zachbar

You’d be surprised at how many T-6 students hook their Nav checks for GPS approaches, generally things like letting the GPS take them somewhere they didn’t mean to go, not configuring it properly, not reacting to a loss of RAIM correctly, etc etc. The FAA and the rest of the world is actively replacing traditional navaids with PBN. It’s not cosmic like you have all correctly noted, but it’s different enough that it’s worth teaching so the Air Force doesn’t look like a bunch of ass clowns trying to get from point A to B.

I’ll throw my opinions into the mix. Some might be popular, some not. I respectfully disagree with Danger41 that you can teach CRM in a week but agree that we don’t need a T-1 to do it. CRM is more than just asking the other guy to put your gear down, and the soft “people” skills that come with managing a crew well take a span of months or even a year to learn as a copilot in my opinion, but a lot of that is community specific with how they want their missions and crews to run. I think close formation is overrated but not useless. It has value in teaching aggressiveness, smooth control inputs, and that less is more when you’re on the wing, but being good at fingertip has no bearing on a student’s overall airmanship in my opinion. I’ve had lots of students fly great fingertip and then go on to hook the shit out of their sorties for being dumbasses. On the flip side, the students who are smart but have bricks for hands usually suck at everything else too. Regarding syllabus 2.5, to be honest I don’t know enough about it to like or hate it, but I do know I’m against the single path to wings as it stands now. There isn’t enough training. Other countries use a single trainer to wings, like the RAAF and their PC-21s, but they still fly it for 54 months, and the PC-21 is a hell of a lot more advanced than the T-6 is. And most of all, why did the Air Force reinvent the wheel with the current UPT syllabus??? Is it actually producing more pilots? What do the numbers look like compared to previous, the end of year ones that account for the washbacks? I’m genuinely curious to know.

God damn, there’s a lot of butt hurt in a topic making fun of people for getting butt hurt. Let them have their reading room. You all have more important things to worry about. Now let me get back to editing this PowerPoint presentation.

As a lieutenant, I spent a month shuttling cargo out of an airfield somewhere hot and desert-like to shut a base down during a “drawdown,” only to fly to the same ICAO as an AC to deliver infrastructure to support a less politically visible mission. I’d say that about sums up what’s wrong with the military as a whole. Policy has to change above the DOD level before it starts to feel better, in my opinion. Shutting down qweep deployments will help, but it won’t solve anything long term. I honestly thought my non-flying deployment to Incirlik was a nice break from the grind. It was 4 months of my commander telling me to do my job and don’t ing bother him if things were going well. Got more drinking and reading done than I ever have in my life!

Fatty driver here, so no opinion on the utility of form landings or fingertip or BFM, but the impression I got was that form landings were quietly taken away due to political pressure as much as a safety review. Anyone else hear the same rumors? Also formation landings made me feel like I was really improving my stick and rudder skills as a T-6 IP, more than anything else I fly. I miss them!

I think this is comparable to the old initial solo, but keep in mind the legacy initial solo was a 0.3 sortie of 2, maybe 3 normal landings. And you were only cleared for that after you demonstrated the fact that you wouldn’t kill yourself to an IP in the same aircraft in the same exact conditions. You wouldn’t even get out of the plane. The IP would hop out, shake your hand, and watch you taxi back out. Now the initial solo is closer to the area solo of yesteryear.

It’s still less sorties overall, and far less hours overall as well. I’ll check tomorrow to get a more exact number on hours. I was in UPT at the base I’m at now, so tomorrow I’ll run the numbers and compare my class’ with the current students‘. The increase to ASD by 18 minutes doesn’t do much to expose Stan to new environments, weather, circumstances, etc. It just lets them get one more approach or do one more set of TP and power on stalls. I fully agree UPT should change with the times, but I don’t think making the training more relevant or efficient means we can reduce how much of it we give.

I’ll somewhat reverse what I said earlier based off an experience I had today. Student cross-country. He shows up with a beautiful VFR plan. Amazingly marked VFR chart. Even wants to pick up an IFR for some instrument approaches after. He briefs me that at 1100L the weather will be SKC, 9999 RVR. The problem is it was 1050L and it was still misty and overcast less than a thousand. The epiphany I had is that if we teach the students based off 1s and 0s in a sim and cut out too much flying, all we’re going to get is really good canned environment pilots. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I have started to notice a severe lack of common sense amongst my T-6 students, and part of that is probably because we are taking away their opportunities to see real world flying.

The T-6 can only do VOR/LOC and LNAV approaches. If you’re feeling saucy I guess you could spin the CDI to something useless and do an RMI only approach. The dirty rumor I heard was about getting newer T-6s like the ones being used at PTN with a more complete suite of avionics as a sort of MAF top off before going to PIQ. Students would fly Phase II in the T-6A and then polish their nav skills in a T-6B, but that sounds like it may be sometime after the T-7 is flying. What’s the T-1 getting upgraded with?

No I think that’s fair. Instruments is straight forward, and the EPs I got in the sim were far more complex than any I have had in the airplane (knock on wood sts). The benefit of real world flying is getting put in weird circumstances and thinking your way out of new problems. There is some benefit to flying different approaches under real world conditions, but I definitely think the mobility tracked Phase 3 can be reworked. But isn’t the rumor that T-1s are disappearing?

I’ve been reading through a draft in order to provide comments to be sent up the chain, and I find myself scratching my head a lot. I don’t want to disparage the people who worked very hard on it, because I have good friends at the other bases. The effort was well intentioned, but syllabus 2.5 seems overly optimistic and grasping for anything and everything “innovative.” The new syllabus concepts also seems to have been tested in a vacuum, primarily because the class that provided the lessons learned for it was part of a separate innovation flight apart from the rest of the flying squadrons. No washbacks or forwards, no inbound baby class pressuring the timeline, no brand new FAIP development to worry about, etc. I question it’s ability to succeed in the real world. My big problem with what we have been doing in UPT isn’t that 19AF wants to innovate, it’s how we do it. We changed every variable a year ago with the new syllabus starting with 19-20, and we changed the way we rate what is successful and what is not. That’s not an experiment. That’s desperate thrashing. How do I know what new concept works and what doesn’t if everything changed at the same time and if I don’t have a control to compare it against? We’re also doing the equivalent of jerking ourselves off here in 19AF because we define our own success. As far as I know there isn’t an official channel to interface with follow on training, and there isn’t an official forum for them to define what they want from a UPT graduate. What stood out to me is that syllabus 2.5 increases the flying time slightly over the current “new” syllabus. That’s awesome! But...if we are nearing the same amount of hours as the proven legacy syllabus, this entire last year and a half was a waste. We should have used something like PTN to vette isolated, innovative ideas to be rolled into the syllabus in an incremental and controlled manner. Instead we have an entire generation of pilots who were screwed by AETC, received worse training, and are less qualified graduates. I’ll look every one of them in the eye and tell that to their faces when I go back to my MWS because they deserve to know it and also because I’ll be stuck with the results when I’m on a crew with them. *rant over*

I’m not at CBM, but triple turning isn’t a regular thing at DLF. Still, I’m surprised at how tired I am at this assignment. Coming from AMC I thought it would be a chance to take a breather and have a regular schedule, maybe actually get a decent amount of sleep. When I was just a line flyer gaining experience my first year, it was crushing. Show at 7 o’clock, brief, fly, land and debrief by 11:40. Phone a food order in somewhere on base so I can eat during my next briefing. Brief, fly, land and debrief by 1600. GK the studs, do the two gradesheets from earlier, and then finally have an hour to take care of real world problems before I have to go home so I have crew rest for the next day. Now as a flight commander it’s busier. I get excited when the next day’s show is more than 12 hours after the current day’s show, because it means I can have some peace and quiet during the 13th hour of the day to get my office work done and still be legal to fly the following morning. Now multiply that by 5 days a week, all month, all year, with the occasional 12 day work week because you took your students cross country.

Interesting. I feel bad for the people who will have their slots taken away. Something had to happen. It seems like the reckoning happened when the snowball of washbacks from classes 20-XX threatened to crash into class 21-01 like the KoolAid man.

I have zero idea about whether slots are being taken away or not, but if that’s true another reason MIGHT be because 19AF figured out in the last year that their initial estimate of how many students it can produce was too high. The rumblings down here at the “why-the-🤬-did-you-fly-CT-instead-of-a-student-sortie” level are that those numbers are being adjusted for the next year.

Too expensive. Free AAFES pogs might work better with the MWR budget.

I’ve always thought of ORM as protection against leadership, not against myself. It’s a tool to signal to them that they’re putting me in a garbage situation, and even if they wanted me to I’m not going to ask for their signature. It is also useful for young pilots. Sometimes I see them lean farther forward than they should, and the thought of having to explain their plan to the squadron commander makes them second guess the necessity of flying towards thunder storms on their third sortie of the day after flying 20 days straight when it’s 106 degrees outside. Back on topic, the ops group at Dover AFB had an e-ORM on sharepoint for locals. I don’t know anyone there anymore, but it’s a lead!

Has someone brought up awards in the last 210 pages? I was sitting through another murderboard today and was reminded of how much I hate our awards system. Hearing things like, “He’s the one with the most potential in my flight, so I make sure to set him up for an award early in the year by giving him projects,” drives me up a wall. If I were king for a day, awards would not be permitted on performance reports. Let the commander continue to recognize stellar performance from stellar Airmen, but if someone truly is outstanding they should have outstanding bullets and outstanding strats on their push line. Being able to put a soft “CGO of the quarter” strat on a performance report creates an environment where supervisors put the cart before the horse, i.e. “I want him to have a good career, so I better get him NCO of the year.” Let people do their jobs. If they’re awesome, give them an award in front of their peers but keep that off the OPR/EPR. Just put the 1206 bullets in the performance report. And don’t get me started on qweep awards. Eff you Bob Hope and your 30 line 1206. Being an exec sucked enough without seeing TMT blow up with things like the “Ron Jeremy Hard Worker” award or whatever other garbage keeps getting added to the list every year.

Definitely was an overly simplified argument. I guess what I’m getting at is RSU pattern or not, both options have pros and cons, but I don’t think getting rid of the RSU pattern is necessarily priority one. But I do still feel that from the 88s I’ve seen and 89s I’ve generated, the IP force is for the most part still keeping the big picture in mind. I am a sample size of one though. And yes that was a fiasco 😬 We’re all hurting for more CT here. New guys, mid-time like myself, and even the older guys. THAT is the biggest issue I think. Most of Laughlin’s convoluted procedures exist so a T-38 can pull closed on the outside runway while a T-1 departs the center runway as a T-6 heads to the MOA on the inside runway with another T-6 500’ above it in the break turn. And the weather requirements exist so all local aircraft in the airspace close to Laughlin can be considered MARSA. It’s a necessary evil, and I’d agree that if there is a problem, it’s with IPs not separating wheat from chaff, not the procedures themselves. Like I said earlier, better is the enemy of good. UPT as it was seems have served the Air Force pretty well throughout history, convoluted airspace and all. Maybe “big Air Force” knew all along they were sacrificing quality for quantity and just never told us.

It can go both ways. Sometimes they have bad habits or are so ingrained in their ways that it’s a detriment. Other times it manifests as above average air sense, better patterns, better comms, etc. I think part of it is attitude and an individual’s ability to start from square one and accept that the Air Force is very particular about how it wants its pilots to fly.

We’d have to revamp the way we fly formation before that would happen. Either add more rides so they can go solo more than once or severely neuter the T-6 formation profile so they can solo earlier. Off the top of my head I’ve taken the aircraft from students who otherwise met MIF on all other maneuvers (they could have soloed otherwise) for rolling TOWARDS their wingman instead of away to initiate extended trail (from close formation), one for attempting an “overshoot” during wing-work (again...banking towards lead and trying to pull), and twice during extended trail for not recognizing excessive closure. Three of these were with “above average” students. Two went T-38s and one went T-1s by choice. My understanding is they get more formation solo in the T-38. Anyone in -38s wanna chime in? More solo is good, I agree, but at 10 hours of formation, a student is just beginning to develop the ability to think in three dimensions in relation to another aircraft. I’d rather see them get more experience before they regularly go solo. Also in regards to all the RSU pattern talk, I don’t get the impression from the gradebooks I’ve scrubbed that students are hooking for “localisms.” Most of the pattern unsats are for good reasons. Is having to stay below 1,600’ MSL until DER a Laughlinism? Yes. But when a student busts that altitude, they’re not just breaking a Laughlinism. They are failing to realize that they operate their aircraft in an environment full of hazards and that they need to have at least one iota of life preservation instinct, think about where the conflicts are, bring the radios into their SA bubble, and for one effing time in their life clear before they maneuver somewhere. Actually nevermind. They’re just going to fly in the NAS and only monitor one radio for the rest of their careers, right? I don’t mean to come off as hating on people who want to abolish the RSU pattern. Any pattern is going to break down when you try to cram as many students into it as big AF wants us to. If I could sum up the current state of pilot training in one phrase, it’s this: Better is the enemy of good.

It’s mostly in the hands of flight commanders, but PAing is not frowned upon. I personally avoid it since the syllabus is shortened enough, and I might have to fly with these yahoos in the right seat when I make it out of AETC. The one student I PA’d was through his last two rides of Advanced Nav. He was an airline guy and asked to fly an RMI only on one nav ride to “challenge himself more.”

I had a 3.8 GPA at the “home of the world’s finest leaders” according to the football stadium ramp (welcome to thin air!), and here I am slinging UNSATS at T-6 students 😞 It was a 3.8 in English though, so adjusting for reality it would be a 0.69 in a real major.

Laughlin, but from talking to PIT buddies at Vance we’re in similar situations.

I can’t remember the class number off the top of my head, but before they finally tracked, the innovation sister flight had over 20 students as a result. They were supposed to get a class off to fly with the innovation students, but they just received a new class again for some reason. Still trying to figure out why... Are you at DLF? We may just see things differently if you are, or if we are separate bases our ops groups might be doing things differently. Bottom line in my mind is that anything that splits the squadron’s attention into two mindsets with different ways of thinking is going to create inefficiencies. It breaks up the unity of effort. I realize we’re in a garbage situation, but I wish PTN could create whole and established concepts to give to the UPT squadrons instead of throwing out the syllabus and just telling us to innovate.

But PTN does have a daily effect on us daily line IPs. You said it yourself: innovation flight. Even those of us not in innovation flight are picking up the students that would otherwise be flying with the “innovation IPs.” Off the topic of PTN, Merle already hit on I think the biggest problem, the IP to student ratio. It’s taking away from IP proficiency, ruining the flight dynamic because the flying day was stretched beyond 12 hours, causing split shows. No more USEM events as a flight, only one or two IPs at formal brief in the mornings. The biggest thing though is most IPs don’t have time anymore to sit and hangar fly with the students. They fly, fly again, then go do their desk work before they have to leave 12 hours prior to the next day’s show. Fortunately a a lot of this has been noticed by 19AF, and if they put their money where their mouth is the student load will hopefully get cut.