hindsight2020

Oh you're preaching to the choir. But it's moot. Pilot retention is NOT something the AF legitimately cares about. The Service Chief has bought lock stock and barrel this PTN illuminati version of fixing the manning problem via production. Which is itself peddled in a version that purports attaining said goals without the need to re-up a former UPT location (Moody being the obvious one in present circumstances). For the record, that pseudo-intellectual pet project is not attaining the production targets they have been aiming for since FY18. My prediction is that it will continue to fail to meet targets until the current autocrat in the training throne retires and the next chucklehead tells everybody to start ramping up some other pet project. Now, even under the Chief's own implicit stipulation of focusing on production over retention, chances of actually enacting Occam's Razor (e.g ramp up Moody) and getting on with the task at hand? Zero. Our capitalization priorities are FUBAR as it is; zero chance that ever becoming a COA that won't get wholly dismissed from the jump. So PTN gaslighting, and more hull losses is what you'll get. --brk brk-- On the QOL front, the reality is that a lot of the thrash that made ops tempo what it was, is AFCENT/CENTCOM created, and none of the AF sub-hierarchies dared push back for effect. AETC tours were supposed to be a reprieve, but they got co-opted into that individual augmentee, operation deny xmas nonsense peddled by CENTCOM, and cheered on by the cOmBaT-cRed/deployment-bros that found themselves in the seats in NAF/staff circles. Meanwhile, that one "deployed" base in Qatar looked like mornings at the local Home Depot parking lot. Fwa run amok. But keeping people in garrison for a tour, or honoring BoP follow-on is all of a sudden blasphemy? Copy. No amount of money is gonna fix that. That's why I went AFRC from day one. I got 99 problems here, but being told I'm "a drain" on the Total Force because I choose to stipulate non-financials (schedules and homesteading in my case) over money or promotions when offering my indentured servitude (aka control), is just not one of them. For the RegAF otoh, squeezing gratuitously appears to be a given, and no amount of money is gonna fix that anti-labor pathology. You need a doctrinal shift, and that's a wish in one hand type o' thing from where I sit. So yeah... the airlines are hiring. 🤷‍♂️

The AF higher echelon so far seems fairly comfortable/copacetic about that trade. Down here in the worker's floor we just get to bury our former students, sports kvetch at MDS conferences about manning policies we can't change, and plan missing man flyovers ad nauseam. Not trying to be gratuitously despondent, but from where I sit, a lot more visible (from the public's perspective) losses would have to happen to create political pressure onto the Service Chief on this front.

I know people always look at it from the prism of working that job for 25 years, but for those who don't/won't/can't, the time delta to hold PHX can be significant between those two. I think that would favor SW.

now now careful now, no anti-imperialist coming-out party until you get that DD214 in hand buddy. tsk tsk 😄 You know the scene from SuperBad about the dick drawings lunch box? Let's just say my wife has become quite the effective sockpuppet account for my foreign policy musings 😄. It's no Greyzone level content just yet; I got myself about 2,007.5 points (not that I'm counting or anything...🙄) to go before I can tell you what I really think. Cheers!🍺

I dunno, I don't speak Active Duty "career progression" all that well. As to the bolded, I can't speak to the the assumptions you're making regarding your "ineligibility" to join the ARC. I've seen people Palace Chase in all manner and conditions the book answer says they can't, fwiw. Twice passed-over waivers are mere formalities in the ARC btw, what's more lengthy and difficult to do is the retire/re-hire. As to non-continuation, it only matters how you feel about it, but I think those fears are overblown. Again I don't know all the AD jargon intricacies of being passed over, but on the surface I don't see anything there that would preclude you from finishing in the ARC and making O-5, outside of running into MSD issues as an O-4 as a "late rate" into the 11(?) world.

and then you "fail" the Hogan lol. Airline application process is so schizophrenic. Today's persona non-grata is tomorrow's "tier I" applicant. Kinda like the AF actually. 😄

It's moot now of course, but the 2011 casualties we interacted with, all were able to make it to the check of the month via the ARC if they so chose to. All the ones I dealt with indeed promoted to O-5 and attained active duty retirements from it no less. We also dealt with many from the 2013-14 VSP/RIF round, same deal. Again, we hired several of them, and they admit it's the best thing that could have ever happen to them looking back. It was certainly a crazy ivan flex at the time from mother blue for those 150 odd Majors, but it also shows the idea of getting the retirement rug terminally pulled from under you is greatly overblown. You just have to be willing to call that bluff. Once you make it to O-4, there are plenty avenues to make it to 20 and beyond outside the Active Duty sausage maker. Just a friendly PSA for those still debating continuing to practice bleeding in the AD over fears they can't get to retirement Shangri-La as O-4s.

You mean other than the shooting, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Signed, TAMI/BRAC'05 YG casualties. Jest aside, congrats.

don't forget points-only Cat-E for the real min run warrior.

Lol The Milton of the airline world.

Absolutely. It's called self-deprecating humor. 😄 One man's trash brahdah! 🤙

"You too can be the best of what's left!" 😄 Painfully apropos these days....

*airline hires in spite of rona* big blue right now.... 😄

And then when one of our wise azz a-word pilots brings up 'PBN' during T-38 IRC.... 😄

Well, the RUMINT I got was the financial duress angle got to the shooter, based on a ratings demotion during American occupation compared to his salary position during Taliban rule. I'm inclined to believe this theory, Occam's Razor and all that jazz.

Nylander was my flight SRO in OTS. Soft spoken and a real good dude, and a true believer in the Air Force and our foreign policy writ large (something I'm categorically not, in part due to the circumstances behind his untimely death in that FUBAR so-called nation building effort). Died a hero. Complete waste of human capital, that entire clusterf*ck of a perennial war we got going on over there, while private interests all get rich off the carnage. Indefensible mess that should have been nuked from orbit and left to glaze 5 decades ago. I'm also still disgusted at the potshots of cowardice levied towards these casualties by US senior investigating leadership. RIP Nathan.

Just like my student on his I-NAV cat check.... 😄

got a link to her insta? Asking for a friend... 😄

womp womp. Guess neoliberalism wasn't such a hot idea after all. Baby should have been allowed to drown in 2008.

Great personal tourer/gentleman acro machine, I'm in the process of getting one (trike version) myself to eventually replace my AD-laden cErTiFied airplane. But, they're frankly even less of a contender for a DOD companion trainer than the cirrus: The DOD would never put an experimental on the fleet, and a good % of the USAF crews would have trouble fitting side by side. They're cramped. Many won't fit without control interference. The RV-14 would be the only one that would have a chance imo. Their useful loads (6 and 7) are paltry, and they need to be built light to live up to the specs. A commercially procured RV will be piggy, it wouldn't survive a DOD capitalization process. The regulatory bloat placed by USAF management programs would negate the capital savings of going FAA non-TC in the first place. The Cirrus lineup is automotive in ergonomics, which allows for all sorts of dimensions to be workable. It's one of the reasons they outsold Mooney and Beech in the waning days of the step up piston (no longer a relevant dynamic, as I've suggested in my prior post). At any rate, this is all mindless fapping. Having experienced first hand the dynamics and politics of standing up an aero club in the post commercial-IFT days, I'm willing to bet next month's BAH that the DOD is never going to procure a piston companion trainer to augment flying hours for the "poors" within the pilot community.

Heck... it's actually better than AD right now in AFRC (>2 yr gets the full treinta y cinco). It's a basically a play by play of the Office Space scene where Peter (AFRC) tells Michael (RegAF) he's getting fired, and the Bobs got him (Peter) a promotion.... 😬 P.S. Damn, that movie just keeps delivering for me 22 years later. "What?!!" Kills me every time. 🤣

Sure thing, I'll try to speak more simply. Airplanes are expensive, middle class inflation adjusted (and I mean housing healthcare and education inflation money, not that joke of a shifting goalpost CPI metric) wages are flat since we went into the neoliberal era. People in my income quintile could afford new piston in 1965, i can't afford the same in absolute terms today, by at least a factor of 3. This rank asset inflation combined with dwindling absolute demand, has made it so that the gap between turbo props/single pilot turbofan, and new piston, is no longer an opportunity cost of consequence for the remaining winners of the hunger games. So the market bifurcated straight into recreational turbine, leaving a gaping hole in the step up piston (historically crowded by the piston twin, now solely carried by the SR-22/22T). Much to the chagrin of Cirrus owners, their numbers are still paltry compared to the highs of the late 60s production. This obviously presents a problem for us imprudent poors, who are stuck attempting to maintain a dwindling supply of fully depreciated (but still overpriced) airworthiness directive laden clap traps against the headwind of purposefully declining OEM (see Textron case study on their beech 35 ruddervators and their Cessna single retract anything parts support) and uneconomic third party support willingness by fleet attrition proxy. The former want these cans mothballed right yesterday, the latter can't be blamed for exiting the market in light of loss of fleet volume. Hope that clarifies. Cheers.

As a sole-owner of one of the aforementioned clapped out PA-28s, a big '2' to your commentary on recreational piston. It's one hell of an elitist hobby, good bad or indifferent. And that just doesn't help the optics when it comes to pleading the case our segment of the hobby is middle-earning working stiffs trying to enjoy an activity that's much maligned and co-opted by class warfare, much as a life ain't fair type of thing as it may be. At any rate, new production piston numbers have plummeted in the last 2 decades, which continues to demonstrate the K-shape bifurcation of the economy writ large. But more relevant to the topic, the gentrification of the hobby into turbine GA and away from pistons outright is also evident in the production numbers, on a historical comparative basis. Heck, I argue absent the churn of the American flight training complex (cheap by world standards, which is why the US is the flight training suite du jour), the whole thing would go the way of European piston GA. We recreationals basically ride remora on the legacy support infrastructure and third party vendor sales availability primarily supported by the rental beater fleets the part 61 and 141 puppy mills turn and burn. Otherwise, we'd be up the creek already on the rec side. Experimentals offer the only refuge left going forward for people like me who will never have the capital, nor the principled willingness, to spend more for a toy than my need for basic housing for my dependents. And as one who wishes to continue to fly recreationally even after I've stopped doing it for money.

I'm as bearish as they come when it comes to finances, but even I acknowledge the airlines will resume dod-retention germane hiring in way less than five fiscal years. I'm not saying blue is pulling anything surprising by taking advantage of covid to cajole people into a de facto 20 year ADSC, but I think they overplayed their hand by telegraphing for posterity what we all privately knew: the DOD does NOT care about experience retention, get it through your thick Stockholm syndrome skulls already. Any rhetoric to the contrary from senior leadership is rank gaslighting at this point.

and it's a doozy. Ouch.