Smokin

Gas stations may be out, but with anytime there's a chance for bad weather my truck tank gets filled. On a full tank, I'm good for 500 miles, plus the additional many miles I could get if I really needed to by siphoning the gas out of my boat, mower, etc. When I can do that with an electric truck, count me in. Until then, I'll stick to burning dinosaurs.

One thing to think about if the airlines are your primary retirement plan is your aircraft currency. If you are currently flying and have the potential to stay flying without IDE, that would set you up best for the airlines. If you accept IDE and get a non-flying staff job, your recency in any aircraft will be pretty limited. Obviously if you get a flying command or a flying staff, that's another thing entirely. Most of the majors want to see current aircraft hours, so if there is a potential that the IDE could take you out of the jet for the rest of your career (or even the last year of your career), that could significantly affect your airline plans. I know that United has a filter on their apps where they won't even see your app if you have less than 100 hours in the past year. You could be the perfect applicant other than recency and you'll never get the invite. Not trying to talk you out of staying in, just wanted to make sure you were thinking about how your app will look in 4 years if the airlines is your plan. On the other hand, your IDE and potential staff tour could open up some non-airline retirement jobs as well.

I would bet that as Clark said, this is a self-protection insurance measure from the future admin. That way the SecAF can immediately say "Ma'am, we're already on it, I have the fun police scouring the AF as we speak." In general, if you're going to get a punishment, better to be from your immediate commander than from his boss's boss.

Doesn't this belong in the WTF thread? Just in case they ever thought they were in danger of possibly, someday down the road, ever being considered a remote auxiliary to the US military, they go and call themselves "guardians". And the Coast Guard dudes are all jumping up and down; "Yes! Finally a branch of the military that is less military than us!"

I'm assuming the Eagle still has the old-school ADI? I was shocked how much better the electronic ADI is in the Viper with the CDU than the old T-38A junk we had, particularly in at lower light levels like night or in IMC when you really want the ADI. I have no doubt that had the old ADI been replaced with the electronic version as soon as it was available, there would be multiple pilots alive today that didn't make it out of an unusual attitude and it sounds like Kage may be one more.

I get your point on over analyzing a single kick, but back to my first point, you can't tell me this was anything but a publicity stunt. At the entire university, there wasn't a single guy who kicked in high school, but either wasn't good enough to kick in college or just didn't want to play for a team that lost as much as Vanderbilt? I don't buy that for a minute. Google says their student body is more than 12,000 students. I'd bet there are more than two dozen previous high school kickers that could have stepped in. So instead finding a student that already had experience kicking a football in an actual game, or finding a male soccer player, they went and trained up a female soccer player. No way was their intent anything but playing a girl for the sake of playing a girl either for the publicity or to make a statement. If I made a deliberate decision as public and as dumb as that, I would have no grounds to complain about others analyzing my decision.

If your football team can't sell tickets by winning games, maybe they'll sell tickets with absurd PR stunts. The sad part is this doesn't play into the advancement of women's equality as they think it does. I have no doubt the school used her simply because she is female. In my mind, that is the opposite of equality. If a guy just uses a girl, that guy is judged by women to be a bad person, but if a school uses a girl, apparently that's laudable and hailed as an achievement. I wonder if it was actually called as a squib kick (prior to the kick). If you're going to set a milestone by having the first woman kick a football in a D1 school, you know that it is going to make headlines, ESPN, and other highlight reels, and you would want it to look good. A squib kick to the 35 does not look good. A 15 year old JV kicker could do that.

The real question is not if there was illegal voting and vote manipulation (I doubt if any sizable election has ever been 100% accurate and correct since the days of the Athenian democracy) but was on a scale that could have affected the outcome. Since so many states were so close, it is a worthwhile discussion to have. I voted for Trump and I am obviously not happy that he lost. I have seen enough evidence to convince me that there was some voter fraud (see first comment and a Fox News article that listed multiple voters that were listed as having voted by name that died prior to 2018) , but so far no evidence that it was on the scale that some have accused. As is normal in our republic, especially lately, it is necessary to tune out both extremes. Was there a massive liberal corporate conspiracy to steal the election? Probably not. Was every single vote that was counted legal and legit? Certainly not. So the left should stop claiming that voters are being disenfranchised by the millions by looking into voter fraud. Similarly, the right should stop claiming that millions of votes were changed by some computer program unless they have some real tangible evidence.

How about the profound silence of increasing the concealed carry on base? The Navy awarded those that responded and talked about how they ran unarmed toward an armed shooter. Should that not have caused them to think "why did our sailors have to run unarmed towards an armed shooter?" I fly with a 20mm gun that shoots 100 rounds a minute and live bombs going to the range. I'm trusted not to go crazy and go bomb or strafe the base and/or the nearby city, but can't be trusted with a concealed pistol before or after the flight.

Disagree. I've never met Pres Trump, but based on what I have seen of him I don't think I would like him personally. But I agree with enough of his politics that I would campaign for him if I somehow had a reputation that would help his campaign. Being a good person and being a good politician are unfortunately two different things these days.

McCain was not well liked. As mentioned, the fact that his fellow POWs would not talk to him should tell you everything you need to know.

Skeptic is better and I don't think it is pedantic. I think "denier" was very carefully and intentionally chosen. The chart posted shows a correlation, but not causation, and is actual evidence against your thesis that man is the cause of global cooling/warming/climate change/whatever-it-is-this-week-so-that-we're-not-wrong. If man were the chief cause of global climate change, it shouldn't have changed much before our industrial revolution. My point with the scientific method is simply that climate change cannot be truly tested and that virtually all predictions have been wrong. If I come up with a hypothesis , make a prediction, and that prediction does not come to pass, I have to re-evaluate either my data, methods, or my entire theory. Instead, climate scientists make predictions, are proven wrong, and then pretend their prediction never happened or just push the dates a couple years down the road. Yet they still want to cripple our economy and lifestyle to 'fix the problem'. IF climate change is primarily man-made, which I'm not convinced, then technology advances got us into this problem and technology advances will get us out. The way we advance is to continue a robust economy. Look at England prior to electricity. Moths were changing color because there was so much coal soot in the air. It was an environmental nightmare. Was it fixed by governmental regulations that you can't use your coal fired pot belly stove to cook and heat your house? No, it was fixed by electricity not governmental regulations. Like beer, a free capitalistic economy advancing technology is the cause of (if you are correct), and the solution to, our problems. On a related note, correlation is not causation: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

"Deny" is a loaded term in political arguments as often when it is used, it is used in the same context as Holocaust Deniers, thus giving the moral upper hand to the party that places the label. It is an irresponsible term to use for this reason as well as to say that I am "denying" something also implies that it has been proven. People who make a positive claim in an argument are the ones responsible for proving it. If I say Bigfoot exists and you say he doesn't, it is not your responsibility in the argument to search every square inch of the planet to prove he doesn't exist. It's my responsibility to prove he exists. As has been said above, the best possible argument is a loose correlation. Instead, people who believe humans are the cause assume that it is true based on the "science" when it is absolutely not science. The scientific method is the heart of science and it is impossible to apply to global warming. Additionally, every attempt to apply just a part of the scientific method by making predictions based on observations has failed every time. Remember Al Gore after Katrina when he said that Katrina was the start of a huge wave of super storms that will destroy our coasts over the next decade? The next decade had almost no significant hurricanes in the US. Same with professional scientists predicting the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. There were signs in the park predicting the disappearance of the glaciers by 2020. Those signs were quietly taken down last year and the glaciers are still there. This isn't science, this is politics pretending to be science.

For a sub-compact, the mini-tuck would also work. I have the supertuck for my Springfield XD and just got the Reckoning for my XDS. Not sure what to think about the Reckoning quite yet, I may end up swapping it out for the mini-tuck as the supertuck I have is great. The Supertuck distributes the weight well and is as comfortable as is reasonable for a holster. Spend the extra on the horsehide if it's available. I wear at 5:00 so the end of the grip ends up directly behind my spine; find my shirt catches and prints the least there.

It was a computer program running a computer program vs a pilot running a computer program. The results are so predictable a 5 year old could have told you who would win. Simulators are not real airplanes. The AI would not have the data in an airplane it had in the sim; perfect performance modeling of both jets, perfect data on adv airspeed, alt, g, distance, heading, AA, etc. Probably even knew exactly what flight control inputs the pilot was making before they would have been apparent visually. A laser and a camera doesn't get you that data. The entire thing was done with the stated purpose to give confidence in a drone wingman for future fighter pilots. A cagematch in a sim does not do that, so the stated objective was not possible to meet. The entire thing smacked of purely a publicity stunt.

Having been stationed both in Europe and Asia, I would have to completely disagree from the point of view of the people being stationed overseas that Asia would be better. For national security, maybe, although Russia isn't the Russia Hillary would have had you believe with the reset button. And if the Korean War heats up again, the last thing we need is more people there to get slimed on day 1.

I don't have numbers to back it up, but just by my experience we have a record low 90 day lookback overall for fighters combined with a record low total experience. That in and of itself is something to be very concerned about. Even the first assignment guy who deployed twice and may have 800 hours, how many sorties does that equal for him when half that time was spent in a in a CAP or a wheel? Deployed experience is good for a pilot, but one deployed 6 hr sortie doesn't always replace the 4 sorties the same hours would represent, especially if that sortie was 6 hours of turning while doing very little. Then take the average first assignment dude who probably has less than 200 hours (or the brand new guy who just showed up from the B-course with all of 69 hours) and fly him at half the RAP rate for a couple months due to this near standdown for COVID while many of the experienced IPs have jumped ship and you have a recipe for disaster.

We have lost a lot of fighters in a couple months. The trend alone should give all pilots a serious self-examination as to how ready you are for the next flight regardless of the cause of the mishaps. I'm sure some safety guys could pull some data, but I can't remember a worse 4-5 month period in my career. A correlation of mishaps with the speeding up of the pipeline would be worth looking at as well. Prayers for this pilot's family and friends.

Go guard.

torqued hit on my concern of long term implications of all this anti-police riots. The number of people who are interested in joining the police force right now has to be virtually disappearing. That means the police force is going to have a drastically reduced applicant pool, which is going to decrease the average quality of the individuals hired, which is only going to increase incidents like this. I also wonder if some of these current incidents like Minneapolis and Atlanta are a product of this same decreased pool following the Ferguson riots. If you hire people who otherwise would only be able to get a minimum wage job, and then give them authority and a gun, you're going to have big problems. I'm not talking about most cops right now, but if the nation continues on the current path, this is what we're going to end up with.

Email this afternoon from NGB today, blatantly political. Threw the current Floyd issue in with Trayvon Martin (jury found the man that killed him not guilty in case people forgot). Not only blatantly political but also threw out the standards of justice in America by assuming that all the victims he listed were actual victims. Floyd jury hasn't even been called yet, but, reading between the lines, 'the cops are obviously guilty of racism driven murder'. There is a difference between sympathy to an alleged victim's families and community and ignoring the world's best justice system in the name of .... justice.

USAFA - Don't care where he went to school (40 years ago!) as long as it wasn't a diploma mill. Fired from American- Don't care, obviously United saw something different in him. Card counting - that's a plus in my book. Run in with a union? Any good executive in charge of a for profit company that has a union will have run-ins. If he doesn't, then he's probably not doing his job. His job is to make the company money, unions make the pilots money/QOL. Conflict is inevitable. Hasn't been in charge long enough to judge how he's going to do as CEO, but I haven't heard anything yet to merit your take.

No, I'm talking about all formation landing mishaps. And yes, we have been LUCKY to have not had more fatalities. How about the F-16 formation landing at Kunsan where #1 ended up in literally stuck in the fence? Couldn't get out of the jet because the fence went over the canopy. Stuck in a crashed jet with over a thousand pounds of fuel sitting a couple feet behind him. Did skill keep that jet from catching fire and burning that pilot to death? No, it was either God or luck. I work hard to be the best pilot possible. But I also know that I have been lucky. I've made mistakes that could have or even should have gotten me killed. I've had 3 high speed close passes inside 500' in my career, two of them I maneuvered the jet to avoid the mid-air. The third one was plain dumb luck to have not hit and almost identical to a mishap that happened a few years later and killed one of the pilots. I learn from the mistakes and do my best to not repeat them. Doesn't mean that I'm a better pilot than other guys who weren't so lucky making the same mistake. The fact that more people haven't died from something is not a reason to charge ahead like the risk doesn't exist. Again, the argument is as simple as looking at where the majority of Class As happen in fighter type aircraft. If I recall some of the the previous safety briefs correctly, if you combined takeoff/landing phase with midairs, I think you have close to, if not over, 50%. Why combine two of the greatest risks for so trivial of a benefit?

I think we've been lucky that this is only the first fatality on formation landings in recent memory. I stress recent memory, because I have zero doubt that there have been many in the past but our memories are short. However, this is at least the third serious mishap (I think all class A's) during a formation takeoff or landing that I can think of off the top of my nugget during my career. And I'm not a safety guy and don't pay particularly close attention to incidents during types/phases of flight that I don't do (like formation takeoffs/landings) so I'd be surprised if there were not others. I understand your point (at least I think I do) that we need to train military pilots and formation takeoffs and landings are a difficult challenge to master. The fact that the specific challenge doesn't necessarily translate to the CAF isn't relevant and I agree. I remember drawing the fuel system diagram during a T-37 ground eval. I couldn't even pretend to draw a fuel system diagram of the F-16. Also, that T-37 diagram was complete BS and I bet only had a vague similarity to how the fuel system actually looks. But, if you can't memorize a diagram and regurgitate it, you're probably going to have a hard time memorizing other stuff that you need to know by heart. However, as I said earlier, the majority of fighter incidents happen on takeoff/landing phase or in close proximity to another jet. The CAF doesn't require a formation takeoff/landing skill set, so we are teaching UPT students a useless skill set (just like drawing a pretend fuel system). If we are testing their ability to learn and execute a skill set, why not test them on one that won't get them and their IP killed if they mess it up? Fighter pilots occasionally die practicing BFM. BFM is a vital skill-set that you can't exchange for a safer one. It seriously sucks to lose lives, but that's an extremely unfortunate yet unavoidable part of our business. Formation takeoffs and landings is the exact opposite of vital, so why lose lives for it?

Don't think I ever once wrote no sids/no stars on a 175. Just assumed it was standard knowledge in ATC that we would never accept one. Until one day bringing a jet back cross country, clearance was "xwy69 SID." I responded with a very purposefully jacked up read-back including "..umm... SID?" Controller asked if I had a copy, umm,... no. He started to read me the SID, then wisely changed his mind and said "on departure, turn right 090, climb and maintain 10K". That read-back was flawless. I think they got the picture.