Lord Ratner

I answered your questions and addressed your points. Every single one. Any lack of substance is your inability to make a point to respond to 🤷🏻‍♂️. Anyways, this is boring now. Next crisis please.

Off topic? You don't really read much here do you? Is this just somewhere you feel less helpless, because you can say the things you wish you could shout at your coworkers? It's gonna be ok. Promise.

Bud, this isn't that complicated. And you can't just throw quid pro quo around like it's some sort of all-covering Boogeyman. If I pay you to build me a fence, that's a quid pro quo. If instead of giving you money I decide to offer you flying lessons, that's still a quid pro quo. You don't have to like it, but the government is well within its rights to include a certain amount of charity work in exchange for a contract. As long as the law firm has the option to say no, which all the articles you're citing have plenty of examples of law firms that are refusing, then it's not extortion. Where was all the righteous indignation from these law firms when the government was requiring vendors to have a certain number of women or minorities as founders or executives? Suspiciously silent. I have every confidence that a law firm as prestigious as Weiss can survive without federal cheese. And if they can't, like so many other vendors that are about to be DOGE'd, they will adapt or die. This firm chose, voluntarily, to accept the president's offer. His quid pro quo, if you will. 😂 Of course it's not good for the country, but it's just fun watching the progressives roll around on the ground like they're on fire now that their own tactics of the last couple decades are being used against them. They got so comfortable with this one-sided game that they forgot how to lose, and the meltdown has been spectacular.

"No thank you sir, we are not willing to work pro bono as part of a contract with the federal government." That's the Wonder of living in a free country, you can say no. All the other progressive law firms are furious that they didn't do exactly that to save their DEI agendas. Again, Twitter is not a good news source.

Extortion? That's a cute new analysis of the government's responsibility to give money to a company. They weren't threatening jail. They were threatening to cancel contracts. The dude was elected to annihilate dei, secure the border, and/government waste. And to end the conflicting Ukraine. Doesn't matter whether or not you or I agree with those goals, that's what the American people elected him for. But by all means, keep it up. Like I said this is just going to keep Trump's approval ratings higher for longer. Absolutely no Americans would have cared about this specific issue if the Democrats weren't pulling their air out trying to oppose every single thing he does. But think of the law firms!!

Fake news. Literally. There is: Hilarious. I'm sorry, does the federal government have an obligation to pay for the services of a law firm... just because? They were not "targeted" by the executive order, the executive decided to end a services agreement with them based on their actions. Then they changed their actions in order to satisfy their customer, the government, and now they have their customer back. It might be less stressful for you if you tried getting your news from somewhere other than Twitter.

Agreed, up to the point where we start talking about "even one mistake is too many." It's just not a realistic standard. Anybody who is on a tenuously secure legal status in this country should be making sure their legal documentation is in order. Again, I'd love for it to be a smoother, cleaner, more reliable process. But that's sort of wishful thinking is why nothing's been done. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

What a ridiculous legal argument. You have to wait until a full trial before the government is allowed to do anything to stop you from breaking the law? So if a cop pulls you over for speeding, 50 mph over the limit, he has to let you keep speeding until you've gone to trial? No. They seize your car for reckless endangerment. You get your car back after your day in court. If I decide to dig a 50-ft wide hole in the middle of the street, the cops can't fill it in until I've had my time in front of a judge? This falls apart immediately upon even the most simple-minded analysis. They may deserve their day in court, but we have no obligation to keep them in our country, which is an active and ongoing violation of the law, until they get their chance. I sincerely hope the Democrats keep hammering away on this issue. They are doing everything in their power to keep Americans on Trump's side.

35¢?! Look at Daddy Moneybags over here 🤩🤩 A steel cased Magtech will get the job done *and* save the taxpayers some money. DOGE approved!

Thank you, this is a fantastic and concise phrasing of what I was trying to convey.

No, that's very true. In the tanker it would take far more hours to be experienced. 8 hours where 75% of it is reading a magazine obviously doesn't compare to 1.5 hours in a Viper. But part of this is what we consider experienced. I don't think of a guy with one assignment on the line as experienced. There's "Mission Ready" and then there's "experienced." Another element is time. You can shove 10,000 hours into one year (if that was possible) and it wouldn't make you experienced necessarily. Some things just take time for the brain to process and for you personally go through enough scenarios and enough experiences to be, experienced. I've got about 2,500 hours in 7 years at the airlines and I think I'm realistically just now starting to be experienced. I don't fly much so it took me a bit longer than it might take someone else, but we have lots of captains now with 2 years at AA. They are qualified, but they are not experienced. Anyways, still agree with busdriver and others who blame DCA as the root cause:

I don't think it's a coincidence that a regional crew and a low-hours Army crew crashed. That doesn't mean it was the primary cause, but the Swiss cheese model for safety has always suggested that many failures line up to create a mishap. Lack of experience is one of them. No way I would have accepted that circling clearance. I've refused similar at other airports far less congested than DCA. And the guys a fly with are in the same boat. Experience isn't just about maintaining altitude. It's about knowing when to say "no." I believe you. That means you have a largely inexperienced corps of helicopter pilots. This isn't about dick waving or which service is better or really anything other than accepting the reality that normal ≠ experienced. You simple cannot be experienced with those hours. You can be hot shit, you can be talented and confident and all sorts of other things, but not experienced. Pretending otherwise is exactly what military leadership has been doing to justify reducing the training and currency of pilots. That doesn't mean you can't get the mission done. I certainly did. But there's no fucking way 500-hour-LordRatner made better decisions than 6,000-hour-LordRatner does. I'm honestly not sure how this is controversial. Would *you* have flown that close to a regional aircraft landing at DCA, at night, on nogs? Is this some sort of White Knight defense of the military pilot? I don't fault her for the DCA procedures, and I don't fault her for her own experience. The former is the fault of the FAA and the latter is the fault of the Army. Again, I do not agree with people picking apart her career and motivations with no knowledge of them. But we do have direct knowledge of her experience, and commenting on it is fair game. Her instructor pilot had what, 1,000 hours? If that's true then he was barely experienced, and certainly not an experienced instructor. Again, not his fault.

It is. But the implication I was disagreeing with (while agreeing with the rest of the post) was this: In media she's being described as experienced. She's not. That matters in a discussion about what went wrong and what to do to fix DC. 1,000% Way back in the beginning of the thread I said this was the fault of the FAA for allowing the dumpster fire of DC to persist. But a secondary causal factor is the military continually reducing the experience of its pilots. Partly because you're going to be off altitude more often when you are inexperienced, and partly because you're absolutely not going to know when to refuse a procedure that, even if permitted, is retarded.

Which is why I started my post with "Agreed"

Agreed, except for the hours part. Sorry, but we shouldn't pretend like just because the Army does something as a lazy habit, that it somehow imparts upon them a superhuman ability to attain proficiency faster than the rest of us mortals. 460 hours is dog shit. Doesn't matter if you're flying helicopters, Jets, or learning to crochet. That is a tiny number of hours for someone operating aircraft that requires high levels of proficiency and a safety emphasis. Obviously we are dealing with the same problem in the Air Force. When I got out we were sending guys to IP School after their first assignment and all they knew was flights out of the Died. But that's more of the same "normalization of deviance" that created the DC problem in the first place. I'm not going to comment on her as a person because I know nothing else about her. But as a pilot she was, by definition, inexperienced if all she had was ~469 hours. Doesn't matter if it's "normal." No one should be assuming her motives, because she's dead and it's a courtesy to the family, but we also shouldn't lie about her experience level in an attempt to lionize the fallen.

The problem is that the well-off white people who populate the chattering class of activists, literally have no idea what it means to be poor. They don't know what lives the poor lead, and more relevant, they have absolutely no idea just how much the government supports the poor. They like to imagine illegal immigrants from Mexico and South America as a modern version of the poor Irish building skyscrapers in New York or the abused Chinese building out the railroads. It's simply not the case.

San Francisco voters got what they voted for before finally realizing they wanted something a little different. Maybe this time the rest of California will have the same Revelation. Probably not though.

When people delete their profile, it's because they don't trust themselves to stay away. Good for him. When I was helping administer our Union website, I would occasionally have pilots ask me to ban them because they couldn't keep themselves away. Their internet rage was literally affecting their relationship with their spouses and kids. I don't think anybody is really "suited" for internet conversations, but some are particularly ill-suited for the medium.

Which policy would you like to discuss?

Well I agree with the premise, I don't suspect it's very realistic. There aren't a ton of civilian schools out there with fast Jets ready to take on the volume of students that the Air Force requires. That's not to say that there's an Armada of seaplane training schools either, but there are more. Probably just a function of how much cheaper a Cessna with pontoons is. As to the simulators, I have to disagree. If you're a fighter guy then you have much less experience in advanced simulators than I do, and at this point I've done military simulators, airline simulators, and civilian type rating School farmed out by the military (MC-12). If you're an airline guy then you already know this: You are never going to get realistic training in a simulator outside of the raw mechanics of flight. For takeoffs and landings, for aerodynamic complications, stalls, all that type of stuff, the simulator is incredible. But once you start talking about simulating complex operating environments, radio calls, and all of the "real world" stuff, it's just not going to happen. It could, in theory, but it won't. There's just no way to get the students and instructors to take simulator training seriously enough to adequately simulate the experience you get at a real airport with real people and real planes doing real things. This is the hardest part of the conversation. We both know what to do to make good pilots. The question is, how do you make good military pilots in an environment where those things aren't funded/supported/allowed?

https://www.tipranks.com/news/airline-ceos-ring-alarm-bells-as-american-airlines-nasdaqaal-joins-delta-and-southwest-in-slashing-guidance If anyone thinks the airlines just figured this out last week, I have a bridge in New York to sell you...

It feels like we're talking about two different things here. You concede that airmanship is better. So then... What exactly is your point? Being a tactical God is largely irrelevant if you crash the airplane at the end of the day. It seems like the way you're framing this is exactly how we (not "we," I'm long since separated) ended up in this clusterfuck... Trying to distill aviation down to the "tactical abilities" so that they can be focused on exclusively to the detriment of "airmanship" is how you end up with a bunch of inexperienced pilots flying planes into the ground. Obviously I would rather have another hundred hours of upt training with military instructor pilots, but that wasn't the suggestion or the conversation. The suggestion was that if we are going to farm out military training to civilian institutions, we might as well max-perform the civilian training opportunities in the hopes that a broader experience will make up for a diminished training program. UPT was never about creating tactical abilities. That's for iff and later. It was about creating pilots (airmanship). Trying to trick fuck your way around that process will yield predictable results.

Ok this also sounds like non-pilot talk. Understandable. The point is airmanship. Its the same reason we had future tanker pilots flying 90-degree wing work in UPT. Same reason we had formation takeoffs and landings. And NDB approaches when everyone knew NDBs were on the way out. Flying is not an assembly-line task. You don't just "do flying" a million times until you're an expert. It's a series of physical and mental tasks that are supported by a greater series of physical and mental abilities. The current pilot training crisis is purely a function of the Air Force wanting to buy more than they can afford, and trying to move the resources from pilot training to other things. To make this work they have taken the same approach you have of looking for only directly-applicable skills, training those, and cutting everything else out. It's not going great, based on this thread. It's very simple. You want the best pilots in the world, you need the best training in the world. "Best" means not just neat planes and repetition of core tasks. It means broad exposure to the widest range of flying regimes and decision-making scenarios. "Experience." If you don't think seaplanes and tail draggers and STOL/bush flying have anything to offer a pilot, then you are either A) not a pilot, or B) not a particularly experienced one. I'm sure one exists, but I have yet to meet the pilot with the above three quals who felt like they were no better after the training than before. EDIT: I think you're a pilot, but I don't think you have a particularly broad experience. I could be wrong, so if you have tail-dragger, STOL, and sea plane quals, my apologies. But the entire concept of directly-applicable training is a failing strategy with obvious outcomes.

Just trying to establish if you're speaking from a position of experience, or pontificating from the bleachers. Seems like we have our answer.

Are you a pilot?