08Dawg

The good news here is that the Buff is now in combat. It'll be a minute or two before most of those crewdogs are eligible for Striker Vista, but I think having both the non-LO bombers in the fight will eventually help smooth that transition.

Bet the A-10 bubbas are pissed...they're the real "Attack" squadrons. Just ask them, they'll tell you!

Yup, I think that's am ambitious plan. And just about the time they get to be useful, Global Strike's going to say, "Tour complete, go requal in your previous platform". Not sure what they have in mind for a timeline, but I think at least four years would be optimal.

They should be relatively knowledgeable about the threats in general. Since the Bone's defensive stuff is much more user friendly, I doubt they'll have issues. My worry for the Buff guys going to the Bone is fitting in from a credibility standpoint. You take a guy who's been flying really nothing more than Lancer sorties and the occasional CBP deployment and you plunk him into a squadron where even most of the LTs have combat time. Tough sledding, if you ask me. The Bone guys coming to us will probably have a leg up on your average run-of-the-mill offender, as we're only qualifying them in the offense seats. Just get ready for a culture shock when you go from 1980s tech to 1960s.

True, but now that we've more than doubled the number of available bomb squadrons to pick up AFCENT taskings...I think four months makes more sense. My first trip to the island was four months, and that felt right. Six months is a drag, tropical island or no. An even better answer, to me at least, is do what we did in the late 80s/early 90s- park a squadron out there. We've already got a detachment out there now. Maybe you don't put twelve tails there, but four-six with periodic swaps to keep the corrosion issues low.

It's a sad state of affairs when an O-6 thinks they can not obey a directive from the CSAF. "I know Gen. Welsh said this, but I know better, so get your master's done or you're not getting a DP".

Depends on how "combat" your sq/cc feels the deployment is...it's also about a $2K roudtrip plane ticket, before putting your wife up in the Hilton for a week.

Ya know...just once I'd like to see Congress take it in the shorts, for a change...

Maintenance says jet is Code 2....you're taking it, right sir? But seriously, so glad the crew's ok. This could have been much, much worse. If you look off the nose about a jet's length, that's the start of a six-hundred foot cliff. Huge props to the A/C for getting this jet stopped and the crew off.

The 12B outlook ain't lookin' that good either...

Somewhere, a shoeclerk's cranium is exploding at the sight of those rolled-up sleeves...

If you need some pointers as to who to talk to, PM me. I work with the Reserve guys daily.

I had some suspicions about the tester in flight med, even though the result's been the same for a couple of years running. I hadn't thought of ophthalmology, but I'll give that a try. Thanks!

Red and blue I passed, green I'm 60-70 percent.

Anybody have any recent experience with an ETP for color vision, especially on the guard/reserve side? My story- Buff radar nav, got in before the new computerized color vision test. Trying to go to UPT, but the color vision thing hosed me on the green portion. Ironic thing is, my MFD is solid green and I have no problems looking at it.

Same's true in the Buff world. Many patches get maybe a year outside of WIC, then they get sucked up into various exec jobs. Off the top of my cranium, right now there are guys less than two years out of WIC sitting in wing, NAF and MAJCOM level exec or aide jobs.

Some platforms (AWACS, JSTARS, the few remaining KC-135s), the writing's on the wall. Guys with smashbug wings are going the way of the dodo. Now, for platforms that a) drop ordnance or b) have an AFSOC mission, the outlook is good. AFSOC is quickly phasing in -J model everything, including AC and MC-130s, and they specifically kept the CSOs on those aircraft. For bombers, the jet doesn't work without us, so you'll have a full career there. The Buff is slated to be around until the mid 2040s at the rate it's going. As for being a second class citizen...most of the problems I've experienced have come from cocky straight out of T-38 young copilots who think they're God's gift to aviation. By the time they make AC and especially IP, most of them have calmed down and come to accept that, at least for the Buff, the jet revolves around the offensive team. If your offense team sucks, you don't make your TOT and your bombs don't hit the target. Your potential in that kind of community is limited only by your work ethic. Right now, the current 5 OG/CC is a radar nav, the incoming 2 OG/CC is an EW, and the incoming 2 BW/CC is a Bone WSO on a cross-flow program. In my ops squadron tours, I had two CSO sq/ccs and two pilot sq/ccs, and in my current FTU gig, I've had one and one. Marketable skills...there's no one-one correlation, but you'll have years of military experience and be an expert in weapons and sensors. Jobs at Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc are usually pretty common post-AF.

KBAD "local area" is three hours. You can take VOCO (Verbal Orders of Commander) leave up to eight hours driving time up to four non-duty days.

People knock it, but I've enjoyed my ERAU masters. I specialized in aviation safety, and since I went to safety school, it was interesting and relevant.

That, and it comes off your Career Data Brief/SURF/whatever...a year out from a PRF being written with a new CSAF likely in that time frame? Yeah, I'm finishing mine. Absolutely no trust that the pendulum won't swing rapidly back the other direction in the next year or two.

We've landed at other places that short before, so it didn't take THAT much doing. However, if another f'ing person asked me about KI Sawyer...

The 307th Bomb Wing (think AFRC Buffs at KBAD) just stood up a reserve bomb group at Dyess, so maybe there's hope.

. Because throwing money at people always solves your problems...

I think studying human factors is fine. The more we know, the more we understand, the better we can train. Aviation's gotten to the point where the man is the weak link in the chain. I think the problem right now is that the DoD HFACs, at least as it's implemented in AFSAS for any mishap, is clunky and a bit forced. You have to parse through a bunch of different errors and find the one that most matches what you think happened. Haven't tried to push a report through yet without one, but when I was at AMIC, the word was "good luck submitting an AFSAS report nowadays without specifying any human factors".

I don't know a single dude/dudette who has stopped working on their masters. Word we got was basically "do it now, you'll have no time as an O4/O5"