JeremiahWeed

Absolutely one of them, yes. First leg of the trip (usually), back side of the clock departure, 7+ hours of block time with a 2-man crew. It sucks hard. That was the worst leg of that trip. Everything else was one leg under 3-hours or long haul with one or two RFOs. There are some other bad ones in the system like DXB-SIN or NRT-SIN, but they’re usually not during critical body clock time.

The next one takes place about 18 months before the Most Interesting Captain trip. I’m only 6 months on the 777 at the time and this latest Captain is absolutely notorious with the 777 FOs. Since I’m a relatively new arrival to the jet, I am uninformed and go into the trip “cludo”. The first leg is one of the worst in the system with an 0400 takeoff to fly almost 7 hours from MEM to Anchorage as a two-man crew. Toothpicks holding eyes open, I’m willing to listen to whatever in order to try to stay awake. I get an earful as Captain Player describes the full-scale domestic disturbance that played out the night before he left on this trip. Cops at the house, he’s detained, wife kicks him out, no idea if he’s got a place to live when he gets back – classic Jerry Springer shit. Jeez dude, that sucks – I hope it works out, etc. etc. You okay to fly this trip? He says getting away for a while is probably the best thing. I try not to spin the guy up more than he is, but I’m thinking if I was in deep serious with the old lady to the extent that the po-po are involved and my future habitation in my residence is in question, leaving town with her having free reign with the checkbook and every available attorney in the area has serious potential to end poorly. Whatever, his call. We limp into ANC and I don’t see him for the next 24 hours until we’re leaving for Narita. Not surprised he’s out of contact considering the shit storm he’s dealing with at home. We leave the hotel and he appears to be in high spirits. Another 2-pilot leg at 7:30 block, but the sun is up the whole way and we’re well rested. He’s still pretty bummed about the home situation but he’s been talking to the wife and she’s willing to listen. “I’m just worried about being able to see my kids. I really hope we can work this out, blah, blah.” A while later, we’re 4-5 hours into the north pacific crossing and he starts telling me about his plans for a “sex vacation” to Trinidad and Tobago. “Oh, dude, it’s awesome. You land and they show up in a Range Rover, take you to the compound and you pick your chick for the week out of a line-up. It’s just sex, food, booze by the pool for the week. All inclusive.” 🙄 I’m thinking – what happened to the guy worried about his kids and trying to reconcile with his wife? So, like a dumbass, I open my pie hole. “Do you think the sex vacation is the best idea considering all the shit going on at home?” “Oh…. Yeah…. Maybe you’re right. Maybe??? 🥴 After 2.5 days in Narita (where I saw this guy zero seconds), we spend the next few days and two flights banging around short haul in Asia. Over the course of those flights, I get schooled on every city in our system that offers any opportunity to pay for sex. “You gotta try Pasha’s in Cologne… Go to this place in Dubai, I think I have a card………I hope we get revised to go to Singapore. I’ll take you to the 4-floors of whores there. It’s awesome – the higher the floor the more expensive and hotter the chicks are. If you every have any questions about where to go, shoot me a text, I’ll hook you up.” Now I’m pretty sure why I’m not seeing this guy on any of our layovers. I feel like I’m flying with Jeckel and Hyde. I never know if I’m gonna get crazy sex monger or bummed out dad/husband trying to keep the family together. The other comical aspect of this guy is that I don’t think he owns a mirror – or at least hasn’t used one in the last 15 years. 👴 I think most of us who are getting up in the years have that occasional loss of SA where we forget that we are invisible to every chick under the age of 40?......45?.......50? Not sure where the cutoff is. We have our new super-power of invisibility and we just need to embrace it. The hot chick in the grocery store parking lot isn’t smiling at you because she’s interested. She either thinks you look like her dad, needs help cuz her car won’t start or is completely broke and might be willing to make your day for a hundo. This guy is 64 if he’s a day and he looks every year of it. Yet, he still thinks he’s Captain Player. He’s been part of the international travel scene for so long that he’s forgotten that the only reason he’s getting attention in Asia, the Middle East or Europe is chicks dig the size of his wallet 💰. He actually pulls up to the chick in the Ferrari at the stop light and gives her a wink thinking something might come of it, the whole time forgetting that he’s effectively sitting in the human equivalent of a mini-van. So, now we’re doing long haul from Narita to Paris. I get the pleasure of his company for almost 4-hours, then a break in the bunk and then almost 3 hours more. For the 4-hour stretch, sad dad shows up and starts lamenting his situation. “What am I gonna do?..... etc, etc.” I learn that his wife is Russian and she’s a dentist. They met on one of his trips, eventually got married and he paid to put her through dental school. I’m about full at this point, so I’ve got my nose buried in a book trying to look busy and give the occasional sympathetic response. A couple of hours into this, he suddenly hands me his phone and says “Check it out”. I take a look at the screen and see a still picture of a blond chick giving some serious oral attention to an enthusiastically engorged dick. Not one to decline the occasional porn offering, I look a bit more closely. As I’m realizing this has the look of an actual picture and not something downloaded, he says, “That’s my wife”………..pregnant pause as I look up…………”and that’s me” – with a big grin on his face. Dude……”Did you just show me your junk in full rage with no warning? That’s not cool”. 🤮 He loses the grin and says, “Well, we’re swingers and it’s just our thing.” I didn’t think you’d mind. Then he starts regaling me with swinger stories – how awesome it is to do some chick while same goes down on the wife, etc. All I’m thinking is I can’t wait to get to the bunk for the next rest period. Rest break over, I’m actually dreading getting back up on the flight deck in case Mr. Hyde is back. He is, of course, and starts showing me pictures and reading texts from of a bunch of Eastern Euro chicks that he’s been “sexting” with. Our trip ends in Paris after our current flight, with a deadhead home. As we sit in the hotel bar after arrival in France, now he starts asking my opinion about whether he should deadhead home to FL or take a flight to Baku, Azerbaijan so he can hook up with one or more of the chicks that have been sexting him. “So, the get back with the wife plan and concern for the kids…. Maybe put that on the back burner for a week or so in Baku? – I’m sure it’ll work out okay.” That seems to re-cage him and he decides to book a ticket home. I’d like to think I had a positive influence in the end, but it was a seriously bizarre experience overall.

Yeah, I got some stories............ First, I’ll say (in my opinion) the FO’s job is to be a tolerant chameleon, when necessary, which is usually infrequent. When I was an FO, I did that pretty well. I’m not suggesting a Captain gets to bring all levels of crazy, non-standard BS to the trip. However, some of the stories of conflict I’ve heard are just as much the FO’s fault for being unwilling (as opposed to unable) to flex and just get along. The one thing you never do is take your issues to management. You don’t put a fellow pilot’s job on the line over a dispute of any kind. The first option is man to man, face to face. If you can’t solve it that way, then the next stop is professional standards with the union. Ratting someone out to the company is really bad form. The bottom line is, if you’re an FO, let shit go and chill. The entertainment value of some of these guys is top notch. You’ll miss out if you bail too early. I never kept a “list”. I usually heard about these guys after I flew with them. Then I’d usually be asking, why didn’t someone warn me about this guy? Trust me, they were all on everyone’s list if they had one. After 23 years of doing this, I’ve got some doozies. I’ll start with “The Most Interesting Captain in the World” Standard 2-week around the world 777 trip at FedEx. At some point in the first few days, Captain Fantastic informs me that at some point in the late 1990’s, he had the lead role as the Phantom in the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Before he could begin his performances, he “blew his vocal cords out”, needed surgery and lost the part. I know it may seem stupid in hindsight, but I had no reason to question this and wasn’t in the frame of mind to wave the BS flag. In fact, the first instinct I had was thinking my kids (all musical theater performers) were going to be excited to hear that I flew with someone who was almost on Broadway. Of course, I asked if FedEx had agreed to give him a leave of absence to do this since that’s kind of a full-time job with multiple shows daily. He explained all that away and we moved on. The next one was, as a high school student, he discovered some DNA thing that had the potential to cure cancer. He didn’t have a PhD after his name, so no one took him seriously and he didn’t get any credit. I don’t know shit about DNA and it was early in the trip so I was still in “gee whiz, that’s pretty interesting” mode. The days continued and I heard about him getting the Arch Bishop of his church fired over a sermon topic, being a studio musician for various famous performers (this guy’ s cool, that guy’s an asshole, etc.) and his 80’s band that toured with and opened for Journey. They had a record deal but their drummer quit to get married and it fell through. I asked about the band name, etc. and did some online research but no joy. But it was the 80’s and they didn’t make it, so why would the interwebs have anything? Still semi-clueless and not being much of a talker myself, I’m just plugging along – warning bells haven’t started yet. As a side note, one day he starts going off about the full body scanners in use around the world. His doctor has warned him in the strongest terms never to accept them since we would be scanned so much more often than the average traveler. No shit – less than 24-hours later, we’re going through security in Osaka at o-dark-thirty and they try to make us go through one of those things. Amazing. I’ve been through KIX hundreds of times over that last 15 years and never – not once – have I every had to go through anything other than the normal metal detector for crews. Of course, it’s an absolute shit-show. This guy is getting badge numbers and asking for supervisors and threatening job loss – the whole shooting match. Of course, the Japs are sucking air through clenched teeth, avoiding eye contact and in full disengage mode trying to deal with the cray-cray American. They eventually plug in the normal machine; we walk through that and go on our way. He had big plans to write the whole thing up and maybe he did. I never heard a thing about it after that. There used to be a well-known interview process at Delta involving a psychiatric evaluation. From what I understand, the doctor doing the interviews eventually took his own life. Apparently, back in the day, Captain Fantastic threw his hat in the ring with Delta and got interviewed. His ability to parry and counter this psychiatrist’s questions during the evaluation were so clever and unnerving that the doctor eventually gave up in complete frustration. It was not long after this interview that the poor chap did himself in. Yes folks, our Captain was in fact, fully responsible for the death of the Delta doctor. By this point in the trip, I was a bit numb to the whole thing and it had been so much that I wasn’t really paying that much attention anymore. But I wouldn’t say the lightbulb had come on over my head quite yet. I know – I’m a dumbass. I am a music fan though and while we were waiting for an ATC delay in Shenzhen, we got talking again. We’re sitting #1 by the runway waiting to be released and somehow Jim Croce’s name comes up. You know – the guy who sang “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”. Yeah – I know some of you don’t know it. Fucking youngsters. Google it. It’s 70’s folk/pop music. But the point is, that our Captain decides to tell me that “I used to play with Jim”. Now my radar finally comes out of test and I’m starting to really scan. I saw our hero’s birthday on the Gen Dec multiple times that trip. The most amazing Captain was born in 1961. I knew Croce died in a plane crash in the early 70’s so I looked it up when I got to my room that night. 1973. Mutherfucker!! So, you played with ole’ Jim when you were 12, huh? Yup – he got me. I guess I try to take people at face value. But I gotta say, if I was still an FO, I’d fly with him again just for the entertainment value. I’d love to be able to egg him on and see how far I could get him to go. Point being, not all the crazies are worth avoiding. Think of all the stories you’d miss out on.

At FedEx we used to have the ability to create a "negative airman list". Essentially a list of the pilots you didn't want to fly with. If your awarded schedule came up with one of the folks on your list, the system would bypass and you got your next choice. Now it gets funny. Of course, the same 5% minority of clowns were showing up on everyone's list. The FedEx lawyers start pondering this system and decided it's a bad idea. They didn't like having a consistent list of problem children being created each month by a group of competent professionals whose judgement is respected and well paid. Bzzzt to the negative airman list. Now the Captain's bid are published Tuesday and the FO's bid's are delayed 24-hours. This allows them to manually de-conflict if they find someone they'd rather not fly with on their bid with no paper trail for the lawyers to worry about. As Serious said, Captain's are stuck with who they get. But, it seems the majority of the pilots who have a list are FO's, so it probably works out most of the time.

First 4-FLUG ride - setting up left echelon turn to initial for a right break

There isn't a pilot shortage. There are more than enough qualified candidates. The problem at most airlines is simply training throughput. If you look a bit, there is plenty of info circulating around the interwebs to support this. https://www.alpa.org/advocacy/pilot-supply is one example. Airlines are quick to jump on the pilot shortage myth instead of taking responsibility for their own poor planning which is creating a training bottleneck. Age 67 is an uphill battle because it hasn't changed with ICAO. Not the same as when we went from 60 to 65. 65 had already changed internationally and the skids were greased to make it happen fast and it did. 67 is not the same situation and at least at ALPA, it is not supported by the majority of pilot groups. I'm sure there will be some pilots that will want to fly until they die, but from what I'm hearing from my union contacts on Capitol Hill, it's unlikely to gain much traction.

Yup. Slow mover intercepts can be challenging. If you’re sitting ADF alert you should be proficient. High Pk you’ll see that mission if you launch. So practice. It was a dedicated ride in the F-15 FTU syllabus last I knew. Far easier as a two-ship. Good to know fast jets don’t like to go slow. Thanks for that 🙄

Holy shit that was painful. Call sign Ray Charles?? 😂 I hope that guy is better at bomb dropping than running a slow mover intercept. On a guy following a river no less! Jeeezus! Fly over top of him and hit “mark”. Takes minutes for him to create significant distance from the point. Easy to re-acquire. Plus why a single ship? Budget cuts? 🤔

Agreed - but I guess they meet the mins. I'm no crash expert, but that one seems like maybe there's a possibility it wasn't immediately fatal. First guy on the scene runs up after about a minute with nothing to fight the fire which took that long to start building. Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if the RJ pilot who ran into his a/c to get the other pilot to come look instead came out with the Halon bottle and hauled ass the roughly 100 yards to the crash. Hard to watch at least 7 able bodied people stand by while someone potentially burns to death.

Sort of..... again. When you have a trip that starts or ends with a deadhead, the company buys you a ticket between your domicile and the city where the trips starts or ends. If you choose, you can deviate from that travel plan. The ticket they buy gets cancelled and you can buy your own using money from the cancelled ticket. They don't move the starting airport. You can start from wherever you want. For front-end DHs, there is a deadline and by deviating, you're agreeing to take on all responsibility to get your ass in place on time. If you want to buy an airline ticket, JS on company metal, hire a limo or any combination, it's up to you. If you have money left over, you can use it to deviate on another trip by adding to the bank from that trip. There are guys who hold double dead-heads (front and back) who almost never go to their domicile unless they have recurrent there. All the frequent flyer miles and the benefits that come with them are yours. I never drive to/from the airport. 100% of the time I hire a car service on Uncle Fred's dime. If you commute, there is really no other way to do it.

I’m in Huggy’s camp too. I flew them at United but I didn’t know any better. Going back to them after years of flying MD-11s and 777s, I gotta say I’m not a fan. Low tech, low systems automation, pos wx radar, uncomfortable seats and now an after market interface to put speeds on the PFD speed tape so it’s semi-compatible with the 767 LDS. It’s a “Frankenjet” compared to the brand new 767s and 777s Fedex gets delivered almost monthly. The only reason I fly it is I get paid the wide-body rate since our base operates both. All that said, I still rank the 737 at the bottom of the heap. What a POS.

FedEx. No reason to inflate or convince anyone to come here. I'll try to be as objective as I can. Just think it's worth putting it on your radar if it wasn't. Cons: 90 minute call-out on reserve in Memphis. All other bases it's 3-hours. There is such thing as R-24 (with 24-hour notice for assignments) but it's a fraction of the reserve lines and they usually assign base hotel standby to R-24s soon after it starts and bring you into base. None of the "industry common" reserve attributes like long-call, the ability to bypass assignments, aggressive pick-up, etc. Overall, I'd say the reserve system at FedEx is at best middle of the road in the industry. On the positive side, reserve usage tends to be low and if you choose to live in domicile and can hold it, you stay home often with pay. Domestic night flying commits you to day sleeping while you're at work. If you can't do that consistently, FedEx life will be much harder for you. If you're okay flying longer trips internationally, your life can be much simpler and the flying is infinitely easier. Pros: Commuter friendly - I realize the common advice is not to commute. Impossible to argue with that if you have the life flexibility to move to domicile. If you're established somewhere and don't want to move to a pax carrier domicile, there is no airline in the US where it's easier to be a commuter. As someone who has done both, I guarantee the ease of commute at FedEx is difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced it. The entire operation and system form is set up to fly all the aircraft from the outstations into domicile for the sort and launch 2-3 hours later on the first flight of of a trip. Getting to base for a trip from a city served by direct FedEx flights is a piece of cake and there are ample contractual protections for the potential missed commute. Same with the end of a trip. So there's no mad scramble to block-in and run to a commuter flight to get home. Lines are constructed to minimize commutes per month. In 16-years at FedEx, I have never commuted more than twice in a month. The other unique aspect of the FedEx operation is the regular use of commercial flights to deadhead pilots into position. This give a huge percentage of the pilot group the option to commute to and from work with positive space tickets purchased with company money. I have made executive platinum at AA for the last 12 years straight. While I don't have company passes to travel standby for free, I have been able to use my frequent flyer miles to obtain tickets for my family any time it suits us. In terms of career earnings, current new hires at FedEx are going to have access to wide-body captain seats much earlier than their peers at pax carriers. 83% of our Captain seats are wide body seats with the potential to hit our highest pay rates. Run those same numbers on the Captain seats at your typical legacy carrier. We have pilots hired less than 8-years ago who are now wide-body Captains and will be on our highest pay scales for most of their careers. There are even some outliers in WB seats at the 6-year point at our HKG and OAK bases. Based on projected retirements, that trend is going to continue for the next decade at a minimum. These are the seats and pay rates that many pax carrier pilots only get access to in the few final years of their careers if at all. Late in career military retirees can opt to chase $$ and get to seats they would never touch somewhere else. Or they can chase QOL and be in a WB FO seat far sooner, flying long-haul international if that suits them. No matter which seat or aircraft you end up in, the actual flight hours you spend in the seat are usually a fraction of what you get paid for. Domestic lines paying 80-90 credit hours have about 30 actual flight hours in them. Long-haul 777 schedules are probably 50 actual flight hours for 85-100 credit hours of pay. In my opinion, the threat of single-pilot cargo operations are unrealistic. That's a much longer conversation, but technological capability on a test-bed vs realistic industry application that actually equates to appropriate savings are not the same thing. So, if that is steering a current pilot with the quals away from FedEx or UPS, I think you're over-reacting to that potential downside. Just throwing out the cargo consideration for those who may have written it off.

https://www.fortcrookipms.com/ckfinder/userfiles/files/2017/Cherry Girl.pdf

The only thing we had was a programmable audio alert. Set a specific MSL altitude and it would go off when you passed that altitude. Other than that it was some standard ROT based on dive angle x 100 for an AGL WAG (i.e. 2000' no lower than 20 degree NL without a no-shit dive recovery effort).

Put aside the major cultural differences. I could be okay with not expecting some Saudi fuck to be on board with US standards when it comes to women's rights. Get your training so you don't meet you maker earlier than necessary and maybe not be the typical ME fuck-tard that can't employ at even a basic level. But, is it that much to ask for a civilized military officer to show up for work daily not smelling like a camel's asshole? Figure your hygiene issues out and don't expect us to accept your BS standards that were formulated out of necessity when a bath was only possible once a month. We don't impose our standards on the host nation when we have exchange pilots working there. WTF?

SocialD and Prozac, I'm going to have to disagree. Yes, the failure of chopping syllabi, lack of parts, poor senior leadership, et al. is clearly at the root. Coming at this from a macro level and isolating the failure well above the squadron or wing is just not an accurate assessment, IMO. That fails to put the micro level responsibility exactly where it should be - at the feet of the flight, squadron and wing leadership. The fighter squadron has always had to insulate itself from the general dumbfuckery of the USAF leadership and when required unfuck the results caused by the same. There was always a final sanity filter at the operator level. Lt Schmitz was clearly challenged by the basics on this particular night. No senior level general officer directed this particular Lt complete this particular mission in the manner attempted. There was a grass roots failure to consider the current limits of his capability and over-task him. How and why he arrived at that diminished level of capability isn't relevant to that local level decision. No one can say for sure what the outcome would have been with different choices. We can "what-if" this all the way back to his B-course and the Mx decision process regarding the seat. But, given his actual state of qualification when he stepped, he should have been walking out to a D-model with an IP. If that happened, it's almost guaranteed we'd be plus one F-16 and pilot. Failing that, having a proactive SOF that actually got the tech support necessary to make his recommendation would have at least bought this kid an extra 2000 feet to save his own life in the seat with a manual chute deployment.

YGBSM. Years of TCTO delays and lack of parts for an egress system? Producing a F-16 B-course graduate who has NEVER seen a tanker? How in the actual fuck does this happen? Those are huge failures on an almost systemic scale. But, I'll focus most of my wrath on the bro-level. What kind of decision process in the mind of a squadron IP makes it even a reasonable plan to take an MQT student to his first AAR event EVER, at night in a single seat fighter while piling on a never before seen mission event as well? Oh, and add in the fact that he hadn't flown in more than 5 days and had only recently returned to regular flying in the last month. We're talking basic common sense here. Do we really need USAF directives (that were ignored!!!) that specifically prohibit attempting new events in MQT at night without a demo pro in the day first to figure out this is a really, really bad plan? Do we really need an RM worksheet (that wasn't calculated properly anyway) to figure out this is a really, really bad plan? Then there's the SOF. Another bro-level failure. We're rolling the dice and just guessing now on a situation that's not addressed in the checklist? The MP actually caught this and tried to get guidance on the fact that the checklist didn't completely address the situation and had steps he couldn't accomplish. No Conference Hotel? WTF? It's truly incredible how badly the supposedly experienced leadership involved in this fighter squadron completely failed this pilot. What an absolute clown show!

Why is an Iron Eagle reference related to the KK universe?

Why are we retiring 30-year-old KC 10 tankers and still flying -135s twice their age? Is it the difference between a/c designed with a slide-rule and extra engineering slop as a result vs those designed using a computer or something else?

I’d feel badly for him too, since eating crap in SA is much worse than dying in a fireball of your own creation or doing same while taking some buds with you. 🙄 At least 3 tries at a set of wings is way more than most guys get. Somehow I think the free world will be okay without another target occupying the driver seat of an otherwise useful fighter.

I don't claim to have my finger on the current pulse of a typical AD squadron. If CT sorties are non-existent, that's a problem, no doubt. However, MQT or FLUG syllabi shouldn't require extensive BFM missions. It's a spot check to ensure the trainee is proceeding at an acceptable pace. Is the MQT student reasonably proficient as a new wingman fighting a full-up adversary? Can the FLUG student fulfill his new role leading and debriefing that mission, setting up the engagements, ensuring safety and adherence to the TRs. If either of those students needs more than a couple of BFM sorties to move on to the next phase, there's a problem.

This right here.^^^^^^ The monthly, building block training cycle is key. You don't do one BFM sortie per month. You spend ALL of your monthly sorties focusing on BFM and then move on to a more advanced phase. Development of muscle memory and "snap-shot" recognition of fleeting opportunity only happens through repetition. Instead of having an engagement always develop from a familiar perch or high-aspect "go" point, now we all can recognize those snap-shots seen over and over through the meat of the engagements in any visual situation we might encounter. The "startle" is gone and our ability to quickly analyze a situation is enhanced. Sure - BVR and longer range WVR employment is the most likely outcome to current combat engagements. But, discounting the value of enhancing the skill of visual maneuvering to a WEZ is to make the same mistake our predecessors made more than 5 decades ago when they blew off the gun and assumed missiles removed all requirement for visual engagements. Success in the visual engagement is still one of the most difficult skills to master. Hoping our weapons and technology remove our need to use those skills is to repeat the mistakes of the past. A well designed, repetitive training program should allow development of basic skills all the way to the most complex.

Uh oh, now I’ve done it. 🙄 So, are all the F-22s and F-35s just missing a seat in your world?

It was designed for two in the late 1980's when the weapons and information interface may have supported two crew members (primarily for the ground attack mission). The inconvenient truth is that the only production line open at McBoeing is the two-seat version. If the USAF had the option to buy a single seat version, my guess is they probably would. So I wouldn't read too much into the extra seat. The fact is that the current data flow available through on and off-board sensors and the interface between aircraft and pilot is stagnated and even hindered by filtering that information through another human linked to the pilot by a simple voice intercom. Hate to burst the bubble for some of you GIB types, but this isn't 20th century fighter employment where an extra set of eyeballs saves the day when an undetected bandit swings your wingline or sensor interface or weapons employment is so complex that another crew member is required to do the job. No offense, just reality.

31 year old data from 1989 hasn’t changed much. 196 total in UPT 86 T-37, 110 T-38