HiFlyer

More of the 1955 guys. Spoo knows...

Keep in mind that she will have no access to the base unless you are with her. She's just another civilian to them.

The reason is too few fighter & bomber training slots, and too much training capability in the ENJJPT syllabus (sortie availability). The NATO input is still there, but the AF can't simply reduce the USAF input (ruins the training aspect of NATO guiys and our guys training together) or send tons of ENJJPT studs to UAVs (which was beginning to happen), so the AETC commander sent out a policy letter a while back that decreed that USAF studs were now eligible for any aircraft. Its a product of the fighter drawdown, really.

It ain't dead yet. There is a lot of Congressional battles to be fought on this one!

I once took off out of Osan in a U-2 (wx 100 & 1/4). Throttle cable became disconnected from the fuel control on the roll (classic "forgot to safety wire the bolt" event) and left me with a wide open engine, no way to control it except the emergency fuel shutoff, and complete IFR for two thousand miles. After ten hours of wandering around the Pacific looking for a place to go the weather cleared over Okinawa and I shut it down and dead-sticked into Kadena. If nothing else I learned the J-75 was one tough engine...hours of overtemp by hundreds of degrees and it was barely singed. They pulled the engine and sent it home, inspected and replaced a few turbine blades and combustor buckets as a precaution, and put it back into service. Had another friend who lost all the oil and flew one four hours to Guam with no oil. Two slightly worn bearings replaced and back into service. J-75s were great engines!! P.S. Great job Tony!!!!

The last official thing I know of said that once washed out of a DoD military pilot training program, there was no re-admittance rergardless of the Service. That did not preclude entrance to another rated program (CSO/Nav or ABM) if the Service wished to admit you, but no pilot training program. Whether or not they've changed that policy I can't say. I doubt it, though.

I'd heard that, too. It was part of the "betrayal" feeling, I suspect, and he didn't want it to be remembered or glorified. It was not his idea of how to sell aviation and he didn't want it repeated. He was a great CEO, but a bean-counter, at heart!

Not exactly false, just not the whole story. A lot went on between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning. Bill was livid on Saturday, believing that since every cent Boeing had was invested in the -80 program and its failure would probably have bankrupted Boeing, Tex's "stunt" performed without "management permission or advice" was seen as endangering the viability of the whole company; he felt personally "betrayed" according to one assistant my dad knew. You have to remember that Bill Allen was a very smart businessman, but not an aviation engineer or pilot. He initially viewed the maneuver as "acrobatics" (which it technically was by FAA definitions). He informed his assistants later that night that he was going to fire Tex on Monday when they all got back to the office, but they calmed him down a little and got him to put off any actions or decisions until he talked with Tex on Monday. When Tex explained everything Bill calmed down, probably helped by the very complementary comments of the Pan Am Chairman who later mentioned that the roll convinced him that the performance capabilities of the airplane were clearly more than a simple sales pitch. Tex kept flying but according to my dad was "moved out" of the Chief Test Pilot position not long afterward...although I can't confirm that part...I just took my dad's explanation as accurate.

You think its a coincidence???

I recall having to do the same thing eons ago when the wing at Laughlin changed from the 3646th PTW to the 47th FTW. The master list used to be controlled by the comm people, I beleive, at Scott AFB back when there was an AFCC. I suspect the function still exists but has changed hands a dozen times over the years. I'd start with your local Comm people; find some senior NCOs who know about such things and ask them. They might be able to start you in the right direction. There was a list of every approved call sign that existed and which were still available. We got stuck with "Aloha"...not really distinct or easy to say compared to "Rake", which the T-38 squadron had before. I don't think it lasted too long!

I was at the 1955 "Gold Cup" unlimited hydroplane race on Lake Washington in Seattle when Tex did two fly-bys over the course between races ( a couple of days after that picture was taken). He rolled it twice (two separate passes) in front of about 100,000+ spectators, including the CEO of Boeing (Bill Allen) and his guest, the CEO of PanAm. Allen almost had a heart attack; the PanAm CEO decided to buy the airplane on the spot! Tex was fired as Chief Test Pilot that night by a very upset Bill Allen, but hired back in a day or two as "Chief of Customer Flight Test Relations" or something like that after Allen calmed down. My dad worked at Boeing (on the 707 program) at the time and the whole company was in an uproar for a week or two before things settled down. I can still remember it; the whole place got deathly quiet for about 15 seconds the first time anticipating a horrific crash, but the second time the applause and yelling was incredible.

A couple of thoughts. First, consistency is important in training. If you're going more than three days between flights your progress will be visibly slower simply because you lose some of the "feel" you attained on the last sortie. Slower means more flights, which means more money. The optimum is probably three-five flights a week. By the way, too many isn't good either...it doesn't leave you time to absorb what you've learned and prepare for the next flight, especially with the pressures of school. Second, if your desire is to get in to UPT, excellent academics is probably more important that a PPL, so taking time for flying is a bad idea if the result is poorer performance in high school and college. You can't finish UPT if you can't get into the AF! Save your money and focus a summer sometime in the future on flying...it will be better and cheaper in most cases.

Incredible! So much for progress in American education since Grampa's time.

Perhaps part of Purdue's costs are included in the tuition/fees for their aviation program.

Just to make sure you understand, visual acuity (the 20/20 business) is not the only factor in passing an AF vision test. There is color vision, depth perception, asitgmatism, and probably other factors. They AF looks at these things in much more detail than an FAA flight doc on a class III. Not saying you have a problem, just letting you know that being 20/20 is not a guarantee of passage by itself.

I can only say one thing about this. Waivers generally depend on the seriousness of the particular factor in question and how badly the AF needs you in that position. If they're short of pilots in two-three years and the medical condition is not serious and is waiverable you have a shot (obviously, age is not a medical condition so the entire equation revolves around need).

I wouldn't plan on two weeks in any case. The academics takes much of the first week alone. The syllabus is built to the average guy...about four weeks. If you do well and have some flying time (PPL or close) you may get out after about three weeks with good performance. I'm not saying it hasn't been done in two weeks, but that is really on the edge of reality. Plan for four, hope for three.

Go here for the AFI on "Palace Chase"... https://usmilitary.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=usmilitary&cdn=careers&tm=11&gps=471_486_1276_868&f=10&su=p284.9.336.ip_p554.13.336.ip_&tt=11&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.e-publishing.af.mil/shared/media/epubs/AFI36-3205.pdf

Use caution. It isn't a vacation. While the weekend off-duty time is yours, you will be expected to arrive Monday morning with lots of new knowledge. My son spent a significant percentage of his weekends in the books and said it was pretty obvious during the week who had used the time wisely and who hadn't! It isn't about flying, its about learning flight info and the local procedures. He had his PPL and over 60 hours in the DA-20 and still had to work his rear end off to do well!!!

A long swim to anyplace else!

There are no "best bases", there are only "better for me" bases. What are your interests, your lifestyle preferences, your needs? For instance, if you love to ski and do outdoors stuff, places like Hill AFB and the Colorado locations are likely places, as are Germany and Italy and even northern Japan (Misawa). If you're a surfer and beach bum, then Hickam, Patrick, LA AFB, Vandenburg, etc. may be good choices. If you're hot on pursuing advanced education, a location near good schools may be important. Catalog your needs and likes, then look for places that match.

You're probably out of luck. There is no real "schedule" for IFS...it could be within weeks of OTS, or months down the road. The only thing you can assume is that after OTS you will do MFS at Brooks (if you are a pilot and haven't already done it), then sit at your UPT/UNT base for some period of time, then do IFS for about 3-4 weeks, then go back to your base, then eventually start training. I've seen guys go to IFS within a few weeks of reporting, and other guys sit on casual for four or five months before going. The only relationship I know of is the sooner the start date for your class, the sooner you go to IFS.

There are several commercial pubs: ARCO, Peterson's, Barron's, plus some related web sites for practice tests. They're all about the same, but it doesn't hurt to use them all. Go to a well known book store and buy them, or a used bookstore to get them cheaper (try to get the latest version). None of them are perfect, and none of them give you the exact test, but they will all describe and allow practice on the TYPE of questions asked. Also, for the Verbal sections, many people recommend a GRE or GMAT verbal analogies study guide, which are apparently similar to the type of thing you'll see on the AFOQT. The most important thing is to understand the way the test will be administered...several (a half dozen or so) strictly timed sub-sections. Practice taking the tests under strict time restraints as the books suggest. Time management is frequently as important as the material itself.

Don't blame the AF...look across the river. Your ever so short-sighted representatives in Congress were the problem. For the AF, it was either train and bank or shut down about 70% of their UPT capability and not be able to train pilots in a couple of years when they could clearly see the bulge disappearing. They chose to adopt the "banked pilot" system so they could keep the system functional. It lasted about three or four years, then the system ran short of pilots and everybody went back into flying jobs (or got out). This kind of thing has happened several times over the last forty years as Congress tries to solve short term budget and political problems by sacrificing long term stability.

I saw this a few months ago and found it interesting as much from the off-duty and training stuff as the duty stuff. It was also interesting to me personally because my uncle was a bombardier with the 100th Bomb Group at almost the exact same time. He was shot down over Belgium on the way home from one of the "ball-bearing raids" (Regensburg, in his case), was recovered by the Belgian underground, and spent almost six months getting out thru France and Spain. His story was facinating, but hard to get out of him for years because of the horrors he went through in the process. He was one of the first to get back via that route, and was virtually imprisoned by the Army upon his return to the UK because of the intel he collected on V-1 sites while waiting to leave Belgium. They didn't want the word to get back to the Germans that we were collection info that way. His family was informed that he was MIA when he went down, but were not told of his return for over a year while he (and others) sat under guard in a high security facility in the UK debriefing and being hidden from the rest of the military. He was not allowed to notify the family and return to the US until very late 1944. His story matches this guy's story almost exactly! By the way, according to the story he finally told his son, his group of several guys was among the first to get back via this "underground railway" which was why the allies were so protective of the information. One of the great tragedies of the trip was that he made it with one of his other crewmembers who made it all the way to the Spanish border, then slipped on a rock crossing a stream to freedom, hit his head, and was killed.