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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.

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.

Go all in and put two WSOs in it.

On that being said "arg"...I declare DIBs Before "Biff_T"!

Sadly, none of this surprises me. The more I learn, the more jaded I get toward our military/political leadership and what kept us in the never ending quagmires since 9/11. This is proof that no one is immune to the government trying to fuck you and make your life a living hell if you piss off the wrong person. It also puts a spotlight on the hypocrisy around the different spanks for different ranks. Never mind the unwillingness of people to do the right thing so as not to upset their careers. Here's hoping the current administration will fix this situation. Funny sidenote on the point they make about being "frozen" in the rank your retired/left the service. Our OG received a call from a FDX guy about a squadron mate who had the audacity to take MLOA during peak. The dude introduced himself as Maj Gen XXX and to our OG's credit, he made a point to let him know that his retired rank didn't mean shit, then prompted told him to go fuck himself, the MLOA was legit.

Leave the kids alone. If the boomers hadn't raped every institution and convention for their own advantage, all the while incinerating the housing market, suppressing interest rates, saddling every 22 year old with crippling debt, and inventing "too big to fail," maybe the younger generation wouldn't look toward something different. The American Dream was raped by the generation that cried out for free-love and no war until they got in power to give us a corporatist government and endless wars. Now they don't like that their kids are skeptical of their promises. No small wonder. Socialism is a nightmare, but you have to be blind to think this is just about lazy young adults. 😂

Watching POTUS realize that Putin is a menace in real time has been entertaining.

Well, looks you got your answer.

Correction: ACE did not end when SAC went away. It remained within the newly-formed ACC until summer 1994 (maybe '95) when General Loh cancelled the program literally overnight. In my opinion, this was one more indicator of the lack of understanding that officers like Loh and many of the other ACC generals with fighter backgrounds had WRT to the non-fighter platforms under their command. Although I was never in ACE, I have many friends and classmates that flew as ACE co-pilots, or that were assigned to ACE as instructor pilots. I have a lot of experience with the CT Program at Beale, which ran in conjunction with ACE until the ACE portion was killed. You pose a number of questions, Clark. Bottom line: the ACE Program was a cost effective and solid aviation method for getting low-time co-pilots some much-needed quality flying experience. Not to mention, it made pilots very happy that they were able to fly... actually fly anywhere they wanted to go, and work on developing their new aviation skill sets. Imagine that... happy pilots working to better their fundamental aviation skills. For a brief period of time, Beale RQ-4 pilots were flying Beale aero club aircraft in an ACE-like program. Pennies on the dollar. Of course, it was cancelled. But it showed that with a tiny bit of thought and effort... and not much money... something positive could be done. The short-sightedness of Gen Loh and his staff was very unfortunate. Bringing back an even better version of the ACE Program should be done today. In both ACC and AMC.

You are *way* behind me in line 🤣😂

Dibs

True, but I'd still hit it.

I want to see her wearing those chaps with no jeans.

Weed stench, incessant beggering, homeless that don't want help and just want to be assholes, $18 beers.* But hey, there's a Packers bar there with Pliny on tap. * I know, I probably described every mega city.

If it’s stable enough for you to climb down from the flight deck and walk to the door, it’s stable enough to land/ditch. If you can’t walk to the door, you’re proper fcuked whether you have a chute or not.

Detroit was technically too be to fail too. Been there recently? Given communist rule, ANY city is fully capable of collapsing and consuming itself.

Russia made a robot. It's a perfect copy of a drunk Ruskie.

Yeah while it's an interesting conversation in an academic sense, the simple reality is that the people who view flying as an unfortunate necessity and impediment to ladder climbing are not going to do anything but the bare minimum to train and keep pilots trained. The bare minimum will be discovered by gradually reducing flying experience until too many planes crash to ignore the problem.

This is from the cheap seats, but everything being discussed in this thread strikes me as the whole point of pilot training. What am I missing? What is the USAF missing? Is this a serious proposal? We cut pilot training in half, but then add a program like this shortly thereafter? WTFO?

The putin simps like bashi are confused because they got played. They thought they were voting for an idea (pro-putin) but now they realize their idol’s hurt feelings and chase for a Nobel prize are way more important.

Unfortuantely, there are experience and recency blind spots no matter where you find yourself in the aviation industry. When bringing guys in to fly the B-24 and B-29, I am looking for a mix of: - Multi-pilot, multiengine, "professional" flying - Day/VFR GA flying - Tailwheel experience There are a lot of other desirable traits, but these are the ones that keep the airplanes from getting wrecked.

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.

That’s what we planned to do too, but the BAH difference between our current assignment and the UPT bases is $1,300-$1,700/month. From my understanding, they just changed things to where you only find out your MWS at drop night now and don’t find out your location until you finish up at the FTU. If that’s the case, they can’t PCS you and then send you to the FTU because you don’t know your final duty station yet. I hope they’re able to accommodate you for IPT locations that make sense!

There is a middle ground here that should make sense to everyone but it obviously hasn't caught on yet. 200 mile high speed chases that puts everyone on the road in great danger are super dangerous and something needs to be done quickly to prevent that. Don't care what you're running for, if you're running you aren't going to be allowed to put others at risk. PIT'ng someone who you haven't established is actually running (moving up to next exit, clear indicators that you're not going to become an issue) and you move to PIT them, unsat. Some jurisdictions don't even allow pursuit anymore if the person is fleeing. Have watched plenty of videos where the dude will run and cops won't chase or they have to hope the Highway patrol or other police/sheriffs can.

This exact situation was on the Oliver show. Trooper PIT'd a pregnant lady, flipped her minivan over as she was trying to find a good spot to pull over.

Not even a CPO guy, just a line guy who’s clearly the front runner for biggest douche of the airlines 2025 award? I can’t even fathom that.

I heard it was Ben Doverbich. I still have that one tucked away in the safe. At the request of the Air Force Museum it will go on display in Dayton when I fly west.

As much as AOC?

Is she dinosaur bait? I think Republicans need to give up on tough-talking women. I'll take the soft spoken Condoleezza Rice and Amy Coney Barrett over Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor green, Lauren Bogart, Christy noam, or Kari Lake

New rule to add to the motherhood: Egressers, defenders, and football players in the tunnel have the right of way.

It's late, I'm drunk. IAW the he man woman haters club handbook At 14:15 reminds me of taking my first wife 4 wheeling on the Eglin reservation back in the 80s. Good times Also at 21:36 there's a door in my barn just like that

An interesting wrinkle here is that the B-21 is already flying.. with two pilots. So I don’t know at what point they’re planning to transition to single pilot ops or how global strike plans to train up some WSO monitors who could theoretically AR or land in a pinch. Just an all around wildly bad idea. Root cause here is they have no clue what to do with WSOs as airframes that have them gradually go away, while we simultaneously hemorrhage pilots. Get stoned, kill two birds I guess.

1. DHS spending $220M of taxpayer money for an ad campaign is bullshit. 2. Steering said funds to your organization is like ADM Burke steering contracts to his future employer. 3. I look forward to the investigation. https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group

A chute is the illusion of a fighting chance. Just like when we carried 6 chutes in the back.

I’ve heard lots of credible source negatives about Crenshaw for several years. Unfortunate, I had high hopes at the beginning.

Just listened to it. I’m not really surprised by any of it, but it is still absolutely blood boiling. I hope the Trump admin steps in and rights this egregious wrong.

Are you looking for medical data on how keeping pilots physically healthy is worth the AF's time or are you just screaming at clouds here?

Regarding ATC "For those that did nothing but complain, and took time off, even though everyone knew they would be paid, IN FULL, shortly into the future, I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. -------‐------------------- Same post should be said for Congress. I'm looking at you, House.

Is this the jet that had drywall screws in the wings?

One more idea, in another thread this may have come up but what if ACE 2 were run at one or several centralized bases and participants TDY’d in for recurrency and a set training profile, like recurrency flights then an intense 2-3 weeks flying schedule. Figure 3-5 training programs. Since it would be about a one month TDY, the interference factor from home base could be eliminated.

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'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.

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".

a bit generous referring to them as people 😁

The WSO mafia is stronger than I thought.

God damn that's delicious.

I'll say it, my rep here is shit anyway. Make America Great Again.

You started a whole new thread to tell us you don't care? Weird.