school in Alaska. I would have done everyone but didn’t have the budget, instead it was about 2 dozen and used as an incentive/reward for great work: IP OTQ, Pilot OTY, etc. Didn't work with everyone’s schedule so randos got to go too. It definitely teaches pilots to unlearn some overly safe attitudes in UPT (nothing wrong with that for their level) and how to fly aggressive without being unsafe, meaning have the confidence to take calculated risks. You can’t quantify the benefit of learning to be comfortable outside your comfort zone, but vignettes can draw connections between unconventional training and success in unconventional combat situations. It’s the same logic used sending officers for masters degrees- “this may not apply directly to current job but you’re learning how to think using new tools, thus arming you for the unknown.” That’s the argument I used to get it approved and left my boss speechless, lol. My thoughts are that if you aren’t actively finding fun creative ways to make the team better you have no business leading. Also if you aren’t willing to take some personal career risk by trusting the team to do these things, you have no business leading in combat. We ought to have the best pilots in the world and that costs money and requires leaders who aren’t pussies.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful. As a heavy Bubba the weapons lifts into Poland have been one of the highlights of my career. If not the highlight. I watched the live feeds of the Russians pouring across the border and next thing I knew I was in Poland. Watching pallets get moved off my planes onto trucks and knowing within the week it'd all be gone. Used to put a Russian into an early grave. It was an action that I can proudly share to any westerner. It was an action that put our country back into a well respected light with any European. We've nearly dismantled one of our two biggest geopolitical enemies of the last 80 years without costing a single American life. Spending a fraction of the snafu that was Afghanistan/Iraq. Boosting the American defense industry immensely both through our tax dollars being spent and through a massive influx of international sales. And now we're tossing it away? This war has been an Intel,strategy, and systems testing goldmine as well. A goldmine we're just going to walk away from. We're alienating ourselves from our closest allies. We're ceding soft power left and right all for what? A few billion in savings? Billions that were going to our own military industries. Check the stock market. LM, GD, etc. have all fallen 10% or more over the past month as a result while Rheinmetall, BAE, etc. are seeing 20% growth as Europe realizes they can't trust their oldest and strongest ally. Can't wait to see how many more skilled workers we add to the unemployed list next to the other 10s of thousands who've been fired recently. Don't even get me started on our brothers in arms that will die as a result. We've trained with many of those men and are abandoning them now for no reason. How we as a nation have come to the point where materially supporting a war against an undeniable tyrant is a bad thing astounds me. Can you imagine if we had stopped the lend-lease act and told the UK "good luck with the war buddy?" This is the nation that stuck with Afghanistan and Iraq for decades despite the lack of progress, yet we can't stomach 3 years of monetary support? Rant over. I'm off to go get drunk and pray that I don't have to explain to my grandkids one day why grandpa stopped helping. Why he stepped aside and let Russia walk across the fledgling democracy of Ukraine.

Why do you clowns insist on creating some false aggregate of positions to create the perfect conservative bogey man to debate instead of the people actually here in the discussion? You wanna balance the budget? Freeze all distribution programs at their nominal levels immediately. Let inflation solve the rest. Cut Medicare of for anything but stabilization and pain management after 80 years old. Fix Medicaid so that some retarded homeless junkie can't use emergency rooms for free while everyone with a job and insurance has to pay a fortune for after-hours care. Reform all benefits programs to *once again* require working age adults to work or starve. Strip the military acquisitions process of all special interests. No more buying pens from the blind just because. Remove all tax benefits for capital gains on publicly traded and private equity assets. It's income, you pay income tax on it. Stop securing home loans and student loans at the federal level and stop the rocket ship of rising home and education prices. Means-test VA disability benefits. For every $3 above $100,000 you make you lose $1 of your benefit. Obviously you aren't financially suffering from your disability. None of this is going to happen right now because everybody is hooked on the drug of free shit. What's going to happen is at some point we are going to get into a bloody messy war, a bunch of our kids are going to get fucking slaughtered by the Chinese or the Russians or the Europeans or the Africans or whoever the fuck we end up fighting, and all of a sudden people will get very serious again. You'll spend your savings on war bonds that you know are going to depreciate in value because what other choice do you have when it's directly funding the survival of your children in some God forsaken warzone? It will suck for a lot of people with pink hair and custom pronouns as the society exits the war with a newfound sense of homogeneity and community responsibility. Being your "authentic self" will be wiped away by the same judgemental fury of the surviving servicemen who will shun and shame those who believe the society owes them a payout or a tax shelter. Both the ultra rich and the ultra lazy will find themselves with fewer allies than ever. Until then, chill out, have a beer, and be happy that we don't die of paper cuts or colds. This has all happened before and it will all happen again.

You find it ironic I talked about roads in a post highlighting problems with our government spending? I find it extremely ironic that you referenced the 'ask not what your country can do for you' quote when talking about the budget when the majority of the federal government budget is purely wealth redistribution under various names. That is 100% people asking what their country can do for them and many of them do virtually nothing for their country in return. I gave the best 20+ years of my life defending this country; I've asked and answered what I can do for my country. I'm not asking anything of my country now other than to stop taking my money and giving it to people that haven't done a thing to deserve it. As @blueingreen said, I'd gladly forfeit everything I've contributed to social security in order to kill all wealth redistribution plans. I'm just fine paying taxes for things like roads, national defense, etc. I fully grasp that those have real costs that I've paid for, both in taxes and service. But the majority of our budget is not roads and such. And the enormous bureaucracy gobbles up significant portions of the very small portions of our budget that are allocated for what the federal government actually should be doing. If our government doesn't start focusing on what it should be doing and cutting out the rest of the BS, we're going to be in a world of hurt.

150' over water is essentially IMC. I'd rather fly with goggles and look under as required in a city. Did it all the time in Vegas. This is all intellectual masturbation. The procedures are stupid, and purely a result of not wanting to tell people they can't have everything they want.

This is the part that I find so funny. People act like these programs have existed for thousands of years and are the sole reason why humanity has survived. Who gives a shit if we over correct? If the alternative is fixing nothing, I would rather zero the budget out entirely and rebuild from scratch then guarantee my children and my grandchildren will live in a financially collapsing empire. People all over the world are living in much worse conditions than we are. We can survive a reduction in government provided quality of life, for a decade or so.

No offense taken! I am 61. There are currently 2 guys flying that are 64: One sits next to me and has about 3,500 hours and 1,000 - 1,100 sorties in The Deuce. The other flies the ER-2 for NASA out of Edwards, is a TPS grad and has a boatload of hours too. I believe that many moons ago, NASA allowed pilots older than 65 to fly and a few did. As an AF civilian pilot, I don't do anything "operational". But if you want to learn how to land her, do EP patterns, or fly in a spacesuit, then I'm your Huckleberry.

Sigh. Okay, I'll pretend you guys are as dumb as you're pretending to be. Right. So, from the article posted: This is what we call "lying." The official knows damn well that the database hasn't been finalized, because everyone (yes, including you) knows that pictures of the Enola Gay aren't going to be deleted (intentionally). However, a stupid person might not engage their frontal lobe and realize that if you are on a quest to purge the DOD of a decade or so of intersectional nonsense, and you were going to do it in 2025 when you have this neat technology called a "search engine," you would probably search for key words that are heavily associated with DEI initiatives, collect the results into a "database," then go through the database to pick the content that will in fact be deleted. A military officer with the cognitive capacity of a rhesus monkey would realize that the people in charge of this process would definitely search for the word "gay" and get a bunch of DEI nonsense, with, you guessed it, some pictures of the Enola GAY mixed in. But of course, "the official said it’s not clear if the database has been finalized," so until the Enola Gay is actually deleted from the DOD history books, why don't you guys stop acting even dumber than you are and just chill the fuck out. Nah babygirl, you're just so lost in the media-induced desolation over the surprise-domination of the Trump candidacy that you are clinging to anything that feeds your intense desire to have your fears justified. And what would be a more justified fear than watching the history of WWII erased? But just like the Russian pee tape, the not-a-chinese-lab origin of COVID, the Hunter's-laptop-is-fake story, and so many other too-good-to-be-true progressive fever dreams, this one was obviously a nonsense story put out by a desperate journalist feeling completely helpless to stop the erasure of the last 20 years of progressive change. You aren't out, and we both know it. You need this place because you need somewhere to scream into the abyss, but you don't want anyone to know it's you when you do it. It's not a coincidence that all the progressives/liberals/never-trumpers are coming back now that the Boogey Man is back in office.

I just cracked open my bottle of Pappy to enjoy this wonderful evening of karmic justice.

Everyone else on this thread rn

Replaced with Caine. Interesting bio. Viper guy with SOF stink and spent 7 years as a “part-time member of the National Guard and a serial entrepreneur and investor.” Could this be the Special Ops Fighter Pilot of which the prophecies foretold?!?

The government doesn't "deserve" anything and telling high wage earners that they need to pay more so we can give their money away to people that didn't earn it is what started our country down this dangerous road that we're currently on. Wealth redistribution (Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, and other income security programs) in 2023 expended 75% ($3.3B) of the tax collected ($4.4B). You will never find enough efficiencies with a scalpel. I don't think an axe is a big enough tool. I'd prefer they use a bulldozer. Bureaucracies naturally grow bigger and try to empire build, it is just part of the build of a bureaucracy. Go cut a small chunk of the mold off of old bread and the next day it'll have grown back again. Our government bureaucracies have grown to the point that we need to cut entire agencies to stem the growth.

MARSRADIO, the civilian HF service backup to HFGCS enjoyed communicating with Air Force One today. A member of their team, MSGT, was retiring and this was his last flight. Approximate 12 MARSRADIO operators briefly talked to AF1 with best wishes in his retirement after 20 years. “On behalf of Air Force MARSRADIO, we congratulate you on your retirement. We wish you blue skies and clear frequencies in for your future.” (MARSRADIO Squadron Commander) There is increased activity in the western Pacific supporting flights between Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island, Japan and Fiji. We are still optimistic that we will get a remote station in the Mariannas by the middle of the summer. The net averages 20 hours of support daily with calls from around the globe.

This is a great point, once we established air superiority against the Taliban, the Houthis, & HTS we've dominated. That's why Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria are solid victories for the US 🇺🇸 Honorable mention to Libya, Somalia, Mali. And the "all air power no-fly zones" from Iraq in the 90s definitely prevented a decades long ground war. You seem like someone who spent the last 20 years fighting all over the world gaining a wealth of practical combat experience, not at all a new guy.

Or, arguing with you is like playing chess with a pigeon. You just knock over all the pieces, shit on the board, and strut around like you won the match. There are more interesting people to converse with here. Though you are occasionally amusing.

The one Zelensky fucked up? I'm one of the more pro-funding-Ukraine people here, but that was an absolute dumpster fire. What did he think his job at that meeting was? Just because your flag is raised to the same height doesn't make you peers with the US. He knew the starting positions of Trump and Vance, and he should have known Trump's disposition towards flatter, and he decided to press. I'm not saying he's factually wrong, but his job at that meeting wasn't to be the debate champion. I wish this was just Trump playing 4D chess to get the Europeans to take over funding Ukraine, but it's not. Trump's first impeachment made Zelensky the enemy, and he's looking for any reason to embarrass him. Zelensky failed the test. However the end result may still be that the Europeans finally take ownership of their sphere of influence.

So a "known racist" has a POV on a topic unrelated to race, and it's "not ideal" that a similar POV aligns with this? What? hope you don't like vegetables, because Hitler liked vegetables and we know how that turned out.

I heard a passenger interview from an intercept once (not this one) & she was talking about how safe she felt once the fighter showed up. I don't think she understood what that presence indicates, but it's not passenger safety.

MSNBC cancels Joy Reid’s lefty show as network makes major shakeup The pendulum swings hard. This "lady" is a pure racist lunatic, maybe the rhetoric (on both sides), can start to die down...pipe dream I know.

True....but in this case, a Kill is a Kill. I will allow it!

There is an entire difference between “Standards” and “meaningless hills to die on invented by some shoe clerk to give their career/position purpose.” The inability by senior leadership to even acknowledge that both are going on throughout ranks and services is exactly the kind of shit that causes you and others to stand dumbfounded at your warfighters and tactical leaders not simply toe the line because some anointed E9 from the second group tells you, “we’ve got a problem with discipline.” Stop inventing stupid standards and crush anybody that does so we can spend the energy on enforcement of standards where it god damn matters, Sir. The next time some E8/9 is doing uniform spot checks I’m going to make them conduct a log book recon because that will actually get somebody killed and is the job those crew dawgs are here to do, and they can in fact do it while wearing white socks *gasp/horror. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Enshallah.

This is why American corporations going the DEI route was so poisonous. They planted the seeds for the general public to not trust who they are putting in the front of airplanes by openly stating they would prioritize immutable characteristics as part of their hiring practices. The crazy speculation and blow back you’re seeing on social media is a direct fault of their choices and actions in the post 2020 world. It will take a long time to reverse the distrust; and it may never go away since so many out there still worship at the altar of DEI.

Backpedal much? You clearly said we should we should shovel weapons into a war so a society could be fed into a wood chipper. That indicates a choice on our part to achieve a desired outcome. Either own it or admit it was a poor choice of words. This is a pro-war position at best, straight up evil at worst. Anytime a choice is made to cease hostilites... that's backing down? Are for or against minimizing bloodshed? Your language is ambiguous, but you most definitely don't care about anyone's bloodshed. Well I can see how a two-sentence statement can be fodder for your backpedal comment, but I'll add a little more context since you're obviously not a fighter pilot. I mean them both. There. I'm owning it. It was, in part, a cavalier response to the devil-may-care attitude some of you show, by regurgitating Russian talking points while representing yourselves as US military officers. Yes, we should funnel weapons into this war so the people who are defending themselves can continue to do so. No, it doesn't matter iF tHEy're nOt a dEMoCraCY. Putin along with his criminal army should be the ones who bear the brunt of the cost. That cost should be maintained at a high enough level to continue taking a toll until he cries uncle - which he eventually will - that much should be obvious to anyone who has paid attention to just how well his military has fared in this conflict. Maximizing Russian bloodshed to enable that end, should be our explicit goal, as that is the only way this war will justly end. I'll let me be the judge of what I do and don't care about, but to get to the crux of your provocation, yes, I have accepted that war is two things - wrong in an absolute sense, and two, part of human nature. I'm sorry that human kind has decided that some shit is worth killing people over - but that's not a decision I get to make. It's part of the reality I inhabit. And I know you're using "pro-war" as an insult, but if you are in the military, and you can't have seen being pro war at some point or another, than I don't even know what to think about that. Maximizing the bloodshed of those who are in the wrong, and who simultaneously have the full capacity and responsibility for ending the war is the fastest, and most moral way to resolve it. The only reason Putin won't, is because he wants to save face, and now sees an opportunity. And on that topic - our lack of unanimity and moral clarity on that point helps enable Putin. That is why attitudes like yours are met with such derision. The part of this whole thing I find most incredulous is that you think that by terminating support for Ukraine, bloodshed is going to end for those people. That's inexcusably naive. The only thing you're going to get is a reprieve from seeing it on the news. In fact, the cost of the war will still be fully borne out. That's the unfortunate part. You'll get to turn the lights out, click your brain off, take an internet victory lap, and pretend everything's hunky dory.

POW camp at SERE will be more fun if you do.

Thats the not internet way! Double down bud

Turning with an engine out for non-terrain considerations. Aircraft with less than 500' vertical separation on final. Modified landing data for the shorter runway. That shit doesn't fly at other airfields. That's the deviance. Only a few select "special" places is it allowed. That's the normalization. The helo flying high is just "deviance."

I love the passive aggressive approach to BS like this. I was directly told by my DO in 2008 that if I didn't wear a reflective belt out the door for the night sortie then I'd get no-stepped. So I doubled it up and wore it like a Jap about to do a Banzai. When I got the WTF look from him, I responded that it was far more visible and safer that way. My harness didn't cover any of it and the higher elevation would give greater visibility, and since safer is better, this should become the new standard. He turned around and basically stormed out. I got to fly my sortie and morally got a draw since I made the DO leave me alone for a while but at the cost of actually kind of wearing that absurd thing.

DOGE is going to force this guy to retire, and we'll finally be free of his tyranny!

Visual search from the RJ approaching 300’/1nm from touchdown is a red herring. PCF: helo altitude control/vis lookout RC: asinine procedures IVO DCA IF: Change the procedures/amount of traffic using DCA/immediate surrounding airspace. This is an easy fix that should have, and could have, been done years ago Everything else is just noise in the big picture.

It's not Friday...but today is the day for the 80th Anniversary of the greatest picture ever taken...even if it's Marines

That really sucks for you. And I mean that, a lot of really good people who've done a lot of really good work are going to go through this shitty process. Unfortunately there's no alternative. We have spent decades pretending like we are going to get things cleaned up, and in those decades the only thing that has happened is that things have gotten worse. We have gotten to the "shit or get off the pot" phase, and as much as I hate to see people like you in jeopardy, I am more concerned about my kids and their kids and their kids. We are on the unsustainable path that becomes more catastrophic the longer we are on it. Donald Trump is the most emblematic of this phenomenon. I truly wish we had someone better to lead us through this process, but he is the president specifically because everyone 'better' failed us. So now we're here.

Meanwhile at Hellfire/JDAM/Griffin/SDB suppliers…

Those be some fancy @hindsight2020 words

Word inside the beltway is CQ Brown and a few others get the axe tomorrow. List likely includes CNO Admiral Lisa Franchetti. Hoping Slife is on the list as well.

Kash Confirmed. Reports of crowds scrambling to empty supermarket shelves of popcorn nationwide.

"We" are not going to pay off this $37 trillion debt. Our children and probably their children will not pay off this debt. Generations unborn will be taxed to pay off this debt and I don't think history will be kind looking back at some of the crap we wanted but they will have to pay for.

Most mid-level officers are in the top 10% of tax payers. The top 1% is somewhere around a half mil or sightly more. I’m not saying $690K isn’t a lot of money for us normals, but seems like top 1% gets thrown out as if it only encompasses Gates, Bezos, etc. Tax the rich is a stupid and losing strategy, especially when you have half of tax payers barely providing anything, and not to mention all the people who don’t pay a dime in taxes, but suck societal resources without issue. I think both sides can agree the tax code needs improvement, but simply continuing to increase punishing successful people is a ridiculous proposition. How about we just go flat tax, no breaks/deductions (or very little at least). Something like everyone pays 10% fed, whatever that totals to is what the fed budget is. Oh that’s not enough to fund all your bullshit pet projects? Too bad, draw the cut line like the rest of us who understand basic finances do.

Did somebody say Cold Stone? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

On the Defense budget subject - spitballing, but could probably cut a couple hundred billion. Having seen deep inside the acquisitions side, all the way to sustainment (and what the warfighter gets for it), it is criminal the money the DOD wastes/misallocates/pays out as it willingly bends over and takes it from industry who enjoy near zero accountability. The DOD accepts shit like paying LM billions of dollars for “F-35 modernization” which really means “make it do the things you told us it would do in 2013.” The millions I spend referenced above should be 100s of thousands, but I don’t hate the player, I hate the game. And the DOD is OK with all of that…fuck us, we deserve to lose billions in funding when that’s how we spend tax payer dollars.

Truly? You said that you, a progressive who voted for a progressive candidate who pitched Donald Trump as the literal end to American democracy, would somehow be more mad if you were a Republican who voted for the Republican president who immediately started doing what he campaigned on doing. And you didn't see how that comment is bananas-dumb? Donald Trump is wiping out the bureaucrats that used administrivia and procedure to thwart and outlast his first administration. He's bringing in experts on efficiency and modernization to slash departments that shouldn't exist in the first place. He's purging an ideology that destroyed our academic institutions and violated the very core principals the country was founded on. I know why you're mad about all of these things, but if you're so delusional to think any of this would make a conservative mad, you clearly do live in a mental bubble with no grasp at all on how other people in this country think. That wouldn't be particularly remarkable except for you've been in a primarily conservative organization for what, two decades? The only thing I'm mad about right now is that we had to wait for a reality TV star with a gold toilet and plastic wife to do what conservative presidents should have been doing for the last 30 years.

^^^Too funny coming from the guy who said Biden was doing a good job as president

Way back in the day when I went through my first “no morale” iteration we decided to do scarves. The regs didn’t specify how you had to wear it (other than generally around neck and tucked into flightsuit) or what color/designs it had. So welcome to chief aneurisms when you have a bright red scarf worn like an ascot on any day of the week as you walk into finance. It was 10,000 times “worse” (from the chief perspective) than shirts. It was the ultimate “you play fuck on me, I play fuck on you!” The ability to give a massive middle finger to the d bags and let them know you have bested them on a daily basis was 100% worth wearing a scarf. The entire wing did it for about a year until morale shirts were back. Do it boys, you won’t regret it. Only disclaimer is I have no idea what current reg says about scarf design/wear, so QC that before full commit.

People also need to remember that the regionals are not mainline. Yeah, it's all the same FAA rules and all the same Captain's authority, in theory, but these guys are all in the rat race to get to mainline, and nobody wants to do anything that might remotely affect their chances. Being the guy who won't take a night circling approach at DCA when everybody in the regionals has been doing it for years is not the type of attention I would imagine many of them want to draw to themselves. Personally I see 0% of the blame going to the regional crew. It's just not rational to think that Tower at one of the most controlled air spaces in America would let a helicopter get that fucking close. I certainly am never clearing for helicopters directly below me on short short final, and I fly a ton of visual approaches. The helicopter crew definitely fucked up, but the real blame here goes once again to one of our "institutions" that hasn't been holding up its end of the bargain for a long time. Even if we fix the FAA tomorrow, we're going to see the unfortunate results of a couple decades of laziness and complacency keep popping up.

No one should be interested in the things I'm not interested in anymore.