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Today, a good friend and I flew formation. It was the first time in 34 years that two A-37's flew in formation in North America. Took them from Boise to St George VFR. And yes... it was a blast.

So let me get this straight, 20 million illegal immigrants coming into the country is better than a small number of constitutional violations that are being resolved in the courts? That's the math. I don't work in the Congress, so I don't get to pick a made-up third option where the border is closed and there are no violations of constitutional rights. I have a choice between a candidate that made everything worse, dramatically, and a candidate who single-handedly reduced illegal immigration to near zero, while fucking up in some edge cases. That's pretty easy math to me. No one is denying the constitutional violations, though I suspect you would view far more of the deportation activity as a violation than I would. But even if I agreed with you on every single case, the alternative was a slow rolling catastrophe for my country and the country my children will inherit. Caveats are part of living in the real world. I will be very black and white in this point. If this is a literal statement, then you are a hack. And while I could put together a rather extensive list of individual things he has done that are quite easy for me or any other conservative-minded person to support, and I can even make a smaller list of things that any fair-minded liberal would support, if you can't do that on your own, then you are simply beyond any position that is worth engaging with. In that case, TDS is a fair label.

a bit generous referring to them as people 😁

Glad to see my airline/union assisting UPS/IPA in their time of mourning and assist bringing Captain Diamond home to rest.

i totally agree that UPT cuts are seriously degrading the quality of the product. But don't conflate the UPT syllabus cuts with a need to create a new ACE program: even with a robust UPT syllabus like I went through many moons ago, the ACE Program was extremely beneficial for the new co-pilots. Story time: I remember back in the 2005-2006 time frame, there was a Langley F-22 at Hill AFB whose crew chief lost control of the landing gear pin during ground ops, and the pin got sucked down an engine. IIRC $6.8M in damage. That year, at Beale, our T-38 CT Program was run on a budget of around $6M for ~3700 hours of flying time. Think about that. That's around 3,000 SORTIES in a T-38... for $800,000 less than the cost of a single Raptor FOD incident. My experience in the Beale T-38 CT Program has made me such a better U-2 pilot and overall aviator than I would ever be without it. A magnitude better. There is so much that could be done to make our USAF aviators "that much better"... but the AF leadership will simply not invest the pennies... and I do mean "pennies"... to make it happen. It's no longer a priority. I hope I am proved wrong on my last statement.

It's more likely that he was here under a different username. That seems to be another Hallmark of his type. They say enough stupid things they no longer want to be associated with, so they hit the reset button. It's ironic, because they just end up posting the same stupid shit anyways. 🤷🏻‍♂️

UPDATE (6 Nov 25 / 1230 CST): Since I haven't heard from lilyelliott4, and his profile is suspect (IP addresses), Ihe's been banned. ADMIN NOTE: Thanks, I wasn't tracking until you mentioned it; then I looked at his posts and all followed the same style. I admit I use AI to grab info, but all of his responses look like they are completely AI generated. lilyelliott4, your account is locked. PM me if you aren't a bot and I will consider unlocking it. Otherwise, it'll be deleted shortly. p.s., I also removed the Thai fitness webpage link. Sorry guys, but there wasn't anything interesting on there! I had to check for the good of BaseOps! 😁😁

I have never seen such an absolutely despicable and disgraceful posturing from any government official. Mark Kelly has been a disappointment for a long time, and this has put him squarely in the category of irredeemable.

Took my wife to the shooting range in Conecuh Alabama yesterday, as we were wrapping up we had a very unexpected flyover. I thought it might be @Hacker in FiFi but after checking the schedule online I am guessing it was Doc returning home after cancelling the rest of their season for an engine change in Panama City. Must have been a sight to see the sky filled with these beautiful birds. The sound was incredible.

Engines are numbered left to right... for those unaware like I was at one point. Brabus... In the Viper or F-35, that would be "#1".

No, the A-37 sounds like a T-38. it doesn't make the dog whistle of the T-37's J-69. The J-85 in the Super Tweet puts out as much in Mil as a T-38A puts out in Max.

That sign better end up in a squadron bar

All things being equal, I'd rather have the gas.

God damn that's delicious.

A buddy who is a long time captain at Delta posted today basically saying through no fault of your own sometimes your luck just runs out. I know they will find the cause and I seriously doubt there was thing anyone of these guys could have done. Same for the people on the ground including a baby from reporting. Rest in peace.

Socialism is merely a stepping stone to communism, Marx said that (paraphrasing). Yeah they’re technically different in some ways, but they’re also very intertwined. Frankly who gives a shit, they’re both bad - people try to use the technical distinctions as a “look how smart I am/dumb you are,” but reality is they’re not that smart and “you” aren’t that dumb. Bottom line - both bad, capitalism better (despite the problems that capitalism has), history has proven that for 100% of the earth’s existence since these systems originated.

I learned in a Supercub that had a 135HP Lycoming...it was a beast and I thought normal ops for a Cub. There is NOTHING like slipping a Cub (or other taildragger), over the tree to a greaser one wheel landing on the grass....best if done at Sunset. I am currently shopping airpark runway options. I looked at a 5280' grass strip on 80 acres two weeks ago. Looking at 361 acres this week.

Zeroed in my MPX yesterday, this thing drives nails at 50M.

That picture causes tinnitus.

UAL 737 has same number of kills as the F-22.

Nothing that can't be fixed by another "Back to Basics" read file

To whom it may concern. Will the person at the O-club Friday night who drew dick pics in our flight caps please provide new hats. Sincerely, Col. Harry Balzac & Col. Hugh P. Ness

I think this about the 5th cycle of colored shirts and name tags in my career. Thankfully I’ve been able to mostly ignore all of the knee jerk decisions and keep doing the right thing: morale shirts and call sign name tags (and no hat/sunglasses on head), as God intended.

My only comparison to heavies is the airlines, which I know isn’t apples to apples, but I don’t think it’s far off much of the time. These styles of flying allow for significant decay of stick/rudder skills and dealing with EPs/abnormals/unintended events that require them (vs. manipulating automation/simply pushing buttons). It is a disservice to young pilots especially not having ACE - the mil is holding them back on advancing their skills/maintaining solid proficiency. There’s a lot of airline pilots who could really use some GA time for this reason, and the ones who don’t care and rest on their 6900 airline hours don’t seem to realize they don’t really have 6900 hrs of flying, they have 6900 hrs of managing computers and rinse/repeating the same taxi flows/departures/arrivals (over generalization a bit, but point remains).

I bet those T-37 hours were probably 10% the cost of -135 hours and at that point in your flying career twice as valuable in building airmanship. Resurrect ACE, fly COs after UPT thru a solid 300 hour min program. Give the new ACE program T-6s from AETC (after an avionics update) then recapitalize UPT with PC-21s, T-6Cs or M-345s… or this training aircraft offered by Grob https://gaf-aerospace.com/tpx-cobra-en.html#:~:text=The TPX is a low-wing%2C side-by-side%2C two-seater,turboprop engine with 750 HP%2C 7-blade propeller. One more thing, ACE was unfortunately before my day but I believe it was there to give COs flying hours they weren’t getting sitting alert to assure pilot development and to aid the development and timing of Aircraft Commander eligible (by hours) pilots of whatever aircraft they were assigned. Good for the pilot and good for the Air Force. ACE 2.0 would serve the same / similar rationale, cheaper flight hours developing Aircraft Commander eligible pilots sooner, less expensive and less wear and tear on an already well utilized fleet of aircraft

I've gotta go dig in my tubs of ol' USAF shit to find my "WSO Hater Union" card I was once presented at a roll call. Looks like I have others to pass that along to here. Wish I could remember the occasion for which I was awarded it.

The best graphical depiction I have seen so far...

This. https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch40.htm "Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as Socialism, and the higher phase known as Communism." That's from the writings of the Economics Institute of the USSR. As Brabus said, it's merely a pit stop on the way to a communist society. Even Marx and Engels didn't really distinguish between Socialism and Communism in their writings. To them, it was all part of the same project. I'm not even convinced anymore that the Left thinks it's a good, workable economic system. I think that's a mask they use to hide envy and a misanthropic desire to destroy things that they can't have or otherwise haven't achieved. It's a hope, desire, and bet on future Schadenfreude.

Access is all that matters, which might come back to bite them in the long run.

So he can’t influence vendors to charge less for a beer at the dude’s own event…but…come Jan 1st he’ll be able to influence property owners to reduce/stop increases when it comes to charging rent.

Yall were enjoying it too much.....cancel that shit now!

The only applicability of “democratic” in that sense is they were all stupid enough to vote for it via a democratic process, and ironically that currently valid democratic process would soon disappear entirely if their ill-informed plan actually played out fully.

I will be completely stunned if anything in the report suggests an alternative outcome. It's hard enough to deal with an engine failure during takeoff, but when the engine completely explodes, to expect someone to analyze that in seconds is already a heavy lift. It's what we're trained to do, but that doesn't mean it's easy. But to then have to analyze a second engine starting to fail? No way. And all for what? Based on where the plane was on the runway in the videos we've seen, there was no stopping, and there was no going. At that point you're just arguing over where to put the fireball. I sincerely hope for the sake of the maintainers who were working on that engine over the past couple months that they too are the victims of Fate, and not something that's going to make them feel like murderers for the rest of their lives.

Could be worse, could have been Slife.

As I expected…

Sorry about the FB link https://www.facebook.com/reel/1331132237948069

I am a weather geek and always wondered what it would be like to be a Hurricane Hunter. For those who followed Hurricane Melissa which is the third strongest hurricane on record (892MB and still intensifying at landfall), the NOAA and USAFR Hurricane Hunters had a constant presence as the storm built and hit Jamaica and Cuba. USAFR flies a fleet of 10 WC-130Js and NOAA operates two PC-3's. One of the P-3s (named Kermit), was flying a mission during the rapid intensification. As they departed the eye and flew into the eyewall they encountered what looks to me like extreme turbulence. Ultimately they elected to depart the storm because of the turbulence ..something that rarely happens. Video below shows what must have been a tense ride. Note the engineer working the throttles...or trying to while getting tossed around. AQP1zLdnXrSgI_2_OBE_F0hhLxJeGO4jFK1eae_iKwtS_ust8aU-GrgMjUvsO9FJVYVRDFgG7Q7fe2AYKxCS-1egSOsuHaBH7rl8OO9TGvWqRQ.mp4

Too much effort is spent justifying upholding the law. Just call them criminals and keep arresting them. The people who don't want us to follow the laws are never going to be convinced no matter how many high-level whatevers you catch, and the people who are already supporters are just going to be turned off if you're caught in a lie. There's never going to be an administration in the history of the country that loses an election for upholding immigration laws. Plenty have lost elections for over-promising and under-delivering.

Good a place as any for this.... Time to cut down on uniform flair? https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/overdue-for-de-norkification-of-our

Hey all, What I’m about to share, take with a very large grain of salt. I have a friend who applied and their commander was actually on the board this year and just based on a conversation we were having, although the government is shutdown, results are still being processed and potentially at final adjudication. Final adjudication means that the selection list is making its way up the chain for final approval before being released by AFPC. To me it would make no sense that the Air Force would leave a board like this up to soley gov civilians to process. There had to have been a contingency plan in place. But again, after over a decade in the Air Force, I can maybe count on one how many things have been done that makes sense lol. However, with this news and my friend actually being stationed at Randolph extremely close to AFPC, I am hopeful for results in the coming weeks.

Not surprisingly, that's a USN Sea Hawk (SH-60/MH-60). Typical Navy infatuation with the phallus! That aside, for eight bucks, you can own the UH-60 Dick Hawk patch that glows in the dark! 🫡 https://www.twotofly.net/products/dickhawk-pvc-patch

I hear you, but the time to use a scalpel was about 25-30 years ago. Now, our government his hard-broke, and there ain't no gaining of compromise with the other side to agree to cut spending. Exhibit #1 = our current government shutdown over public healthcare accounting. So blasting caps and chainsaws it is. I don't like it - and I know you don't - but it's the inevitability of having grown complacent at the trough for far too long. So feel free to direct your ire towards past decisions. I hope you take a proper lesson from them going forward. The deficit spending has to end, or getting people back who are "actually needed" (as you say) is going to seem a quaint problem when we achieve total system collapse because the rest of the world tells us to fuck off with our BS debt issuance grift. So right now, this is what a hard choice looks like. The path you suggest is allowing the tidal wave to continue building. Hard no from me on that.