Danny Noonin

Of course he can eliminate blues on monday. The current CSAF made that policy with the stroke of a pen (sts), albeit after it was suggested at Corona by Lorenz. Previous CSAFs have made utility uniform-of-the-day decisions without consulting the council of the sith lords. As for PME/AADs being masked/unmasked, PME will never be unmasked, but Jumper masked AADs as CSAF. SECAF obviously maintains the overall power, but to say that a CSAF can't do anything without the democratic vote of the other 4-stars is false. It is true that CSAFs tend to consult/discuss issues like this with the other 4-stars at Corona, but that doesn't mean they have to. As for flying hours, ops tempo, etc. those are other matters based on limited resources and immense requirements, not simply discretionary decisons about queep. Difficult to lump those in the same pile. The guy is at the top of the military chain of command in the AF...how does that leave him without any "pull" to change queep?

I think what he's saying is that if captains and majors are "falling on their swords" they will never ben in a position to affect organizational change in the AF. Everyone can make a difference, regardless of rank (to address your post before you edited it). But that "difference" is generally pretty limited for young guys. To change a 300,000+ person, multi-billion dollar organization you have to have more rank. Guys who fall on their swords as cpatains and majors don't ever get to the point where they can influence the big picture.

missing the point again. Of course you want the best commander. The question is, how do you get to be a good one? In a flying squadron, it begins by being credible in the jet. Maybe not the best pilot in the world, but definitely credible or folks simply won't follow you. After that, the traits of a great unit commander are mostly intangible....good with people, fair, involved, etc. Exactly zero traits of a good unit commander require a masters degree to obtain.

dude here is where YOU miss the point. No one is denying that eventually officers need a broader focus. Key word...eventually. The problem is that the AF is demanding that broad focus out of O-2s and O-3s now. If guys that young all have a broad look then who exactly is supposed to be minding the narrowly focused tactical store? Broad focus is great for O-5+. When our operators are officers we cannot have a service that demands it's young officers be broadly focused or effective operations suffer.

I agree with your "causal" assessment, but I think maybe you're missing the context in which the masters, PME, etc. issue is relevant. Gen Welsh and some others are trying to figure out what they can do to reduce an exodus. There is zero chance of adding fighter cockpits, reducing RPA requirements, or anything like that. It's just not gonna happen any time soon. So in terms of fixing the problem, the major cause of the fighter pilot exodus (lack of fighter cockpits) is unfixable in the current budget/world environment. It's simply outside of anyone's control right now. What the 4-stars have the power to do is make life less painful for guys--for everyone, not just fighter guys. They can return sanity to the officer/career side of the world (vice tactical/flying). If the AF can once again emphasize advancement based on leadership and job performance over pure square filling, then it's at least a step in the right direction after about 10 years of going the wrong way. By the way, this is certainly not the first mass-exodus of fighter pilots in AF history. For all of the other ones, there was no lack of fighter cockpits. There were tons of them, and dudes still went for the door. So in that regard, history shows that guys reasons for leaving can have as much to do with instability, career progression (or lack thereof) and just being tired of the all crap as they do with simply a lack of flying. So I think/hope what is happening with the USAFE fighter pilot letter is that they are trying to address the parts of the problem that are actually solvable. And I applaud Boomer, Gork and anyone else who is taking on this fight.

So under your "custom and courtesy" argument, you of course called 1st Lieutentants "sir/ma'am" when you were a 2nd Lieutenant, right? After all, that is also custom and courtesy.

Ok How are you going to pay for that "fairness"? (tsp matches) The fact is that no retirement system (tsp matches, etc) other than a 20yr pension IS the very reason tons of folks stay in. Otherwise far more folks would punch at 12 yrs or so when they start to get tired.

For all the whining that happens on this forum about reflective belts and shoeclerkery other non-mission focused nonsense (and how the shoeclerks grab on to that nonsense and blow it out of proportion) there sure is a lot of high-horse lecturing going on about the importance of lieutenants saluting lieutenants and other ridiculous shit. "it's easy to salute"...yeah well it's easy to wear a reflective belt inside too. Let it go.

So what Gus is saying is that there is no longer room for good judgment or common sense. There are no exceptions to any rule because that wouldn't be fair to someone else. All decisions should be made off of the hypothetical possibility of being sued. Fuk that.

Pretty bold recommendation to someone on flying status.

Because you didn't read two posts north

The shortage is not actually in fighter cockpits right now it's in all the other taskings...RPA, MC-12, ALO, staff, etc. But that's also not the shortage Gen Welsh is talking about. The impending trainwreck has more to do with the F-35 rolling off the line than anything else. Say what you will about the odds of that thing ever showing up in the timeframe or the numbers currently projected. But we closed 11 fighter squadrons last year alone (and several more in the recent years before that) all under the guise of "accepted short term risk" until the F-35 comes to the rescue to save the world. That's 11+ fighter squadrons worth of fighter pilots that are no longer flying fighters. Many of those will retire, get out, move on to RPAs, have arthritis, etc, before the F-35 opens up. Meanwhile we've cut our b-course squadrons and production to the bare minimum and wouldn't have any operational squadrons to send those guys to anyway. So we will be going through several years of wicked low fighter pilot production numbers in addition to what we already cut. If the F-35 production line ever truly spins up like it's theoretically supposed to, there will quickly be a shit-ton of fighter cockpits and no one qualified to fly them. And even if we decided it was a good idea to stock a new fighter just with newbies, our pipelines from UPT to IFF to b-courses will not mathematically be able to bridge the gap. Not even close. That's the impending fighter shortage that has everyone worried.

Foul.

It was literally titled "No Practice Bleeding Policy" in the subject line of the memo. I used to have the policy letter posted over my desk. If you need a masters--we'll send you. Don't waste time with PME in correspondence unless you don't get picked up in residence. That policy was in effect until 2006-ish. And Mosely didn't kill that policy, SECAF did.

Nice.

Well at least I don't have to defect to france now

What you talkin' bout Willis? It looks to me like you said the OG's top priority should be the demo. It also looks to me that it garnered a "shack" from Rainman. I truly hope I just can't read, because if any USAF OG's top priority is the airshow demo, then we should all just defect to france now and make it that much easier to surrender in the next war. We have lost our fukking minds. An ops group commander's top priority should be mission accomplishment. His number 2 priority should be safe operations. Period dot. The demo (other than the safety aspect) should be nowhere near the top of the list.

For those calling for the chain of command to be fired for the capital crime called "they should have known"...be careful what you wish for. This can be exactly the kind of knee jerk reaction that can ruin a unit/wing/base. Good luck to you with the next guy who will surely be in your chili all the time, doesn't trust anyone, and treats everyone like children because he doesnt want anyone to ever say that he didn't know absolutely everything going on in the entire wing.

Get over it dude. Read the report yourself if you want. You clearly know what you're talking about so I'll give up.

Sorry for the thread drift. I take the heat for that. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

Dude, GMAFB. It was a gust. That doesn't mean the winds were being called out of limits when they were cleared for takeoff.

Well in this case, they pretty much were, weren't they? 37 knot crosswind gust, with max book limit of 33. Airplane had winglets too, with max manufacturer demonstrated limit of 22. Again, not making excuses for anyone. The causal factor in this accident report is pilot error. Period dot. My whole point is that anyone who entered the major airline world in the last 8 years or so has undergone significantly reduced training flying airliners than anyone who entered the industry before that. The airlines pitch to the FAA was that they didn't need such extensive (translation: expensive) training for newbies because they would be under the supervision of more experienced captains for years and could gain their seasoning that way. But put it this way: On your next airline flight, the crew up front very well might consist of a F.O. who has maybe 10 flights in any heavy airplane in his life sitting next to a captain who has overall experience, but only 5 flights in that type of aircraft. Perfectly legal and I've seen it happen, but it's hardly Chesley and Jeff. So when shit goes south, who are you going to blame? The pilots of course, and I'm not saying that's wrong. But in my opinion, its a high risk setup that the FAA and the industry have come up with and we're lucky it hasn't bitten us badly yet.

I'm not making excuses for anyone or absolving anyone of the responsibility to get the j-o-b done no matter what. I'm just saying that, by military standards, modern day a-word training absolutely sucks. Shockingly so. To claim that anyone is "proficient" at the end of a crash course is a joke. Dudes can get from point A to point B just fine. But throw in some no-notice life and death curveballs and now we're all just taking our chances, because there may not be a solid foundation underneath it all.

I'm not saying anyone would take revenge. Very rarely do guys get bad deals out of spite, even though many times guys are wrongly convinced that's why they got a bad deal. You do have to step back and look at things from a commander's perspective sometimes. It's a tough spot to be in and why they get paid the big bucks. There are very limited good deals to go around. There are more great dudes who've earned a good deal than there are good deals. Someone has to lose. If you were the boss, would you burn one of your good deals on a dude who you know is punching out ASAP anyway, or would you maybe direct it toward another good dude who you are trying to maybe set up down the road as well? Put it this way, what would you do as a leader/officer/manager in that situation if you had to make the call? If you show your cards early, you might just make a difficult decision for your boss into a no-brainer. That's all I'm saying. It's a big risk to take on a very low Pk (almost zero) palace chase attempt. Only you can decide if that risk is worth it to you. As for not being worried about getting a job in the airlines....If by that you meant you are totally confident that you can get an airline job, than you're smoking dope and you don't understand the way that world works. I don't care what your resume looks like or who you know, it's not that simple. If by that you mean that you don't care about what kind of job you get, just as long as it isn't active duty, than that's another matter. In that case I'd say to stay the hell away from the airlines. That is absolutely the wrong career to toward if your goal is quality of life, especially for a guy with kids. I know a lot of former military dudes who thought the grass would be so much greener on the other side and ended up either quitting the airlines entirely or weaseled back into an AGR guard or reserve gig because they hated the airline lifestyle. Even if it's better than your lifestyle now, that doesn't mean it's actually good. Free advice. Take it for what it's worth.

And they would be correct. I'm guessing you have no idea what an airline training program consists of. Let me describe an average major airline's program for you: Systems training is done by sending a CD to the dude's house, telling him to go through it on his own time for zero pay, and then giving him a computer based test on it. Training is about 4 weeks: 2 weeks of cockpit trainers, then 4 sims and a checkride, then 4 more sims and a checkride. Each sim period is 4 hours long and 2 dudes are getting trained, so he only gets 1/2 the time on the controls. So somewhere in the 16 hours of actual time on the controls there are before you he gets type rated as a PIC, he needs to cover just a few things apart from giant gusts of wind that might hit at 130 knots on takeoff roll. So maybe, just maybe, they might not actually have been too proficient at that. A dude's first time in the actual airplane is with a bus load of passengers in the back. There are no practice flights. Once a year recurrent training consists of a systems exam and 2 sims. Other than that, dude, there is no training. None. Zip. It's all fly the flight plan, maximize auto pilot, nothing ever goes wrong except the weather and delays, kind of flying. Hardly the kind that challenges or develops skill sets. Maybe I'm reading your post wrong, but it looks like you're taking a cheap shot at the unions as if it's bullshit they are trying to shield someone. When in reality, the FAA got bought off by the airline lobbyists and once robust training programs have been watered down to the point that they are barely good enough to get you from point A to point B, let alone deal with serious problems. Or so I've heard.