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.

They are removing ~44 aircraft from service. The rest have/are receiving a rewing to extend their lifespan. The aircraft removed are mostly AD because the guard has mostly lower hour jets. Some of the guard units are receiving F-35s/other aircraft and their A-10s are going to AD. If you get in the A-10 you will likely do a few ops assignments if you don’t try to transition, and then eventually transition to the F-35. If you desire to play the role of CAS/CSAR/FAC(A) then it is, by far, the best aircraft to go with. Things are currently winding down in COIN, but the A-10 has been the most kinetic jet in the COIN fight, with the 354FS recently returning the most kinetic deployment (OFS 2019) since the early days of the Afghan conflict. The first time you are at a TIC, employing the gun within 20-50m of friendlies is a pretty rewarding experience. We were regularly winchestering the jet during Syria (a jet that has 11 hard points and carries more weapons than the whole formation of vipers).

It will be a fighter. You’re in ACC at that point. They aren’t going to release you to hop around majcoms without a legitimate reason, usually medical/ejection seat DQ. If you don’t want to fly fighters then I can promise you that you don’t want anything in AFSOC. They have the same mentality/culture setup, but are extremely overworked and always gone, unlike fighters. Also, if you’re in T-38s then you are 99.69% likely not going to receive anything AMC besides the herc.

If you don’t want to spend time in a vault then FAIP. KCs, C-17(if you don’t airdrop/SOL)/21/5s are about the only ops aircraft that wont require much vault time, or really even much mission planning and debriefing. Anything kinetic, ISR, or the what support kinetic assets (airdrop, FARP, etc) will be spending time in a vault.

They did okay, but IFF isn’t the filter that it was back in the day, which is good and bad. It’s not just a pointless haze, and it’s also not easy to remove students from training in general. I’ve heard from some guys who instructed there that they are already spending extra time working on tac form for many of the students. The problem with many of these students is they don’t have the repetitions of flights that hammer home and make purely flying second nature, which is what ultimately drives many of the problems on follow on trainings. We have students that can’t fly straight and level without it taking all their SA, releasing without clearance, not fencing out when directed, not maintaining SA on friendlies and flight members, almost overrunning a 13,500ft runway and taking out another jet because for some reason they are 90kts at the 1 board, unable to safely hold while correlating a target, flying off the HUD in safe escapes at night and ending up inverted almost into the ground, among many other issues. There has been some extremely close calls to losing jets and lives. We can’t have pilots that are constantly fighting the jet in a B-course level training, which as far as the hawg is concerned teaches the most basic form of employing the jet with mostly link assisted digital-defensive data flow (aka the students are only expected to provide vis lookout while updating their targets off my SPI, they are not allowed to be copying info most of the time while in B-course). Pilots definitely can’t be struggling to fly straight and level while writing 9-lines, plotting in the system, correlating targets, monitoring 4 freqs, maintaining friendly SA in relation to weapons effects, getting to weapons release parameters, and not hitting me, etc... Then add the low altitude environment where we are doing that at 100-300 agl. The AF is somewhat neglecting that fundamentals matter before adding on more advanced, SA draining tasks.

The problem with those studs is they were hand picked to go there because they were already a level above their peers, and this program wouldn’t fail even if they were trash. The washout rate in our B course classes has been rising over the last couple years from the general population of all this change and reduced experience. They won’t all be fine, the number of students who can’t make it through PIQ is on the rise. We’ve had multiple cycles with washouts this year, which is not standard. Basic fighter admin is what drove most of it.

So what you’re saying is the Navy realizes VR isn’t a replacement for stick time in a jet, especially when you’re going to jets that have no family models.

He’s got a good point OP. Your SA is about as high as the vipers blowing through the entire stack claiming they have radar SA, even though they almost hit everyone, including their own wingman and still don’t see the guy in front of them. You just don’t have the experience yet with that sort of flying. Most people start UPT wanting to be fighter pilots, many finish with no desire to ever go over 60 degrees of back again. The guard is still the way to go in my opinion. Once you’re in your in. If fighters don’t end up working out a heavy unit will almost definitely take you if you’re not just a total hazard, and even then I’ve seen some scary 135 guard.

Are you trying to say 6-9 jack and cokes affect my geography skills? Well I guess South East Asia is where the war will be. After everyone on the peninsula is dead.

Well for one, I didn’t join the South East Asia Military. The flying sucks. It isolates people from their families, it’s an ordeal to move there, especially with pets, and isn’t like American culture. Germany was an awesome assignment, but much more American. I feel bad for the dudes on AD if/when they can DM and trap you between moody and Korea. The AF needs to clue into the fact people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere/10,000 miles away from their family members. If we can put fighters in one of the largest cities in America (Phoenix), then clearly they don’t need to be in tons of shit holes like Moody, Shaw, cannon, etc.

Or the pacific theatre.