hindsight2020

remember bois, this is ultimately being rammed through because they don't want to recapitalize the T-6. Just like the Tone, this is the alpha and the omega of the entire rot. The rest is sophist distractions. It goes beyond dereliction at this point; they're straight up conceding institutional sovereignty in chucking our Combat Airman development to the part 141 morass. And I can't get any more inside baseball without doxxing myself, but this guy said a mouthful: 100%. Folks here have no idea how bad. The metrics on IPT are being cooked/suppressed for upper management consumption. The reality is ugly.

reductionist to a fault. agree to disagree.

*yawn* That sophist nonsense again? cool I'll play. Sorry about the GO thread derail: This isn't about generals, this is a larger austerity project than the author intimates. Yeah I see you (the royal you). I've heard that pitch at least 3 times before in my career as an AFRC baby. It's the same ol song and dance that if your position is primarily stateside, you shouldn't wear a uniform. And I got the same retort I've always had for these doublespeaking austerity hawks: FUPM. That expeditionary force myopia is not suprising, given this admin is the party of FAFO, but you're assaulting/gutting your Reserve component capacity with that kind of deployment-supremacist view. More to the regAF point, wildly overestimating the degree of active duty retention you think you have by attempting to extend that COA into AD end strength. Typical FAFO hubris from the "I won't be here when the grenade goes off" dum dum Willie types. To say nothing of AD largesee for me but not for thee run amok. Matters not. You think you can operationally staff DOD congressional pork barrel economy garden spots with 60 cents on the dollar 'local' blue suiters? Go right ahead, let me run to the microwave real quick and get the corn bag. Fact is nobody with a scintilla of existing corporate continuity/tactical expertise is going to do this job beyond the journeyman level (get the civilian transferable training and immediately bounce, brain drain jobs program) in present circumstances as an ART equivalent or worse, no military code GS, when they have to punch out of that 1960s decaying empire Boeing-betrayed POS. No buck no buck rogers homey. And there's a hell of a lot more to that buck than W2 wages. Serious people recognize than nuance, unserious austerity clowns don't. This not conjecture, they cannot staff ART billets to save their lives even if you threw in a free Oprah car with it. They gutted FERS with that multiplier nonsense (1.0 vs 2.5 or even 1.7 for LEO, good grief, and a 4.4 fee since '14 as of last reading), pushed the sunsetting of ART Tricare ineligibilily to FY30 (a fucking theft, when no such imposition is made of retirees who go straight GS employees). And you want to backstop your baseline regAF capacity with that kind of retail level turnover job offers? lulz. It's also the same reason you're not going to retain talent by trying to send career tactical experts (aka technicians, in the occupational meaning of the word) to warrant payscales. That's not a programmatic quip either, they're not doing that to end up paying operators *O(SP)-4/5 money to do the job. (*that's my ficitious O-4/5 equivalent to the ARMY exintct specialist SP tables, non-commanding track, latter which my late English-illiterate grandfather retired from the army in 1966). The point of their COA is the paycut. FAFO. The level of myopia in that austerity pitch is wild. It's all good though, we already got IPT early exit polls in AETC already brewing a real sweet track record on the FAFO front. Add some Boeing malfeasance on the T-7 side and you got yourself a real boondoggle. I could tell y'all what Boeing plans to do to meet IOC contract legalities this summer, but I'd straight up doxx myself at this point and betray the confidence of my sources, so I'm gonna digress. DOD management (leaders they are not) is starting to show their arsecrack once again when they bend over to pick up pennies while walking over dollars. Now back to GO officer drawdown kabuki theater potato.

Of course, always with the punching down threats to the little guy saying the quiet part out loud. *yawn* It also doesn't surprise me we got the memo last week to usaf_All reminding us all serfs of article 88, 92 and 133, 134. Like clockwork. No better way to boost cohesion than threaten me with the gag order, already implicit to this all-volunteer so-called service. Wait until I get 7305 points. Substack and youtube here I come. 🤣 How the heck does Gabbard get to command a battallion while appointed to such a definitionally partisan appointment? In light of such glaring violation of all manners of opsec, this is rules for thee not for me run amok.

^^^That's correct. All this hopium talk upthread is chaff. The IPT direct to T-7 is DOA, on both sides. The IPT side will fail for quality control reasons that are self-evident to those of us who have done the flight training thing on both sides of the military base fence. The T-7 side of that COA will fail for the reason you've highlighted already. And yes, the fallback will be mobility bounds direct to FTU. People will die in continuation training with increasing frequency, though it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to also see an uptick in intermediate pre-qual training losses. Plausible deniability will ensure no flag officer goes to prison over the programmatic decisions that caused them. So I guess my macro point in all this is, everybody take care of número uno... and I don't mean flight lead.

ah yes, the marriage of prudes and hypocrites. I'm more left leaning on all of this and also think adultery being a crime is wack. But let's stipulate that one aside. Even Frat rules in present formulation are wack and long overdue for reform. Ironically, things were actually more progressive and sensible before 1996. Can't make this stuff up. In 1995 most of the non-adultery-involving instances of frat being discussed in recent times wouldn't have been an issue, so what are you puritans on about. The reality is this pruddish reflex just muddies the water and distracts from the real malfeasance and dereliction at the senior management level. To say nothing of serve as cover for the "see, we did something visible" bad faith actors who defend the status quo by that very ineffectual performative proxy. ORI anyone? These firings do nothing for material improvement of issues of import, or were even a prerequisite for it. But by all means, let's focus on the pointless pursuit of the warrior monk virtue signaling. #dont@me #hottake #sportofkings

yessir. I'm sponsoring my wife through NP school for similar end-game motivations. Schedules are more important to me than money; lord knows I've been taking a paycut for the last 10 years on account of that life preference/priority. The reality is that, if it hadn't been for clown FEHB costs and the joke that is FERS (thanks CSRS boomers...) for dual-status people, in all honesty I should have become a career ART. CASS is the only remaining inducement, but that too is a temporary stage, once my aging parents pass in situ or agree to relocate closer to me (the former is unfortunately more likely tbh). People always going on about regionals being a poor play because of "whipsaw and base closures". Sure, and and base displacements/no-hiring periods forcing multi-year transcons commutes (a real treat for family/marital longevity) aren't a thing at the majors/LCCs. Oh wait... Yes, if 121 is your primary payer and you got or want a 30 year work horizon, yes majors make sense over FFD 121....but that's not everybody's circumstance/work horizon. Which is where I see people start talking past each other on said topic. On the RV front, boi I kick myself everyday I didn't incur a 2-airplane cost pre2020 and snagged the RV; now inflation got me sidelined when the certified lawnmower kablewy inflight back in '23 lol. username checks 🤣. I still hope to snag one during a wage ecessionary period, hopefully before AD retirement.

T-50 by a mile, then T-100. Both offered full suite logistics and simulator support COTS. Plug n play.

Asked and answered brah. The T-50 was the "T-16" COA. It's circa an 80% replica. Boeing cheated (again); we all lost. It's over. But hey, do not despair, piston CFIs are going to save military aviation... if they're not too distracted updating their regional ehrirlineapppps on their phone. And if people think I'm being hyperbolic with the latter, then that tells me they don't have a fvcking clue what the operating and quality control realities of part 61 (even some 141) are. I cut my teeth in that morass before I touched a single .mil airplane; I know the rot in that pay to play, blind leading the blind environment. FAFO doesn't even begin to encapsulate the hubris of senior AF management in proferring this IPT imprudence with a straight face. What's insane is that the USAF/USN doesn't even recognize Army wings as real. But regional aspiring thumb-suckers is A-OK for .mil flying fundamentals, straight into a gazillion/multimillion dollar PL1/PL3 asset? And I'm the imprudent one here? Orwellian, this whole clusterfvck of dereliction.

I'm not personally aware of any, not to say there wasn't. Certainly nothing like what was publicized wrt the Rapid City Bone landing class A, and nobody died on that one mind you.

Correct. Furthermore, Boeing purposely underbid the contract in ways that would be considered malfeasance on the part of a customer, in trying to legitimize it. Some may go farther and imply collusion in said decision, but that's for another thread. Point being, COTS was maliciously handwaved away here, and some people [have already, and] will die for that capitalization fraud. That is really the start and the end of the conversation right there. That is the only thing that moves the needle in an enterprise that is otherwise considered soo scutwork and small fry for Big Air Force, they're willing to equivalence away our experience to that of sub-ATP, low time piston CFIs. There are so many layers of plausible deniability baked into the training pipeline, they'll always handwave it away as something else. You can't debate in good faith with these self-preserving shapeshifters. @Ant-man assessment from the FTU perspective is absolutely correct. They WILL rationalize the increasing shit product, while gaslighting all of you into believing the dilution as an innovative reformulation. And when people die, they'll sacrifice-lamb direct local leadership at the unfortunate ops squadron (see Shaw Viper class A, an undergraduate student of mine btw). But don't you dare look an inch backwards when investigating....

@Clark Griswold On your question: TLDR: version. Asked and answered COA, failed. Admits two inconvenient truths: 1)no capitalization is forthcoming, and 2)the bodies are not there on the 11F side to pay the bill. Latter which itself is a combination of numbers reality, and 11F mutiny against the AETC mission (don't shoot the historian here, not my fault we don't PCS like regAF and can call out failures with full 10 year receipts). Longer, uncle hindsight storytime version: Funny you should ask. That COA of yours of making the "intermediate" phase adjacent to the MWS has been proposed before! It was peddled by none other than everybody's little instagram tyrant himself, Willie Boy. The CONOPS was called "Reforge", and it's oooold news at this point. Read here for the whole evolution, again note the 5 year old date. So many nuggets of irony in that one, my personal favorite being the attempt to use COTS for the proof-o because they didn't have T-7s! Unironically, they actually said that on the record... 5 years ago. Read that again, slowly, if you're not tracking the punchline. So many nuggets of self-own in that article, thank you for bringing it up, I had almost forgotten about reforge. Today the 69th watered version of this sophistry is called FBF, and largely accepts the logistical defeat of what anybody down here in the trenches could have told you 5 years ago: "No Buck. No Buck Rogers". I know some of the authors of this thing well; I personally knew and flew with him (quoted on the article), he was the DO during my first stint through one of the garden varieties. Decent enough dude while I crossed paths with him, and knows better than most what it's like to get fired for other people's sins and having to fall on swords for lesser men, aka RegAF standard. The story ended well for him: he landed on his feet. Reached check o the month some years ago and now flies the friendly skies for an airline that stands together. ....and the T-7 is still vaporware at this point. 😄 There's a lesson here kids, which I'll let the fighter2airline religious Order of the CJO Cross go on and pass the pamplets and prosletyze on (after all, I'm 121 agnostic lol). And to keep this thread back on topic: The actual real world answer is they'll do what they've done before: NEEDS of THE AIR FORCE. Yup, that means you can get your happy ass re-assigned out of the promised fighter you competed for and it's been done before. The 38 trained T-6 FAIP assignments in particular have a big problem right now. The T-6 wait times rn are so atrocious it might impact their promotion timelines in a significant enough way they could plausibly recat to 11M, since they won't send them to IFF for the same reason (backlog). I knew people who went U-28s in the early 2010s due to the Viper backlog being sufficiently on their ass. Nothing new under the sun. Everybody has to come up for air at some point, and pay the bills after the Air force chapter has passed, if flying is what you got into this game for. Good luck to all the kiddies.

Oh they know all of that already. They don't care. In any event, the answer to your question is, as always, "more than currently". And they're always flirting with finding that line. The injurious part is of course, you know, the pawns of the innovation experiement who will die for it (and have died already since 2018).

Further effects of the divestment, some GS [now former] toners at P-cola are scrambling for T-1 sim jobs at the garden varieties in order to get a touch n go to apply back to their own sim jobs down there. That's how saturated that market is, and how much location is an inducement for these AD retiree types. Some folks would bag groceries as long as the wife doesn't have to hear we gotta leave the redneck riviera. In fairness, I know Allegiant pilots in the same boat (vis a vis legacy 121 et al), so the dynamic is not unique. After all, it's why most people (HoH with dependents) get out of RegAF for, statistically speaking. On our end, not everybody wanted to flow to T-6s, T-6 PIT is more than 12 months backed up, it's a mess. Some sour faces across AFRC regarding the divestment (Toners were always the easiest to fill due to the airline job gateway it was), and people looking at having their AGRs invol-curtailed short. It's a mess for sure, yai morale and loss of experience. But fif gen and big pork programmes are capitalized, so it's all good. /s

correct, sim only, there's no tails on the ramp anymore (DLF). And those (the sims) too will be divested. It's just paid for, so it's being used as a front to distract from the backlogs the herbie FTUs are having themselves. Deck chair re-arranging, nothing of substance here, it's just a failure to admit they didn't capitalize properly and now the chickens came home. Don't fall for the "innovation" spin.