hindsight2020

Yeah buddy. Sarcasm aside, communities can't complain about perception if their ambassadors suck. Can't blame the kids for that.

Fvck, you gotta love the interwebz. Shit's truly forever isn't it...

Oh no, they care, Gallup just asked the wrong people. Ask multi-national Corps only, how they rate Congress. That chart could be pivoted upwards around the 50 percentile line and traced. Done, approval rating in the 90s. BL, It's big fucking club...and YOU A'INT in it. The other poster is right. The only metric of leverage you have in this world is your feet. The rest is just spinning your wheels. As the movie the Gambler posited, the key is to reach the position of fuck you. Get there, and wanking about some chump change 20K post tax won't seem like that important a topic in the big scheme of things. Lord knows that shit wouldn't get me out of bed, let alone stay in a position where I couldn't say fuck you on command. That's the biggest thing I value as a career AFRC guy, over anything Big blue has dished at me since 2005. See my avatar. This mother can shut down and imma be alright, baby's paid for.

Sounds like a great mission for an AFRC takeover. Bankers hours plus flight time sounds great for us quitter types that no longer have pretenses about our so-called career claim to fame. :D

You guys are missing the point. Nobody is gonna take a paycut to live in DLF. You want those lifers in the sim building to run the flightline? Half can't pass a medical. But you go right ahead. Look, you're not gonna get any takers to come down here to District 12. You're gonna have to incentivize the $$$ in ways that make civilians a non-starter. Once you hit AGR levels of equivalent hard/soft compensation, it's not worth it to the DOD to pay a civilian that. This isn't new. They already tried to make us all ARTs down here. Didn't go anywhere. And I mean nowhere, dead in the water full stop. It was amazing to see how they even had to carve us out DLFers from the conversion. Never seen management have to be so transparent about a concession in my 12 years in this gig. You guys know the muckity mucks are going back to an ART-to-AGR retrofit with tail between their legs right now, right? 55% system-wide manning on the ART side alone. They can't staff it in GOOD locations, let alone the UPT shitholes. This whole thread is moot already. And you guys think the P-cola model of having non-ART/straight-GS GS-12 flying T-1s is gonna get traction in UPT shitholes? LOL Hell, there was a huge exodus in P-cola precisely because they wouldn't give those guys GS-13 with the SSR, only the most hardcore "live in FL over anything" townies remained. And moving UPT on a piecemeal basis to good locations in order to normalize for the inability to pay civilians AGR money and benefits? ROFL. Your god-damned chief of staff is actively lobbying for the regional industry just so he doesn't have to address servicemember non-monetary QOL drivers, and you guys think the DOD is gonna have the impetus to make basing changes? Holy shit you guys are hitting the Petrovskaya a bit hard and early on this one. Good AFSO-21 topic though. Good luck.

Semantics, but doing the T-6 NAV block as out n back was always an option in the syllabus. So nothing has been "taken out". It's just some decision the muckity mucks made to save a nickel and spend a pound (and piss off mx in the process, as their overtime gravy train was the weekend XC). Ah big blue, a-word hiring like gangbusters and they're still pissing off the rank and file. LOL Holy cognitive dissonance batman. Stand by for decision reversal....

nm.....

FY 2000 or thereabouts, Toners could drop a bomber. Then it went away. It's not earth shattering change by any means. The ethnocentrism of the Air Force track system is retarded anyways. We're now prepping for T-38 instructors to come from T-1 tracked MWS guys who've never flown the thing. Of course, PIT is such a high-ROI water-into-wine making outfit, they'll have zero problem cranking out quality.... As to expectations, manning is falling apart but it sure is a great time to be a T-38 student. It's like an episode of the Oprah Show. YOU get a fighter, YOU get a fighter! LOL There's some real shitbags being pushed who would have never made the cut back in mid 00s, and we've tried documenting away and trying to bring solid candidates for the B-courses, but in this environment it's about impossible to wash someone out of UPT/IFF. In time, this too will change again. It matters none, timing and luck has always been the driver, et al. I sleep with a clear conscience, let the B-course IPs sort through the guano. Not on me brotato chips. --BREAK BREAK-- On the AFRC front, the last email I got was the ART-to-AGR retro-conversion plan that's being thrown around, as they grapple and panic on an 5-year on going 55% ART manning rate, after the whole six years of pushing the ART conversion on everyone during FY11 when the airlines were merely hinting at opening the floodgates. Ah vindication sure is sweet. Fuck em. Let them eat cake for 15 years of non-choices and garbage treatment of their operators. It is an absolutely great time to align fuselages into whichever status you want to be in long term. Make no mistake, just like the airline hiring, once it stops, and it WILL stop, the hiring will also freeze in the military side and whatever chair you have at that time is the chair you'll have to like for quite a while. The only way they can change the ART dynamics for the better is to allow that job to be considered USERRA-eligible based on the part B. That way airline aspirants can mil leave into an ART. But since it's being driven by the part A (civilian), no dice. Same thing for the AD recall volunteer call. You give the guy a flying club gig for 3 years and all these junior guys will jump at it. Pilot shortage fixed overnight. But big blue ain't interested in giving out good deals. So they'll sit on it and keep sucking. Oh well, suit yourself. P.S. One gratuitous pot shot observation of the airline gig. You know, for the greatest job in the world, people sure spend a lot of time hiding from it in the military. Any job is great when you're the senior guy. I judge a job's worth by how the middle guy does. From my vantage point, the middle guy at the airlines does ok, and I'm certainly not making a plug for an AD-on-the-cheap ART job, just keeping it balanced. I was a trougher in the mid 00s, I know what the airline job looks like on the back end of the waves. No free lunch fellas. Everybody walk with the Mk 1s uncaged and tracking now. No excuse in the age of the internet.

We are def not doing just fine on civil service mx down here in Azkaban aka DLF. Not even close. Just another data point for the melee. Carry on.

well, there goes the airline hiring wave.....

Yep, count me in on the Dec 2019 crowd. I already have a 430W, which qualifies as position source for any dumb blind Out-only box. I don't need TIS-B in my flying life. The only thing I've made frequent and practical use of in my recreational and traveling with family flying, is FIS-B. I get that from any portable single-band portable puck, like my skyradar puck. So I'm straight. You guys can knock yourself out counting blips on an ipad while I look out the window and use flight following, like I have for the past 15 years. I'll comply with the Out mandate at the latest possible moment. It's gonna be alright. My hope is by 2017 when the FAA is forced to comply with the part 23 re-write, all this becomes a non-issue as the new "primary non commercial" category allow me to put non-TSO avionics on the certified spam can and turn the thing into a de facto experimental, which will drive certified avionic solution pricing structure through the bottom. As to the Viper mid air, I love TCAS on my 38, it is incredibly useful in the environment we fly this thing. Same thing for TAS in the T-6 (el cheapo TCAS substitute). I truly favor the TAS/TCAS solution for the military side over the ADSB thing, but I know big blue doesn't have it as priorities for the fighters, so who are we kidding. Guess that means more head swivel for the fighter guys.

That would require leadership's allocuting to the assertions that: 1) morale is an actual primary duty competency-affecting driving factor and 2) morale is low amongst targeted groups. There is no indication senior leadership has any genuine interest to allocuting to either of those statements. Examples abound. SecAF talking in platitudes about the realities of ICBM work, the painful teeth pulling that was hearing about "pilot's being bored" as part of their excuse for the retention problem in front of Congress et al. Same goes for duty stations and the impact of PCS basing variances as a subset of this issue, both for stressed fields (which they can't even identify accurately without insulting the aggregate membership's intelligence) and for the general population at large. If I was an RPA victim, I'd SIE without batting an eye. A recat to a 4 year ADSC, GI bill and restarting my professional civilian life (flying or otherwise) upon exit, would still put me ahead in a decade's time than fulfilling an unwanted job for 10 years just to have to restart a process I'd be committed to starting the very day they gave me an RPA in the first place. Personally, that's why I went Guard/Reserve; as hard as I worked in high school and college/graduate school in order to position myself to merely gamble at the foot of the literal lottery that was getting a pilot slot, I just couldn't justify losing an entire decade's bet and getting pinched for an additional decade in a position where I wouldn't even be allowed to recover vocationally due to an extended military commitment. I would see no other place to go than SIE if they didn't offer me instant discharge or banked program like they offered folks in the early 90s. Game is chess, it ain't checkers. Take care of número uno...and I don't mean flight lead. Good luck to all.

Aggressor units? Off the street? Not gonna happen dude. First, you have to generally come from a pool with prior fighter experience, probably with a red air background in your history of previous assignments or interservice equivalent.Then you go through the vetting process normal-normal. As opposed to the great big hype of the "fighter pilot shortage", there's plenty of 11F people in the streets or in Active Duty wanting to flow to such an assignment, so the off the street need just isn't there. Same deal with IFF jobs et al. In order for an off the street candidate to flow to such an assignment you'd first have to get hired by a vanilla fighter unit, get your cred there for a few years, then apply as a TR or otherwise. As you probably already know, the selection process to fighter units in the Guard/Res remains competitive. Of course, if you're Somebody's son, this common wisdom can be waived. But that's true for anything in life, which is to say it's not worth spending any time on it. At any rate, good luck to ya.

For those of us with scarlet letters, the real value has more to do with the fact I can guarantee not to fail the ATP ride via a type rating course, whereas I can't say that going the semenhole route. I can't afford any more feigned contrition stories about what essentially amounts to wrong place/wrong time snapshots in ancient time. So I pay the extra 3k over the semenhole route and go on my way, lest I feel like giving the Shawshank version of how I feel about events in my life that predate what I had for lunch last week...

All I ask for is good RCP vis. I think all the proposed variants have better RCP ergonomics. Anything would be better than what we got right now. Oh, and more wing, we need more wing. :D The old girl has done her job way past her shelf life, it's time to move on though.

TAMInated would have been a more catchy name for that trailer, that's just me.....

At least in the Reserves, #1 claim is fact, supported by differential expenditures bona fide hometown units do not have, period dot. The numbers and the people speak clearly on this issue. The concept of hometown unit model versus commuter unit model is very well known and quantified within the ARC. The fact people in AD leadership don't acknowledge places like Cannon/Minot/Laughlin/et al as undesirable may be political in nature, but it is not supported by fact (number of separations per AFPC assignments per capita to said location, for instance). Must be an active duty thing.

Tell that to Congress, they're the ones peddling said shit, I'm just framing it in more concise analogies that politically monolithic simpletons can digest.

Ok, so basically you need all these self-licking ice cream cone jobs so that the households every peon envies/aspires to can continue to make $120K/yr where otherwise the communities would collapse and with it all the mickey mouse crap hourly jobs that support the consumption of said 120K/yr households. Furthermore, if we don't like the fact these jobs are wasteful bullshit to begin with, then somebody is gonna have to come up with a way where we can route the population currently dependent on defense spending into other occupations without making it so prohibitively expensive that they might as well give up and join the welfare rolls. That dynamic is what the author referred to as the "chickenhawk economy" and I devil-advocate that such is a success of the military as it is currently utilized in de facto peacetime. A view that's incredibly cynical by my own admission, but one that ought to be discussed in the context of the author labeling it as a failure, when it can be argued it is a success of the military industrial complex (at the expense of the eventual failure of the Country's future solvency in my view). Hopefully that's a little simpler to digest.

The cynic in me has to play some devil's advocacy and suggest that, at least in the context of what the author titles "the chickenhawk economy", that the military has accomplished its mission flawlessly. That is: to be a steady conduit to the economic sustainment of civilian CONUS communities as part of the privately-admitted waste production endemic to the military industrial complex. I'm certainly convinced that the geographic etymology of my job is not a matter of operational and strategic relevance; the manner in which the government positions my job in order to capture my household spending is very much part and parcel of this socioeconomic engineering that has nothing to do with national defense. We're all complicit in that waste. Back to the topic at large, that's a lot of contractor and civilian wage earners making a solid living under the wings of these endless barrels of pork. I know hating on public workers and private defense contractors big and small is the flavor du jour , but according to most of these civilians, this economic waste is more than justified; an outright necessity for a lot of these communities. The alternative would be even more households working competing for service economy/Olive Garden wages. What say you? Waste production, in war or peace alike, is an economic necessity for this Country. I don't like that catch-22, but I can't think of an alternative that doesn't otherwise involve private industry getting dragged kicked and screaming into a position where they're forced to retrain the Country's labor force, in order to gainfully employ the population in a capacity no longer deemed wasteful or politically twisted.

The 90-day chunk manday reduction pertains to a specific subset of manday orders and only draws down the payment of the Reserve annuity, not a civil service one I believe. 57 is a magic number only in that it is the civilian MRA for those hired after whatever the year is (I don't have it in front of me). Have you tried working an ART to 60? LOL I say that again, in half jest at it is clear I've already made my feelings towards the proposition of flying military rickety jets until age 57-60 known. You're unlikely to reduce a reserve retirement payout date 10 years brother; the policy change was made effective circa 2008 if I recall when the memo hit my old squadron way back when. Still, good thought process. I don't know the answer to the medical portion. I'd have to dig into that one.

Kenny, Your personal case study is vastly different than the scenario I was alluding to, that is, the proposition of sticking out an ART job until 57 in lieu of an active duty retirement or an airline job. With 16 years of Active Duty service, you are in a much different position and thus the opportunity cost of qualifying all that credit service time towards a FERS annuity with a mere 5 years is not terrible at all. Considering that same AD time will qualify you for a very decent Reserve retirement, your only opportunity cost is the lost seniority of 5 years and the impact that would have in your lifestyle at home as an airline pilot. That's more of a personal contention QOL-wise and only you can figure out what's best for you and your family. Another option you might want to entertain, is the proposition of tooth-n-nail your way into an active duty annuity via troughing. I've seen it done by several Reservists. Hard to do, but you can't help but slow-clap for the guy when he hits sanctuary as a trougher. The Reserves will fight you every step of the way to ensure you don't get there, but it's not impossible. Many furloughed 9/11 era pilots have done it; trough their asses off, keeping the now almost decade old seniority number at legacy while making every manday USERRA exempt (i.e. doesn't count against the 5 year cumulative limit), get to the brass ring, get paid right meow and bam! Recalled to the mainline job with 10 years seniority. Again, like I said before, fvking #winning. THAT option would be more lucrative than just vesting your AD years with the requisite 5 years of civil service (via ART or otherwise). Either way, you're in a good place, you'll get paid for those AD years one way or another. Good luck to you in whatever lifestyle choice you end up making. I'm very much a QOL over money guy too, so I completely relate to why a 16 year guy would pull chocks even though economically it would be much more lucrative to stay the course. Life's too short to be miserable for the latter 2/3rds of a military so-called career. Happy New Year to you and your loved ones and everybody stay safe out there on the friendly and unfriendly skies alike! :cheers:

The math is simple. A 2.5% multiplier annuity payable in my 40s based off DFAS tables is leaps and bounds a much more lucrative deal than a FERS 1% multiplier payable at 62 based off GS SSR tables (or worse, slick GS tables due to the high probability one cannot medically finish civil service as an ART to 57) for my qualifying military service. So much so, that it becomes the difference between being able to retire to a lifestyle I can enjoy versus not being able to make black on the same amount of working life invested. To me, that's a critical difference since I am the primary breadwinner. I don't know how else to explain the math difference for ya. If your personal circumstances make a 40% annuity cut for 10 more years worked mere chump change because you have a high earning spouse or otherwise are not the primary breadwinner, then that's cool; I'm limiting my comments to my circumstance. If Uncle Sam shorts me the opportunity of an AGR retirement and considering I'm going to get Social Security and a Reserve retirement whether I'm an ART or a Walmart greeter anyways, the question then becomes what is a more lucrative avenue in order for me to attain my retirement goals: ART or airlines. Without a doubt, an airline that offers a 10%+ B-fund at present rate narrowbody FO rates, offers off-the-charts better return than a GS-13 ART job. If the ART job was CSRS, then the math for me would favor ART for the opportunity cost of furlough/income loss at the airline to me. But under FERS, at 1%, it's game over, no contest, the airline is better. I'd love to enjoy the higher time at home an ART could potentially offer, but not at a 40% annuity reduction from AGR retirement or airline/TR combo retirement. I can always go back and get me that FAA ASI/post office job if the airline lottery fizzles, but I'd be remiss if I were to balk on the opportunity to make that kind of coin for my family and my solvency in retirement if Uncle Sam is going to jip me off an AD annuity anyways. As always, to each their own. Clear as mud?

It used to be nice when CSRS was around. Those days are gone. Nowadays, at 1% per creditable year and a whopping 4.4% employee contribution (up from 0.8%) for those hired after January 2014; it's such a goddamn retirement paycut it's not even funny. And remember, the 5% TSP match is on your dime, so that's another paycut when compared to an airline B-fund. You know what the employee contribution for an AGR annuity is, right? I'll let ya figure out that math with your fingers. In addition, you get hit with the FEHB which isn't near as cheap as Tricare [standard/Reserve Select] for the equivalent benefit (80/20 coverage with sub 3k catastrophic cap and a deductible so low you frankly can't match it in the private marketplace), which you lose eligibility from as a civil servant. To top it off, the FERS retirement annuity is penalized if you withdraw earlier than 62. You're gonna have to wait on your retirement money ANYWAYS between 57 and 62 (most people can't get to 30 years credit before MRA), unless you want to take a 25% retirement paycut (5% per year for every year younger than 62). Did I mention we're talking about a 1% pension? Personally, I'm gonna try to hold on to the AGR as long as I can, though I suspect they'll kick me off the pot into the ART thing. I'm ok giving up airline seniority for an AGR paycheck and retirement. With that kind of check in hand, I can be whatever the hell I want to be, when I "grow up", airline or not. But for an ART compensation/retirement package? Hell no, it's just not worth it giving up a seniority number at a legacy airline for a measly 1% pension, an expensive health care option and a 90K job doing medically-unsustainable work until 57. ARTs are also vulnerable to AEF deployment cycles unless they're FTU or UPT units, so let's not kid ourselves with the home every night sales pitch. 1% decent retirement?...LOL. Said the very boomer CSRS-recepient who voted away my generation's retirement in the first place.

If mobilization is a threat for the unit in question, any individual member would be a fool to volunteer for duty which would be not USERRA exempt. The notable exception being bums/troughers. So in all reality, the mobilization issue is self-correcting.Uncle Sam will have to pay through the nose for the mobi's as they will generally NOT volunteer. The real impact of the mobi's is the post-deployment manning. Guys historically punch right after enduring these non-vols, especially the more senior airline guys who were merely coasting for retirement points/furlough protection and otherwise endure a quantifiable paycut while on AD. Situations such as these generally create a flush manning-wise as they return to essentially drop retire papers. Frankly I'd be more worried about catching ebola than the whole econ/QOL hit due to the invol mob. As to individual mobis, watch out, that can get political within a unit real quick. Playing favorites et al and all the things that make ARC incestuous leadership an infamous stereotype, particularly in the Guard side of the ARC where good ol' boy/townie dynamics are more prevalent. Good luck to all those affected. #Getpaid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9aXaeheYFw