Learjetter

Now, THERE'S some Christmas spirit!

We usually see it written "DNIF"--Duties Not Including Flying.., DNIF for a few days/weeks is likely, until the cast comes off...or, unless you could demonstrate to the doc you can still manipulate all controls properly and can egress a-ok. +2 on the above, unless you're in real pain and can't stand it, wait until you're at your first assignment after all training to let the AF ortho guys have a go at it (or, they'll refer you to civ orthos "downtown").

Don't gnat's-ass it...just stick to the frag, give 'em the frag, and report the frag...anything "missing" at the end of the sortie musta been burned in flight--surely the engine coupon showed one motor burning a little more than the rest...

Nope. PIC is PIC. However, what I DO about such an event may be partially based on the rank/position of the PIC in question.

These kinds of leadership reactions are not new....

Absolutely survivable...Q3 only a minor blip on the record these days...even the 89AW is taking looks at folks w/Q3s...Unless you also document it with a referral OPR...that's tougher to bury...but also survivable.

I agree, about time. Good on 'em But, "cajolery?"....Really?

"Paperwork in hand" pretty good argument that the Beta agreed to the 3 years the AF said he had to serve... ETA: Guess Big Blue's plan is to claim the "3" is a typo?

I work with the bubbas at AFPC often-- they are a good bunch of guys trying to match the right guy to the right opening at the right time...not as easy as it sounds. You can call and talk to your functional--and you should definitely stop in and visit next time you're at RND for a records check. The ADP is useful for letting your boss and your functional know what you want. But your DT vector takes priority. As for openings via AMS, what shows is what's loaded to show--there are A LOT of very cool jobs that will never show up due to selective hiring protocols or simple bad timing. Your CC should know about these jobs, or go read AIRMAN: The Book to learn about cool flying gigs in other MAJCOMs (like test units, Big Safari, AFFSA, AFMC, DIA, green door jobs, FAA flight check, FAA liaison, detachments that do neat stuff you never heard of, etc)...just make sure you're kicking ass at your current job and have a good attitude, and make sure your boss knows what you want to do, then let him mentor you and show you several paths to reach your career goals...then, the only variable left is timing. Good luck.

If I was a CSO stud in your class, and we were competing against each other for the one job we both wanted, I'd be ecstatic that you were trying to knock out your masters in training.

FIFY

I piloted that KC-10 from SSC to PSAB w/Wald (& you & 69 more of our "A-team" friends) on board...

Touché? Or just touchy? Let the audience decide...

Guess they decided against the c-17...

If you've read much on this board, you'll realize we're split about 60/40 on getting the degree first, or enlisting first. My personal opinion is get the degree first, then apply to units as a straight-up pilot applicant, or enlist after you get your degree, then try to get a UPT slot from within the unit. Both avenues have their merits, and whichever you choose the concept is the same: high GPA, be a good student/troop, and work your a$$ off. Good luck.

Hellzyea! Heavy to fighter cross flow was the heat in 97-98...bunch of good dudes went and tried out the little jets...a lot of them loved it and excelled. Take a couple hundred excess herc/Buddha co-pilots, run 'em thru '38 checkout then allocate to fighter FTUs based on performance..,worked well last time...go for it Big blue!

He's not necessarily discussing AMERICAN soldiers.

Found this on another message board...thought it good enough to repost here. I don't know the author, or poster, personally, but have no reason to doubt the veracity of either...anyway, enjoy another yarn about "the good old days"... How The O-2s Really Got There It's 1967 or maybe early 1968, I forget, and the Air Force has bought a mess of Cessna Super Skymasters and called them O-2s. The Cessna factory at Wichita, Kansas is pumping them out at a pretty good clip and your problem is to figure out how to get them to Vietnam where they are needed. Your choices are: 1. Fly them to the West coast and turn them over to the Army for transport by cargo ship. 2. Take the wings off them and stuff them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and fly them over. 3. Fly them over under their own power with no C-124 attached. Question: Which method was used? Right! Every single one of those puppies was hand-flown across the Big P to Vietnam. That sounds like it might have been a Mickey Mouse operation. Believe me, it wasn't that good. Air Force Systems Command (AFSC) was running that show and their knowledge stopped somewhat short of knowing anything about ferrying air planes. The Air Force had a perfectly good organization called the 44th Aircraft Delivery Group which operated world wide and managed the ferrying of all aircraft; except the O-2s. AFSC contracted with some outfit in San Francisco to deliver the planes to Saigon. The contractor hired a bunch of civilian pilots who couldn't find honest work elsewhere. Since the O-2s were technically "public" aircraft (as opposed to civil aircraft) no pilot's license was necessary to fly one and I'm not sure that all of the pilots had licenses. Some of them were pretty good, but the rest of them were the most god-awful collection of unqualified scruffy-looking alcoholics you ever saw. The dregs of the flying profession. The deal worked like this. The pilots were given a plane ticket to Wichita where they got a quickie checkout in the O-2 if they needed one. Then they launched in bunches of four and headed for Hamilton AFB on the west coast of California. Enroute, they were instructed to carefully monitor and record their oil consumption, which, of course, they did not do. That type of pilot does not monitor and record oil consumption. At Hamilton, the Air Force removed all the seats except the left front one. The seats were shipped to Vietnam by air, which is what should have happened to the rest of the plane, too. Extra fuel tanks were installed in the vacant floor space fol lowed by the pilot himself. He had to crawl over the co-pilot tank to get to the left seat. Next, they installed an oil tank on top of the co-pilot tank followed by a small emergency HF radio on top of that. Now, the pilot was truly locked in. To get out, he could either wait for someone to remove the radio and oil tank or crawl out the emergency escape window on the left side. Takeoff must have been something to watch. With all that fuel, the planes were way over max gross weight. They had no single engine capability at all for about the first five hours of flight. If either engine hiccupped, the pilot went swimming. <!--The route was Hawaii (Hickam), Midway, Wake Island, Guam (Anderson), Philippines (Clark) and Saigon (Tan Son Nhut.) The Hamilton-Hickam leg was by far the longest; nominally about thirteen hours. The O-2s were carrying fuel for about fourteen and a half hours of flight. Navigation was strictly dead reckoning. The pilots took up a heading based on wind calculations and flew out their ETA hoping to be lost within range of a Hawaiian radio station. They had no long range navigation equipment. The fuel tanks were disposable and were dropped off as they were no longer needed. The fuel pumps were not disposable and the pilots were instructed to bring them back along with their dirty underwear and the HF radio. The trip was supposed to take about a week and each pilot carried an airline ticket from Saigon to Wichita to go back and pick up another plane. For this, the pilots were paid $800 per trip with the flight leader getting $1,000. They planned on averaging three trips a month and getting rich doing it. How come I know so much about this? Well, I was the Director of Safety at Hickam AFB and every single one of over 300 O-2s passed through my domain and created almost constant headaches. Before this all started, I had no idea what an O-2 even looked like much less any knowledge of the overall ferrying scheme. The trouble started with the very first flight and began with the extra oil tank. The reason for determining oil consumption on the Wichita-Hamilton leg was to know how much oil to add during the really long legs. There were no oil quantity gauges. Shortly after takeoff from Hamilton, boredom set in and the pilots would give the oil tank wobble pump a jab or two and squirt some more oil into the engines. The O-2 didn't need that much oil. All this did was overservice the engines which resulted in fluctuating oil pres sure. The pilots didn't like that at all, so they added more oil which led to more pressure fluctuation. Meanwhile, they were totally lost and not getting much closer to Hawaii. Time for the old MAYDAY call on the HF radio. When that call came in, the Coast Guard in Hawaii was running a very interesting seminar on sea rescue in downtown Honolulu. I was attending which is how I found out that we had an O-2 problem. The Coast Guard shut down the seminar and launched their C-130 and a pair of cutters to find the O-2s; which they did. They herded them to the nearest runway which happened to be the Marine Corps Air Station at Kanehoe on the Northeast side of Oahu. I drove over the mountains to Kanehoe to find out what the hell this was all about. That's when I saw my first O-2; actually my first four O-2s. Aside from being ugly, they were all soaked with oil over flowing from both engines and they didn't have ten gallons of gas among them. One had flamed out taxiing in from landing. They had been airborne for 14 hours and 45 minutes. The Coast Guard was really pissed when they learned the full story and was making noises about sending someone a bill for the rescue effort. I must say, I agreed with them. That silliness continued for three or four weeks with every single flight of O-2s getting into some sort of trouble. At Hickam, the O-2 pilots were fairly easy to find. Most of the time they were draped over the bar at the O-Club; a situation which was attracting the attention of the Officers Wives Club; always a dangerous thing to do. I went to PACAF Headquarters and told them what was going on and they were absolutely appalled. Civilian misfits ferrying Air Force airplanes across the Pacific to a combat zone? No way! Between us, we began firing off messages to get this idiocy stopped. AFSC couldn't understand what the problem was and probably still doesn't. Hamilton AFB was taking a lot of heat for participating and allowing them to launch at all. I was agitating about the stupidity of this through all the safety channels. I think I may have mentioned that when the inevitable accident occurred, they better hope it was out of my area. If I had to investigate it, they were definitely not going to like the report. I was prepared to write most of the report right then before the accident even happened. AFSC backed down and agreed to let the 44th Aircraft Delivery Group run the operation. The 44th wasn't too happy about that because the civilian pilots didn't seem to take instructions very well. Nevertheless, that brought some organization to the festivities which included things like mission planning, briefings, weather analysis, flight following and escort. The O-2s weren't allowed to fly unless accompanied by a C-47 or C-7 Caribou who could fly at their speed and handle the navigation. That wasn't much of a problem as there were two or three of those planes being ferried each week to Vietnam. That procedure eliminated most of my problems and things settled down to a routine. The delivery rate to Vietnam was slowed somewhat, but I think more total planes actually got there because of it. During the entire process, only two planes were lost. One ditched due to engine failure on the Wake-Guam leg. The pilot managed to get out of the plane and bobbed around in his life jacket until picked up by a Japanese cargo ship. The other crashed in the Philippines killing the pilot. I never knew the circumstances. We had, of course, the occasional problem at Hickam. I remember one pilot who landed nose gear first and managed to snap the gear off completely and ding the front propeller. I went out to see what had happened and got a load of bullshit and a strong whiff of gin from the pilot. The plane (he claimed) was nose heavy on landing and the elevator trim was inoperative. He couldn't get the nose up. Furthermore, his transmitter was out and he couldn't tell anyone about his problems. I checked the plane and found the elevator trimmed full nose down, but the trim switch and trim tab worked just fine. Just to the left of the trim switch, I noticed that the micro phone toggle switch was actually bent backwards. After several hours of martinis, the pilot was trying to trim using the mic switch. He trimmed the plane full nose down while trying to talk to the control tower on the trim switch. Case closed. None of these accidents consumed any of my time. I had learned another quirk in the AFSC way of doing business. Appearances aside, the aircraft were not Air Force aircraft and wouldn't be until they arrived in Saigon and were formally delivered and accepted. Since they weren't, technically, Air Force air-craft; they couldn't have an Air Force accident. The planes weren't registered as civil aircraft, so they couldn't have a civil accident either. They were in regulatory limbo and any accidents were non-events. Nobody cared. That suited me just fine. I had other things to do and I couldn't see how an investigation of stupidity would contribute anything to the Air Force safety program. Incidentally, how do you suppose they got the O-2s out of Vietnam and back to the United States? They took the wings off, stuffed them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and flew them back. AFSC was not involved which, I later learned, tended to improve almost any operation.

There's oil in South Sudan and Uganda--perhaps enough for us to let go of the Saudi teat...which means....see you boyz there!

I disagree. Doesn't say I can't be IMC, only that I must see and avoid during VMC. I'm on an IFR flight plan on a special-use airspace delay. Unless the local rules or LOA prevent it, as a rated pilot, I'm perfectly legal to be IMC in a MOA.

No oil in the tropics--and, no, Hawaiian tropic doesn't count...

100LL: $5 per gallon Hangar: $150/mo Insurance: $100/mo. Liability/moving only Annual: $2000 + cost to fix anything wrong A&P reserve: $25/hr So a nice single-engine aircraft, like a cessna 172, would run you about $45K to buy. Payment: $750 Monthly cost, if you flew 10 hours a month: 750 payment 150 hangar 250 reserve 100 insurance 150 Mx reserve 500 fuel (10 gph x 10 hours x $5 per gallon) About $1900 per month for a nice little 172 to putt around in VFR. Oh, if anything breaks, expect to pay a ridiculous amount for it: engine mount bolts: $129 each. For bolts. True. YMMV.

What?!?!! No cable? That sucks!

Probably messing with his iPod and cool new headset cord he built.

Their jets, their rules. Our jets, our rules. Simple.