Danny Noonin

Just a hunch but I'm guessing they do ISR and network warfare.

It really isn't a difficult game. Write the shit out exactly how it appears. Close enough is not good enough. It's your introduction to the "attention to detail" concept. Edit: Not shitting on you Wolf. But there's a reason that class after class (in IFS and in UPT) fail these simple tests. Dudes just don't seem to believe it when they are told that it must match exactly.

It is certainly not unprecedented for a dude's wife to have a kid while he's in UPT. At least until recently, we in the Air Force liked to hire dudes who liked to fuck chicks, so that kind of thing is going to happen. UPT is not an ideal time, but there is no ideal time unless you FAIP. After UPT is FTU. After FTU is the nomadic life of deployments. At UPT you will in all likelihood be at the birth. It's not prison. Dudes get it. If your flight/CC doesn't get it, I assure you his wife (assuming male flt/cc) or the sqauadron CC's wife will hear about it and most certainly get it--and they will make sure your flight cc gets it. You'll be there for the birth unless she goes into a short warning kind of labor and you are in the air or otherwise just can't get there in time...but that's the same for an accountant or any other kind of job as well. Now...having said that, you wont' get 2 weeks of paternity leave, or whatever it is that the SNAPs are demanding these days. You'll probably get a day or three off, then have to jump right back into the fray full speed. Your frau might not completely dig that. She also might not completely dig it when (if) you sleep in the other room so that you can get some sleep--which you will need. (Sidenote parental advice...don't let her let the baby sleep in your room...you will regret that. Tuck that advice away and save it for later. It's gold) Your wife will be stressed and pissed off that you can't help her more. That's standard new-momma act and has nothing to do wtih UPT. That has everything to do with being a dude with a time consuming job. But when you get home, you can take the kid off her hands and hold on to it while it naps and you can study or chairfly at the same time. In fact, holding a screaming kid is better. It simulates a screaming IP in the back seat and teaches you to think under pressure. Bottom line...I can't recommend that you have a kid while in UPT. But if some of your swimmers get through, then it's not the worst situation in the world.

Say it ain't so! My, how times have changed.

Let me use a better example than UTAs/AT since those are centrally funded. In the AF Reserve, when you are put on RPA (reserve paid for man days) then that all comes out of the unit's RPA pot...including travel, billeting, per diem, etc. the RPA pot is a dollar amount (not a specific number of days). A unit can use those dollars to put a Lt Col on a week of man days or an A1C on a shit ton of man days for the same amount of money depending on their needs. Folks who need billeting and per diem drain that pot of money far faster than those who don't. Which means that in the end, the unit actually gets fewer days of work out of the annual pot if they have to pay for that stuff all the time. Your example of a married guy costing more than a single guy only comes into play if a unit puts someone on orders for more than 30 consecutive days because then BAH kicks in only at that point. Anything less than 30 days of orders and he married guy and the single guy cost the same. Since units can pretty easily manage the issuing of >30 days of RPA orders, that one is pretty easy to mitigate. But in a flying squadron it is much harder to say "no man days at all" to all of the non-local guys so out of towners do cause a serious budget hit in a time when man day accounts have dried up which is having fairly significant mission impact. So yes, while AFRC itself may not require you to live local, a unit can because they are the ones doing the hiring and they can stay away from dudes who will cause them more challenges. The agreement to live local, at least with my fighter squadron, was a gentlemans agreement. I did not sign anything and they probably wouldn't have fired me if i didn't live up to my end, but they sure as shit wouldn't have done me any favors if I screwed them over. Man days can be like gold depending on your situation, so it's not wise to be "that guy" pointing out things like AF reserve FAQs as your source of moral authority to your squadron when they hold the keys to your jet and your paycheck. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

Except depending on how you read the regs, units can technically be "required" to put you up in the Q/hotel if you live out of town and are on certain statuses (Annual Tour, UTA, etc). That means you cost more money out of the severely limited budget that a local person would not cost. Since that means a potential "employee" would cost the "employer" more money to do the exact same work if they were hired, it is a valid, legal discriminator that could be used in a hiring decision. So, yes, many flying units require you to live in the local area.

We did have 24 hour CAPs over NYC and DC post 9/11. They didn't last long over NYC. They lasted for several months over DC. What does speed have to do with getting "up close and personal" with another airplane? I've been close enough to Cessnas to see the pilot's eyes bulge out of their sockets when I pulled up next to him. Speed is important, but not for the killing part. It's important for intercepting that fucker as fast as possible. A couple fighters have to cover a lot of ground and going 250kts in a T-6 doesn't get the j-o-b done very well.

Negative. My original comment was meant to say that they were not appropriate for use in Iraq for the CAS war due to both capability and cost. I felt the CAS phase of Iraq, as opposed to night 1, was obviously implied by the very fact that there were no F-22 squadrons on earth when OIF kicked off. Apparently that wasn't so obvious, since you replied that I was "absofuckinglutely" wrong because we had F-15Cs over there, so clearly somewhere we were not on the same page. So to be clear....Had we had operational Raptors on night one of OIF, we of course would have used them and that would have been the right thing to do. But we didn't, so that's kind of a mute point. Therefore my original comments didn't reflect that hypothetical. By early 2006 (the earliest we could have really deployed IOC craptors), the situation had changed such that they were not the right tool for the job for many reasons, most of which were previously discussed.

Really? I'm absofuckinglutely wrong on that one? So I guess you would have sent the Edwards dudes over to fly over Iraq? Sounds like a great plan. The F-22 wasn't IOC when the Eagles were flying over Iraq in 2003. They were still in test. Not a single squadron had even begun to convert.

Well, this is a useful discussion. To Bong. And fuck that accident report.

No need for popcorn. I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with anyone. F-22 bashing is a sport, and a fun one at that. But it makes no sense for them to be used in this particular conflict and deep down everyone with any objectivity and perspective knows it.

Go look in the mirror? Go fuck yourself. I was with you and your quest up until this point. This is an internet forum, not the place to find real, accurate answers for your staff work. Go do some real Magnum P.I. detective work by coordinating with real fighter/bomber/airlift/tanker/etc wings and get your real answers the old fashioned way. Are you really going to try and change an AFI and the way the AF does business based on what you learned from anonymous dudes on the internet? The truth is you don't even know what you're asking for, therefore you aren't getting the answers you need. You talked about accurate fuel totals, which we all said was challenging at best and gave specific reasons why. Then you said stuff about 1/4 tank or 1/2 tank, which means absolutely nothing in terms of accurately accounting for fuel. You also talked about just basically verifying that a certain unit did AR on a certain day to send the bill to the right place and so no one can contest it. That's a totally different animal and does not require anyone to do extra paperwork since that information already exists on paper. You just need to figure out how to find it. So which is it? Do you really need to just verify that AR occurred or do you need accurate numbers? Until you can understand and accurately communicate the problem and what your goals are, then you aren't going to get any real answers. Right now, you're all over the place. I know you are trying to solve a problem that is outside of your expertise. Sucks to be you. But don't come into an internet forum looking for the real answers (wrong strategy) then throw spears when you don't like the answers (wrong tactic).

Not sure if you're actually serious, but just in case... Do you think if we still had F-117s in the inventory, they would be in Afghanistan right now? Do we have B-2s sitting in XCAS orbits in Afghanistan? Of course not. It would make no sense, fiscally or otherwise. The F-22 has no pod, just a couple JDAMs. It's not a CAS platform. We have 180-something of them and the stealth is ridiculously expensive to maintain. It would make no sense to build facilities to maintain the stealth coatings, etc, in Afghanistan. If we sent them to the stan and let the stealth rot to hell because it doesn't matter for that scenario, then we lose the ability to use them elsewhere if needed. And there are lots of realistic scenarios where they would be needed. I'm not a big F-22 fan, but they can do things (that we absolutely need in our arsenal) that no one else can do. They just don't make any sense in Afghanistan. Nor did it make any sense in Iraq. Dudes can bitch and moan all day long about how expensive it is and that it hasn't been used in combat. All true. But that completely misses the point of why we have them or the fiscal/logistical realities of operating/maintaining them.

Valid.

Geek

I understand what you're trying to do, but if you are really looking for ACCURATE fuel numbers, those are not going to come from the fighters. There is no guage to tell you exactly how much you took. There is just a gas guage. So you're asking for mental arithmetic mid-flight (maybe at night, maybe in the weather) that may or may not end up being very accurate. You are also relying upon them to write it down right away (maybe at night, maybe in the weather) or remember that random number many hours later (lets see, how much did I take on that 3rd AR again?). What I'm saying here is that the best you are going to get is an approximation from the fighter guys. Very approximate in many cases (i.e. total guess and/or made up BS), therefore I'm not sure it really helps you at all. So if you're looking for any level of accurate accounting, you need to look elsewhere. It's just not going to happen if you rely on the fighter pilots to do math in public and remember it all later on.

That's pretty funny actually

What the fuck is the matter with you?

Back in the day, huh? Did you wear leather helmets back then?

I'm talking about the ground one. I don't think that is at all related to the other incidents IF the details I heard are correct. Beyond that, the situation as a whole is ugly.

I heard the story on this one and I wouldn't jump to any conclusions here by lumping it in with any other incidents.

Oh for fuck's sake. Will you guys calm down? It's a low interest loan. So long as you can pay it off, it will not ruin your career or your financial future or keep you from banging hot chicks. And how the fuck did all you guys buy your first car if you didn't take out a loan? Do you expect new college grads to pay in cash? If so, what kind of job did you have in college that left you so flush with cash at graduation? Or should they just be "that guy" riding his blue Schwinn 10-speed to work along the side of the road that you almost hit every day? Or maybe they should roll through the front gate dumb and dumber style on a classy moped? After all, that's economical. Enough with the dramatic warnings. Take the fucking loan out. Just be smart about what you buy.

Who was that?

Jane Fonda has a military ID?