hindsight2020

fr, bet that thing fetches a pretty penny on ebay

DOD can't pass an audit to save their lives, now this happy horsesh!t, Lockmart always gets its money though... and they still have the temerity of accusing my dual-vet household of sabotaging their recruitment efforts by steering our kids away from military service. Un.f^kin.real. USAF takes run the clock offense to the Olympic Gold level. 🤷‍♂️

Oof, you just dug up the memory of the years I spent notching ancestor worship of those who resemble the remark. And the DFCs they got for repaving empty valleys from low-earth orbit. As I've said... Tumon Bay was my Vietnam. I returned with honor, mostly. 😄

They can just open their standard USAF playbook for everything from acquisitions to manpower to strategy. It has one page and two entries: COA #1: Run the clock offense. COA #2: Fuck it, give it to the Navy. Questions? Slide! They're working really hard to become the LCC/ULCC of the military. Single fleet type ops come hell or high water. jOiNT! 😄

#oOf You know, the real fucked up thing of it is... I'm a stone cold teetotaler. Now that you mention it, I should probably take up drinking, prob help me out with that monosyllabic protolanguage y'all trade in. 🍺🍺🍺🍺

Heh, that's called Tuesday at AFRC. At a former squadron of mine, we used to apply and get approved for 125% overhires by default, given the rather stipulated condition of our unit being a de facto AD-separating inprocessing center. We scrolled more people with zero intention of sticking around than a fucking MEPS center. Of course, we make brick with the self-interested (redundant, they are airline pilots 😆) temp help we understood would 1288s in short order, depending on airline hiring per usual. At least leadership was honest about the regional airline condition to our outfit, and that of my full-timer %ss as your neighborhood friendly "regional lifer", of course. I should change my callsign to RED.... Can't get ya a reco to Delta; on the inside though I can give ya a ride to the BX before they close the Subway early (because Air Force, of course), and TODC that 938 for ya before they wrap your "$5 dollars doesn't buy my undivided attention, Robert" MUTA special BLT. 😄

Airline pilots often work under contracts multiple years past their amendable date. Post-amendable periods which often exceeds the contract's original term length in the first place! Now, I'm no professional mediator, but that level of run the clock offense doesn't strike me (see what I did there? ba dum tsk) as labor being in the driver seat on that one. It's certainly not the behavior of a management team worried about there being significant staffing pressure to acquiesce to high demands. Just like the Air Force and their AvB offerings, justice delayed is justice denied. The leading team executes run-the-clock offense, not the trailing team, definitionally.

*snickers* RLA is caca. In practice, employment under it is organized labor in name only. In fairness, the airline schedules ponzi scheme *cough* I mean "arbitrage-by-seniority proxy", is a cake life compared to what the poor souls at the railroads keep facing pre and post Brandon PEB. Getting a PEB stuffed up their six over a meager soft pay ask, talk about an iron grip. Most know RLA makes their strike leverage moot. Between the NMB run the clock offense and the triple layer Russian Donbas-styled trenches that are the PEBs, nobody's striking in earnest. 1997 called, it wanted to remind you who's ultimately at the helm. At any rate, good luck to you all on the continued negotiations. Grab as much as you can negotiate before the music stops again. 🍺

Excellent opportunity for Ukraine to exploit the logistics open question Wagner has created with Rostov-On-Don, and make inroads towards splitting the land bridge to the Sea of Azov. "Better lucky than good.. fuck it, now Choot!" ~Sun Tzu, probably slava Ukraini.

Regarding the first question, yes they would have to do the T-38 transition course, then hop over for an IFF course, then hop over initial qual B-course. Essentially putting someone far removed from the days of being told what to do at the age of 22-25, through a de facto UPT timeline with less years less left of medically qualified service than the aforementioned O-1. Which is why it largely doesn't happen outside the purview of personal affability pageants aka a favor. But hey, mEhk Dem tEll u NAw. Regarding the last quoted line, that's a canard; rated boards have always been open to all rated pilots. I've applied to some of them in the past as non-11F as far back as 2009. The stipulations of "current and qualified in airframe" are no different than the 'preferred candidates' footnote at any job posting. In reality it's placebo.

I flew a lot more in my original MWS compared to my AD peers, as a trougher. Mainly the way we structured sorties availed itself to being able to fly twice as many sorties a week. As opposed to the byzantine way AD did things, where they devoted an entire day to mission planning, for rinse and repeat flagpole CONUS training sorties. Yes, AD would retort they had a much more green force, which in their eyes required the mission planning day for the self-loading baggage's duty position training. I concede the former premise, but reject the latter. In any event, it was a significant difference too, as I ended up going to AC upgrade with about 3 times the flight time as my AD peers, being the youngest in rank of the lot (and the only O-2 in the class). n=1 and all that jazz. All in all, I have some regrets, but going ARC baby for a career is not one of them. I've left a lot of money on the table compared to AD, but I've generally flown my ass off for the past 17 years. Especially the last 7 once I became an O-4 when compared to my peers (long ago O-5s by now, while I endure the paycut as an O-4 in a controlled grade AGR and not in the short list for the O-5 AGR cool kids queue). So I just made my wife an RN and stopped worrying about it lol.

11Bs moving to t-1s as an end state COA wrt FBF is bad intel. But it's also moot since nobody asking that question today is going to fly the t7 in upt anyways.

So have I. Hell, you want to see Olympic medal level flip flopping, spend a day in a guard reserve unit. I got the lost decade T-shirt, i saw it all from the front row. They make congress sound principled by comparison. Don't take too long taking out the trash at the squadron, they'll take your AGR and eff your wife in the time it took you to get back in your chair 😆. PS. Im being tongue in cheek, you know i love you 121 folk, blue falcons among you notwithstanding.

boy have you said a mouthful. Like I've said before...Tumon Bay was my Vietnam... 😄

non-sequitur response.

But you're wrong. The close trail parameters are identical in the T-6: 1-2 ship lengths, slightly below. And I have been that "close" aplenty in the T-6 as in the T-38, as an IP on both.

ooh story time. So barrel rolls are not considered over-the-top maneuvering proper. As @LookieRookie highlighted already, barrel rolls in c-trail are common and, generally a non-event. That said, I have seen weaksauce IPs pork one for the record books. So there I was.... ...I'm -2, lead is running us through the dog and pony show, my student is flying it for proficiency block. Next thing I know, lead guy damn near puts me lost wingman approaching IMC 40 degrees NL and 420 bills at one ship length. I saw the upset early, broke out right above the cloud base and KIO barely avoiding the goo. It was all asses and elbows. Since I floor saved, I figured I'd be higher than him, so I was looking for him to come out the goo mid level to slightly lower than me. haha nope. Fucker came out on the top side of that cloud at like 50 NH like an Atlas V. These two cosmonauts were straight up passengers at that point, heading to low earth orbit as far I could surmise. The irony of Houston Center being our controlling agency did not escape me one bit at that very moment lol. Back on the ground, I assumed this was boilerplate proficiency block student shenanigans (typical "it's been a minute since I led one of these sir"). So I was ready to tear his student a new one on the ground. But then coo coo bird IP copped in the bar pre-debrief that he was in fact the one on the controls demo'ing it for the student when the wholesale pork antics ensue. So yeah, barrel rolls in close trail can get spicy. Occupational hazard of this pilot fOrGiNg biznazz. 😄

Yes. And from my anecdotal observation there has been a marked uptick in atrophy in precision (and supervision on the IP side), as a result of the expectation bias of not form landing from them (by stipulation) anymore. Can't speak to local iterations of the 2.5 syllabi, but at PIT the new syllabus now includes a specific grade of wingman drop off, in order to force the issue of making the maneuver actionable. I.e. demonstrate proficiency in placing the flight in a position that allows the stricken wingman to transition to the single ship landing from a safe and reasonable position. On the wingman side, to demonstrate proficiency in evaluating a safe position to land and transition to a landing within CTS from the formation phase. Which is the whole point of teaching folks wing approaches. It's not an academic maneuver from where I sit. As recent as 6 months ago we brought back a nose on birdstrike with composite DC left and right (partial) bus failure. Very complicated EP to troubleshoot, electrical out in the cockpit to include PFD displays, and NORDO on top of it. Bird ripped through the upper skin right in front of the windshield, where the buses sit in the forward avionics bay. They had to do a no flap they didn't immediately know they were going to end up having to make (which made for a sporty transition, the stricken aircraft almost overshot as a result of lead not accounting for this nuance). All DC-electrical out, nordo wing approach. All those visual signals we rattle on the semi-annual test but never use, well it became a need that day. Again, wasn't a pretty execution by the crew members' own admission, but highlighted the importance of keeping this specific skillset fresh, at least for the IP cadre. I am of the opinion it would be a significant disservice to usaf aviators if we shied away from this training. Seems the AF agrees, as they didn't act to prohibit the training in the wake of the XL fatality they way they did for wing landings in the wake of the VN one. Lastly, formation (section for the brown shoes) takeoffs are to me a logistical necessity on weather days for outright mission accomplishment in no-radar land, given the programmed daily sortie volumes at the sausage maker side of the USAF. Count me also as supportive of continuing that training item.

god damn it, you beat me to it. aww fok it, here it is anyways

Quite a bit apparently. Suggest you do your yearly FCIF review in earnest. Because that 4.4G under 5k limitation has quite a bit to do about wings falling off than you appear to be aware of.

With the other two contenders of consequence both being COTS. That's the real criminality here. I pretty much threw out my T-7 swag already. With a first retirement eligible date of mid-late 2020s, I'm settled in the fact I'm gonna retire in my grandfather's ol timey ride. That is if it doesn't kill me first, or cost me a second divorce. The weef already got smart on the airline "trade", she's now on the "100% you're just taking a gratuitous risk now" camp. Jest aside, it's not hyperbole when I say I have more than one former co-worker who lateral'd back to the T-6 or went back to a heavy, citing these concerns. Though I never had any interest in the 121 thing, it does not escape me that the income vs bodily risk ratio went lopsided a while ago for me as a multi-thousand hour in type grey beard in this enterprise. The consideration does weigh on me at times. What I'm also confident on, is had we gone T-50 or T-100, we'd have tails on ramp last summer. It was the height of malfeasance what Boeing did with that shtick of unserious underbidding. Not so much that they threw the number, but that the AF entertained it with a straight face. I still carry the memory of Stuck with me. Human factors notwithstanding, he didn't have to die that day. These are losses squarely in the camp of the right side of the MTBF curve, aka the bathtub model. To say nothing of the fact we've exceeded Northrop's projected airframe life by thousands of hours and multiple decades, pacer classic potato or not. It doesn't have to be this way. And as much as it pains me to say this, there will be more losses stemming from *aging-structures (*term in engineering grad school for this issue) related failures, mark my words. Acceptable as it may be to HAF, it needs to be said anyways. Because for those of us who are in the community, nothing could be more personal, AVF platitudes be damned. Boeing has blood on their hands as far as I'm concerned. Everybody stay safe out there.

just like the EW mission, the usaf ceded the mission set at their own expense. False economies abound.

naw, it's just a pageant, nothing more. They have no better way of screening for aptitude at the neophyte level, for the kind of flying the aspirants are ultimately going for, but have yet to demonstrate. Certainly no more a clue than big blue regAF does with their gen pop IFS accessions. It's all a crapshoot I've seen plenty of their hires not make it. I've been in the UPT game for 12 years so I've had first hand experience of the dynamic not only as a Guard applicant of said units, but also later on as an instructor of some said washouts both in T-6s and 38s. My own initial caf unit had to deal with one such case during my tenure. Composite Wing sister squadron (11F) tried to push gumby hands, and the UPT squadron non-recommended her for IFF mid-phase3, so they chucked her to us (11B). Worthless, and not the greatest attitude from where I sat (scoffed at the initial offer of an 11M recat, can't believe they acquiesced, actually I can but that's not for this thread) and proof positive there was no vetting of consequence. Tons of cult of personality tbh. In reality, and to your point, fighter units have enough applicants they can just play the straight numbers game, like the cartels smuggling by car crossing. Enough make it through to make the excess losses justified. That does not equate having a vetting process though.

duty station. And Type-I only when orders exceed 30 days, otherwise type II. Welcome to America's lesser paying regional airline 😄