NKAWTG

Could be wrong, but I bet that would be the still at IDE while meeting their BTZ board demographic group. That goes back to the practice bleeding memo from a few years back. Shiny pennies would do PME in correspondence as a select so they could be picked up on a BTZ board while they were at IDE or SDE.

AFPC's site has the somewhat final numbers for this year. https://access.afpc.af.mil/vbinDMZ/broker.exe?_program=DEMOGPUB.static_reports.sas&_service=pZ1pub1&_debug=0 366 pilots signed the bonus which puts it at 48.5% take rate. 233 pilots signed the early bonus which is 16 more than last year. The numbers are near 12 year lows in percentage and raw numbers, but beats me how Big Blue will spin this. Are the numbers pretty darn good, or will they up the bonus next year, believing it will make a difference?

How are the fighter squadrons going to find tails to fly a bunch of crossflow guys? Weren't absorption rates the reason we TAMI'd people out of that community? Nine years later we now have the cockpits to get pilots the right mix of experience to upgrade in a reasonable manner? I also don't see the MAF getting the right pilots either. Flying ability is not something the MAF has cared about or quantified in your records. Your Christmas party planners may have a leg up on this over the guys out hacking the mission.

After perusing the take rates on the site, the lowest sign up rate is the 11F community at 34.9% and 15.7% for FY16/FY17. What is the extra level of suck that's making the pointy nose types more likely to get out than the rest of us. Ignorant MAF guy here, but I can't imagine the the CAF is more clownshoes than AMC.

I'm surprised at the lack of hand wringing on the EU side. The 5th wealthiest country in the world is leaving your club because you are impinging on their sovereignty and their counter argument is the unknown is scary? Brussels will need to makes some concessions soon, or their will be more than rumblings of other countries leaving.

Implementing stop loss would be "Michael Jackson eating popcorn" worthy congressional hearing. You need a better reason than mismanaging the rated community. Now my tin foil hat is telling me if we have some external event like a terrorist attack or heightened tensions with a near peer, stop loss is guaranteed because of the built in excuse. So it couldn't happen. Unless it does.

We paid Rand a bunch of money for this line Given current airline and Air Force pay, pilots make more money over a career if they separate from the military at the first available opportunity (near the eleventh year of service), get hired by a major airline, and fly for the ARC. The difference in lifetime earnings is literally in the millions for those who get out early vs staying in. Big Blue has to compete on QoL because they will never make up the difference from a financial aspect. Even if they adjusted flight pay and the bonus for inflation, it couldn't overcome the opportunity cost of an earlier seniority number.

Your “late bloomer” will have a chance, but I wouldn’t hold your breath over it. Consistent job performance, i.e stratification is the most important factor for the boards. One bad rater or OPR writer won’t derail your promotion potential. But going from having strats to no strats will cost you school slots and command opportunities. Stratifications are also a mix of what your strats were before and what you did during the reporting period. Getting a strat mid-career when you didn’t have one previously is heavily weighted toward luck. By that, I mean someone ahead of you has to PCS, or you need move into a more favorable pool. You don’t have control of either of those situations. Having talked some recent board members, they mentioned having the senior rater stratify beyond the typical 20% threshold was helpful. Picking out the top of the list was easy, but past that, the records all look the same. Having your senior rater push you as top 3rd or half would be enough to make the cut when they promote 70 to 80% of the eligibles.

March ACP numbers were posted. Slight up tick to 37% overall from 35% in February. Last year, about 69% of the bonus takers were early signers. If that trend holds true, then this year's take rate will end up around 42%. I'm curious what the air staff target is, and what the "sky is falling" number is.

Big blue has decided that the folks with the best records need to be pulled out of their communities as soon as possible to check the boxes for Wg/CC. The assumption is they need to fit in school, staff, Sq/CC, school, OG/CC or CV, and maybe another staff. The earlier they start, the better chance they have of completing the Air Force's self imposed hurdles within some arbitrary time-frame. Unfortunately, ops tempo, manning, joint spouse and the select's own wishes have taken a back seat to making this happen. It boggles the mind that the Air Force puts their future leaders in positions where they strongly consider 7 day opting. And it skews the pool toward the career driven, everything-else-be-damned types.

I know this anecdotal instead of numbers, but in my tanker squadron we've got more Lt Cols than Lts. We were all kicked off various staffs and sent back flying the line again. I've been in units where the only Lt Col was the commander, and we have 3 in the squadron, and 4 more farmed out to wing and group jobs, in a CAF wing. Our biggest gap seems to be the senior Captains, which I believe we have 1 or 2. Until they have a hard time filling IDE and SDE slots, I can't see how things are going to change retention-wise. You will always have more then enough people who want to fly planes for a living. The hard part is keeping them flying airplanes and not spending 96.9% of their time on DTS, MICT, 2 below PRFs, SAPR, Christmas party planning, and fire extinguisher CBTs.

Thanks for enabling my internet laziness. I had not considered how timing of the release date vs UPT grad date would prorate the bonus. Damn that fine print.

Can someone explain the rationale behind taking an early bonus contract? As I understand it, you don't get any more pay, and it just locks you into the ADSC a year earlier. So AFPC gets an extra year of certainty and we get what?

The FFA plans to deactivate the majority of air traffic control radar systems and primarily go by transponder/ADS-B for deconfliction. I doubt they will continue to fund systems they plan on shutting down past 2020. So the FFA needs more money to continue the legacy system, the Air Force needs more money to switch to the new one. Something’s gonna give, and compliance will have to be waived for military aircraft. That said, filing flight plans in the US will feel more like Europe with reroutes, slot times, lower altitudes and all around pain-in-the-ass chicanery. Might feel like you’re requesting an ALTRV just to get to the MOA. The cycle of butthurt with ATC will only grow as we diverge further from the rules our civilian brethren have to play by.

Not yet on the KC-135. It has ADS-C, not B. Different beast all together. ADS-B will require aircraft to have a new(er) transponder able to talk to the ground stations. If the RVSM compliance is a guide, then we will ask for waviers until they no longer grant them, and then act like we never saw it coming. A forward looking organization would have POM'd for this. I have no idea what the Air Force did.

  Sounds like you are saying we lack an experienced pilot cadre to sustain the force we have, much less ramp up production. The death by a thousand cuts of TAMI, RPAs, and non continuation is starting to hit back hard. The kicker is you need to make changes and spend capital (human or otherwise) now to fix the problems of 6 years out. That is well beyond the OPR cycle of any flesh peddler or GO leadership. CSAF is boxed into a corner with the budget, and pretty much everything is on the chopping block so we can buy one more F-35. But to the original point, the supply side (FTU output) will be easier to fix than the absorption rate problem. I don't see a way to fix both. There isn't a place to stash pilots that gives them experience Big Blue needs besides the ops squadrons, and there aren't enough to go around.

  I'd argue it is all about the absorption capacity. The UPT/FTU pipeline can be cranked up if you needed to. You wouldn't even have to up the throughput out of pilot training, just give more fighter than heavy drops. Where the Air Force is short is in the experienced 11F patch wearing crowd. They them need in the ops squadrons, and sprinkled across the MAJCOM and joint staffs to bring that particular brand of expertise. Problem is the fighter community does not have enough cockpits and hours to crank out the type of experienced pilots needed. And that is before they start standing up new F-35 squadrons. Even if they captured every 11F coming up on his commitment and locked him in till 20, they will still be short of what they think they need.

    The issue is not who is the "best" within a year group. The strats do a fine job of identifying the best records. The Air Force is trying to trim the bottom, and their methods don't lend themselves to figuring that out beyond the squadron level.

One of the flaws of our evaluation system is that we stratify people into two groups; top 20% and bottom 80%. All records without a strat look essentially the same. With exception of the Art 15s, DUIs and fitness test failures, figuring out a pecking order among that bottom 80% is rather difficult. All of our performance writing is geared toward identifying that top percentage for school, and all the great prose in the world is meaningless without that x/xx number on the push line. So to now turn around use the same system for identifying top performers to weed out the bottom 10% does not work well. I think the Air Force will be content with eliminating any of the bottom 80% by voluntary or other means, but may run into problems for people with the top records looking for a way out.

The fact someone was qualified in two different MWS is only mildly interesting to Big Blue. The important part of PHOENIX REACH is that you met a competitive board and were selected. Just because you happened to move from one airframe to another does not put you on the same playing field as someone selected to crossflow via Phoenix Reach. There is a fairly large divide between what makes sense from a resume standpoint, to what the Air Force thinks is important.

This is spot on for the AMC guys. The volunteers were mostly dudes that thought Beale would be an OK location, and wanted to jump off the constant TDY grind we had for the past decade. The non vols were bottom of the barrel dudes. I know we gave one former AWACS nav and eternal tanker copilot the choice of FEB or Global Hawk. If your commander is looking out for you, you're not going to UAVs. The UAV mission is here to stay, and the AF needs to look at the cradle to grave career progression of those dudes. Just giving these guys an ACE like program will do wonders for maintaining their SA and airmanship.

It sucks, but more circumspect methods are easier to deal with in staff bureaucracy. You've probably marginalized her up to this point so she can do less harm, but if she has made herself the single point of failure for some process (something like all email accounts go through her) then you're stuck dealing with it. Moving a GS is generally easier than firing one. Removing the GS position is also an option on the table these days. What I've seen from those 20% staff reduction efforts, they are targeting positions, not people. Justify the position needs to be cut, and move on. I'm sure the forums could spin "fired incompetent GS" into a good OPR/EPR bullet Are these suggestions chickenshit and not dealing with the real problem? Absolutely. But you only have so many hours in the day, and a real job to do. Pick the battle most wisely fought. Just don't paint all the GS employees with the same brush. There are some good, hardworking Americans in these positions, and DoD has treated them like crap lately. Furloughs for all my friends! Six, eight or 11 days, we'll tell you the day before if we'll pay you for tomorrow. Just like the military, the ones capable of moving on to something better are doing it, and the marginal ones are remaining.

This is not as true as you would think. Tanker requirements have exceeded capacity by a fairly wide margin for most of the past two decades. Just because there will lower priority missions getting the nod now will not mean more tankers for everyone. As to the KC-10 argument, someone mentioned it as a luxury for DoD, and that remains true. It is running into the same issues the C-9 had with medivac. Ideal and purpose built platform, but the mission could be done with KC-135s and C-17s. Three weapon systems cost more than two, and the significant cost savings will be had by cutting the maintenance, personnel, training and sustainment of an aircraft. Now the real hard part will be getting Congress to buy off on any plan to cut force structure or inventory. They constantly foster upon DoD weapon systems the military neither wants or can afford. If the KC-10 gets cut, it will have to be part of a deal where the first off the line KC-46s go to California and New Jersey. Doubtful any other plan will justify to them the need to cut jobs in “their” district.

DG from SOS is one of the most valuable markers you can have in your record. It relieves the SR from actually needing to make a judgement call because some Captain from Maxwell did it for them. I know that's a damn cynical view, but the leadership looks at it as a stratification against the broadest pool of officers possible. The value in SOS is in that DG award, because it provides a way for the SR to sorta amoung the pack of records that look exactly the same. I've seen an annual award winner from SOS ride that two below to Lt Col. Good person, but nothing that screamed absolutely best of the best.

I curious as to what the relative level of experience was among the 4 pilots on board. Take media reports with a grain of salt, but the oft quoted "43 hours in type" pilot was also very experienced 747 captain. He may have been the senior ranking pilot of the 4 on board. However, there was an instructor on board because of his lack of time in type. From the armchair quarterback perspective, it seems this was more of a failure of the instructor/check pilot to intervene in an unsafe situation. Getting IPs to intervene in a timely manner is one of the hardest skill to teach, and typically unpleasant for non assertive types when they come through CFIC. Was this lack intervention a product of that airline culture, or a dynamic particular to that crew? The media's light is shining bright on this one, so the answers will be fairly quick in coming