Majestik Møøse

...I’m ok with this, yeah. Allowing Lowe’s to sell you something for $50 less is much different than cutting in front of weary travelers.

Yeah, there’s plenty. A lot of U-2 guys have extended their UPT ADSC by a few years to fly here. I don’t know any that wished they hadn’t, though that doesn’t mean they necessarily want to stay in the Air Force longer than one U-2 tour. Several are, however. At the same time, I don’t know why anyone would stay in the Air Force after working at a UPT base.

He’s not a USG civilian. He’s a civilian civilian.

From the testimony: “This budget boosts pipeline capacity, expands pilot training and addresses experience shortfalls, continues incentive pay and bonuses, improves administrative support at the squadron level, and funds flying hours to executable levels.” Continues, not increases. I refuse to believe that Air Force leadership doesn’t understand market capitalism. I also refuse to believe that they can’t see the immense cost savings involved in not having to train replacements to backfill departing pilots. I really think it’s as simple as bureaucratic pride and not wanting to cede organizational control and influence to the line pilot peons.

As much money as that looks like, it’s way less than training their replacements.

I thought C-17 guys could land in the dirt? I’m guessing they could park in the dirt too! What’s the PCN of dirt?

Nobody’s going to build a F-23. Ever. Stop wishing.

They’ll conclude that it’s because of old planes so they can justify an increased budget. Then they’ll give it all to contractors large and small while continuing to refuse to pay you even what Congress has already authorized. I don’t even think they’re getting kickbacks or post-retirement consultant jobs. They’re just myopic bureaucrats set in their ways, which is even harder to budge.

War is Boring are such fools. Flying Nightmare, GMAFB.

Peanut Gallery observations from 6-9 years ago: “Seems like totally shutting off fighter drops to UPT for a couple of years may have compounding effects down the road.” “Wow running a simultaneous RIF/VSP/TERA seems like a bit of an extreme way to downsize, especially since the airlines are hiring again.” “OK, so I understand why the Air Force hates the MC-12 - being an effective & cheap COTS solution and all - but I think they’re jumping the gun by giving them all to the Army before we’re done with Afghanistan.” “Huh, we’re drawing down Afghanistan again? Last time we backburnered that the Taliban took full advantage and gained a lot of ground.” “It’s pretty obvious that everyone in the Battle Royals hates ISIS, but I bet we’ll have big problems when all of our bedfellows want to kill each other after ISIS is gone.” “We can get rid of the A-10 because the US is planning on buying 2,400 F-35s? Just like we were going to buy 132 B-2s and 750 Raptors?”

Who gets the cash?

Are you at Travis? This sounds like Travis. File a complaint with the 18AF IG. Or just send this to JQP. Maybe your Sq/CC could say “unable, here’s a laundry list of real-world reasons” and cc the world.

Is this the DRAM thing? Several years ago Travis AFB declared that every flying squadron wasn’t allowed to pour beer in the bar unless everyone was trained to recognize when somebody was drunk. Seemed to us at the time to be an obvious plot to get people to drink in their shitty combined club. The OG recognized the bullshit ploy, but was made to enforce it anyway. He held a special CC call and told us the bad news. Then, after watching a 5min video used for training Applebee’s waitresses, he declared the entire OG to be “DRAM OK”, pulled back the curtain to reveal a bunch of kegs and solo cups, and gave us the rest of the day off. A great piece of theater, and the only cool thing he ever did.

I think they do that because of the seriousness of losing COMSEC, but all it does is squarely place blame on the airman when it’s misplaced. It does nothing to actually prevent loss of control. The time filling out that form would be better spent looking each person in the eye and saying, “if you lose one of these books, you’ll get an Art 15 and everyone in the Air Force will have to get new books. Don’t fuck this up.”

Don’t forget how great a civilian mobility guy is. And a civilian to open and close the vault. Add in a training, scheduling, front office, and stan/eval guy and that’s how a flying squadron can be utterly transformed by adding just 6 people. Hopefully the era of the pilot-bureaucrat is waning.

Sounds like breach of contract to me. Return to sender.

“Reassigned.” Firing is something that real (non-gov) civilians do, and over peanuts at that.

“...component failures or degradations were identified as affecting the topline performance of OBOGS oxygen pressure, flow, and content, resulting in various disruptions that negatively impacted the human-machine interface.” This is an excellent example of Officialese, an English-based language designed to increase the speaker’s perceived professionalism and authority on a subject. The intent is that a listener will either be too lost in the complexity of the words to coherently respond or the excessive verbosity will cause boredom and withdrawal. Simply saying, “the OBOGSs were failing and making pilots hypoxic,” is too easily understood and would invite too many follow up questions. Greater sentence complexity = hard to decipher theme and harder to devise timely counter arguments. Fortunately for all fans of brevity, the statement above became illegal in the Plain Writing Act of 2010.

This seems like an extraordinary amount of risk for a training organization to accept, especially in the modern risk-averse environment. That high of an ALR indicates that the Air Force really believes that increasing pilot production is the most important solution to its pilot shortage crisis.

If I were a Russian or Chinese paid troll or bot programmer, I’d be rolling in with everything I’ve got on military leadership. How I know when I win: US military leaders begin publicly attacking their own with claims of bullying, microaggressions, and unintentional biases. The possible unintended silver lining for us: the weak-minded leaders will remove each other via Twitter while the IDGAF types like Mattis will be more likely to survive.

All valid, but the AF still believes in the PCSM, and they’re giving pilot jobs to people with scores that are at least 10% lower than last year and possibly 40% lower (depending on how the score was reworked) than ten years ago. So our plan is to replace CMR instructors with a bunch of inexperienced useless new guys that are measurably dumber by the USAF’s own expensively-determined scoring system. Edit: also, to continue my recurring theme of the stupidity of not paying a pilot bonus closer to market rates, the UPT training costs alone for those 400 extra bottom-dwelling pilot candidates will be more than the yearly costs of a $100k bonus for all the experienced eligibles. And they haven’t even been to FTU yet.

52 PCSM. Fucking great. Somebody send this shit to the HASC/SASC and let them know this is the AF’s plan because they refuse to spend a few pennies on bonuses. “We need a $69B white jet to train UPT studs with radars and datalinks. Also, the studs will be mildly retarded.”

Good news, the U-2 has been solving its own problems at the Squadron level for some time. We just hired a P-3 guy, in fact. https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/279960/u-2-pilot-application/

They sent the guy who has the same decision making power as our CSAF. Both left the meeting with takeaways for their bosses.

What he’s saying is that the female nav who was “responsible” for signing off on the nukes is a fast burner while her former squadron and group commmanders were fired on the spot. None of the hate and scapegoating that rained down from on high hit her, even though she was the one and only person in the OG who looked in the little “nukes=yes” window and concluded, “yep, everything looks kosher, lets fucking roll out.” Or at least that’s what I heard, but I’m not a BUFF guy.