Hawg15

We actually do try, that’s why 3 fighter squadrons participated in mobility guardian. Our biggest limfac is we don’t have the range to fly to the airspace frequented by heavies, train, and rtb. We need AR support, a plan to justify a TDY, or you to fly to us. Mx makes out and backs very difficult because jet rescues aren’t easy for them. That’s why there’s still a diverted A-10 stranded in the middle of nowhere from the MG21 RTB.

I don’t deny the amount of work the majcoms and cocoms place on the MAF, my issue is with the mentality that apparently some tanker dudes have according to joes post below. It’s up to big blue and the bobs to fix their overuse shit show of CENTCOM and the poor scheduling of both MAF and CAF assets. It’s up to the aircrew to stay in the proper mindset of being the best pilots possible and not getting killed in war, even though what we do in CENTCOM isn’t very tactically challenging 95% of the time. The post above makes it seem like they can’t even manage that. COIN deployments aren’t very demanding from a flying standpoint outside of a few TICs every now and then. I can’t imagine what someone is worried about, outside of personal life matters, when meeting receivers in a totally permissive environment. I can probably count on one hand how many TDYs I wanted to be on, however I didn’t half ass my training/participation in it because I was going to the desert, rather than Russia or China, in a few months.

The lack of care in regards to getting good major combat operations training versus going to the Deid for 3 months to do vanilla ARing with less threat than driving to work in the US is why crews with mentalities like that will be a smoking hole in the ground when the real war comes around. You and the AWACS are what everyone wants to kill.

Requiring a 2 page checklist for basic pilot admin that a 50 hour GA pilot can do is more of a problem than anything else I’ve read in this thread. I can legally kill someone without running a 2 page checklist. Then again, I suppose when you’re in a blue falcon Q3 community it’s needed.

“Unable STAR request vectors” -every fighter pilot in the history of flying objects with or without TACANs, VORs, or GPS.

In the end it all boils down to flight hours. The traditional Air Force pilot training experience is already significantly condensed for what they want out of the end product. If hours didn’t matter the airlines would accept every douche with a commercial and 60 hours in a Cessna. You can sit on the ground all day long and tell someone xyz, that wont be enough to develop good habit patterns in the jet. Upper echelons of leadership need to realize what we expect out of modern single seat pilots is extremely demanding and corners cannot be cut in developing it.

It’s a better angle for taking tiktoks with the other bombers in the background.

In the AF there is a culture of pretending a SGT of any sorts is superior to an officer under the rank of O-6, and if they are an E-8/9 then maybe even more authority than an O-6. It’s perpetuated across career fields and weak officers let it happen. They even support it by telling young officers they need to shut up and listen to the Sgts. I’m sure you have already noticed, that compared to the Navy and USMC, authority is non existent in the Air Force below the wing commander level. A piece of paper stamped by an A1C holds more merit than the command authority granted to most “commanders.” The need for a squadron commander to ask “mother may I” through the group and wing CC, and in some cases to a star (like covid ETPs), is absurd.

I think there are plenty of healthy people who lose points on the waist measurement with how different the body can be due to genetics, especially when you start looking at women and how the Air Force thinks they are all tiny twigs. It doesn’t help that everyone also has a different interpretation of how to take the measurement either. I’ve never thought it was value added to the Force.

I think hybrid flying is great once you have the foundation. As an example, we have a detailed moving map in the jet that students aren’t allowed to use during low altitude navigation until they demonstrate proficiency using paper maps to navigate by terrain features. You definitely end up using hybrid flying for point to point navigation, but they way we do it in the hawg is really just homing on a steer point. My second statement contradicts the first, but that is the difference between a single seat and a crewed aircraft. I’m not going to tell you what to do in your cockpit outside of basic instructor recommendations for new/struggling guys. Be a good, tactically proficient pilot flying the jet per the T.O. and I don’t care what you’re doing in there.

As buddy spike said, I don’t view it as providing me any valuable data. If I’m flying visually in the pattern, the only time I look inside is to lower the gear and confirm 3 green. I have a HUD and helmet display to provide airspeed, altitude, and navigation information. Our aux field on the range doesn’t have any sort of approach. The Air Force and all their IFR to the max extent crutches create absolutely awful VFR pilots. If someone wants to pull up the ILS to back themselves up then go for it, I’m not going to stop them. I personally feel it’s useless to me, like using a GPS on my drive to work.

I’d say the takeaway is that most platforms in the AF treat the pilots like children and this is a perfect example. You decrease their proficiency by telling them all they should do is unnecessary IFR and to follow the thingy on the MFD instead of look outside the aircraft. If it’s not night or IMC I never have an ILS pulled up, I look outside. I’ve flown significantly more visual approaches than instrument approaches. This is something the general aviation world does that I like. Then again, we can’t even fly the magenta line and also spend most of our time VFR. I do have an issue with the fighter mentality of land on brick one, and have always taught the captains bars. I won’t go into the plethora of major factors that went into those incidents, or the total organizational shit show that was the Shaw mishap.

I think anybody who lost a son, daughter, father, mother, brother, or sister for no purpose or benefit to national security would disagree. An Afghanistan presence isn’t even close to a deterrence for major powers in that part of the world, and certainly has no real quantifiable objective or reasoning behind it. People’s children who weren’t even born when this shit started are going off to get killed and kill people in Afghanistan who weren’t alive when it started either. We shouldn’t have a single American in that place.

I’ve talked to a guy who ejected out of the T-6 a few years ago who also had the det cord explosives in the canopy basically turn it into a grenade going off right next to his body. Said he was filled will glass that he could feel underneath his skin for months. I don’t understand why it’s the new hotness in ejection seat design. Even if you actually fly with all your shit rolled down (which almost no one does) it still messes up the pilot when they have an explosive embedded in glass go off a foot away from them.

If he’s already highly experienced in another fighter airframe he will get pushed through upgrades quickly, and if you have close to 1500 hours you are definitely very experienced. I’m guessing he was transitioned to help bring the older experienced type into the community. 1500 hours in a fighter isn’t a small amount. We don’t fly 50 hours in 5 days twice a month like those heavy pilots do on their missions.