Gravedigger

Straight up facts being dropped in this bitch. It's one of those things where it's difficult to advocate for not having the time, resources, ability, whatever when you look at the fact that the majority of people meeting the board, from every community, have an AAD. Regardless of whether or not you like the idea of getting an AAD or agree with the "requirement," your peers are doing it. Until such time as not one single pilot gets an AAD, commanders are going to use it as a discriminator. Some might use it in an all other things being equal basis, some might weight it more heavily. Either way, it will be looked at. I picked something I was interested in, and something that was related to my job. Not everyone has that opportunity, but if you do, it will make the work a lot less painful.

The NSA and IRS have both added it to their case files.

Damn, an entire day? Ours was a 45 min question/answer/scenario deal...very painless. It took me longer than that to click through all of the fucking rooms in the Info Assurance CBT today.

Well said by the Australian Chief of the Army.

Bill Clinton cautioning Obama on being a wuss and looking like a total fool concerning Syria. https://theweek.com/article/index/245598/bill-clinton-cautions-obama-beware-looking-like-a-total-wuss-and-total-fool

I had the "pleasure" of working the Major PRFs for our wing last year; our Wing Exec was conveniently at SOS. Our Wg/CC gave equal distinction to Masters and Bach+, and having no AAD was not an automatic P. Although, it turned out that the people with the weakest performance records overall also happened to be people without an AAD. There were several DPs given to Bach+ and one given to a guy with no AAD, because he had stellar reports. The moral of this story is that this is not an Air Force-wide or selection board problem that most of you guys are complaining about. It is completely dependent on YOUR Senior Rater, at YOUR base. These guys are supposedly from your community and supposedly have similar experiences to you. If they choose to give you a P because you don't have an AAD, that is entirely their decision, not the Air Force's. Now, I do understand that a lot of Wing King's have determined that the easiest way to rank people is by completely objective box checking, so that they don't actually have to think or know their people. That is a problem. But that needs to be addressed in your communities where it's happening, because it certainly isn't everywhere. There are school-selects without an AAD in other communities for crying out loud.

So you are confirming what I said?

Yeah, that's the real question. No way that happened with a DP. If not a DP, then why did the Senior Rater at your base not feel he deserved a DP? A lot of the weird situations people present can be traced back not to the board, but to the flyer leading the wing that made the call.

I liked this post. In other news, Satan is eating a Popsicle.

I PCS'd for 4 months my second PCS in the Air Force. I had barely gotten my utilities set up when I called to shut them off. There are a bunch of < 6 month PCS's out there. Especially when dealing with initial skills training.

Most Baseopers agree with what you are posting. However, this is a very disgruntled community of members and they don't come here to read the things they hear at work/PME from their leaders. They come here to bitch about those things. By the way, are you Gen Welsh? I've long suspected he is a lurker. If so, when is my vector coming?

How many of the FGOs on the forum believe they were inferior candidates to those that were not selected during their promotion boards? There are absolutely dirtbags that get promoted and good dudes passed over every board, but I bet most of you, when you look at the non-selects you competed against felt like the right cuts were made. Everyone always bitches about the process until you ask them who they would have promoted in their place. If something is vastly different in the flying world, I defer, but I bet most of you agree with liquid here on some level; despite the obvious senior leader kool aid qualities of his posts. I'm a lowly Captain, and have no dog in this fight, but the baseops mafia likes to shit on anything that smells like Big Blue, regardless of merit. That's not a good way to operate, IMHO. Vetter, it seems your leaders fucked you for showing your hand. That sucks.

It's probably due to you being an engineering student, but do you know what intimate means? These questions seem more "general" than "intimate." Intimate would describe the level of knowledge of BODN members WRT BQZips mom.

Thanks for the advice guys! Looks like I need to do the weight calculations to see what my best option is, without losing money. My RNLTD is 30 June, and I don't have orders yet, so that could be a factor as well. I might be forced into a DITY if the movers are booked through June.

I'm about to PCS from COS to DC and I'm trying to get ideas on what to do with my bike. I sold my truck a couple years ago and now have a car plus the bike, so towing isn't an option anymore. Additionally, it's a dual sport, so I'm not really interested in riding across the country. I'm considering renting a U-haul, and doing a DITY move, and just strapping the bike inside. Anyone have experience with this or any other methods/suggestions?

IMO, the decline of Speedbird began with retiring the Concorde. On the whole, I don't know of too many airlines that are better now than they were a decade ago. Maybe Emirates and a few others.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe many airlines include pensions when determining labor costs. Pensions for the major carriers are hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

This. Are they proposing some sort of auto-recovery for these aircraft? The plane will handle it's own approach/landing if the pilot is somehow incapacitated? I don't like this idea at all.

I did. He told me if I would have flown 4 miles before realizing the remote sensing, I would have failed. Fortunately, I recognized it at 2. I was a cocky 18-year-old kid, but I came away from the flight with a new rating, a sweat-soaked shirt, a plane full of peanuts, and a tremendous appreciation/respect for the old man and other aviation pioneers. One thing he said has proven to be particularly true, "a license/rating doesn't mean you have completed your training, it means the FAA thinks you are competent enough to not kill yourself and others. Now is when you actually start learning to fly."

F'n A man, small world. It's a fun airport to be around on race weekends. Apologies for the thread derail, back to the C-130 carrier landing discussion.

No, on Mondays BQZip's mom stays at my place. The man was Bob McSwiggan; he's apparently in the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame now. Anyway, that was just the first 15 minutes of the flight. The final approach he gave me a plate from the late 80's, that had long since expired, and I gave him a bit of a chuckle and said "wow, that's an interesting approach" and handed it back to him. I had prepped all of the approaches in the area, so I figured it was just show and tell. Nope. It was a VOR/DME approach at like 20nm from the KATL VOR into Tara Field (circle to land). I flew about two miles off course before I realized it was reverse sensing, and Ole Bob, who had been eating peanuts the entire flight and dropping the shells onto the floor said "yeah I figured you were lost, I's just gonna wait until you learned how to fly or we ran out of fuel." Needless to say, it was one of the most interesting flights of my life.

On my instrument checkride, the examiner had me fly the ILS to a 0/0 landing (with foggles) to prove to myself that in an absolute emergency it could be done. Wasn't pretty, but it worked. The dude was crazy; we did a wing-over in a 172 for the unusual attitude. He was also the only remaining DC-3 examiner in the country, and his solution for icing was to fly into a hail storm to knock it off. I don't know anything about the Herk, but I think in most planes (with the right rate of decent), you could couple the AP with the ILS and walk away alive.

Why didn't you guys just use BITLs? So much cheaper and easier. That's what our Wg/CC, Group CCs and even some Sq/CCs have in their residences (privatized housing too). With the amount of control she wants over every aspect of her ops units, it's no surprise she needed secure voice. Every satellite anomaly, test event, software change and much more seem to be worthy of 3-star action/decision. In some cases to the point of delaying ops events. When she travels, she has a list of high-fiber items that must be supplied, no shit, pun intended. She stopped by for a 5-hour visit and we had to buy $50 worth of fiber-one, activia, etc. Compared to the two previous AFSPC/CVs, who were two of the most laid back, personable and likeable guys around, the HQ building is in for quite a change...assuming she gets the approval from Congress.

Excellent idea, and I might add that it should be a Super Decathlon or Maule. Get those feet off the floor and have some tailwheel fun! Most of the GA world is heading down the same path as the Air Force. G1000s in every cockpit, three-axis autopilot in C-172s...the era of pilotage and dead reckoning is coming to an end for many. Hell, I used to fly a 152 that I thought was fancy because it had VOR/DME/ADF. Send the average pilot (civilian or military) out for a DME arc or NDB hold with no GPS and watch what happens.

I never considered good hands a requirement to be able to drop the gear, find the right airport, or make it past the threshold, maybe I was wrong. Perhaps this is the root of the problems.