Pooter

Don’t be silly dude, this is baseops.. disrespecting the troops only matters when left wing presidents do it

@Lord Ratner You’re correct that the sky isn’t falling, but to me that’s kinda the most key insight. Unless we have another 9/11 god forbid, these boondoggles never feel like the sky is falling at the time. They’re an incremental forward march of tit for tat strikes, dick measuring, and reprisals that get us entangled in these things for the long run. It’s hard to sniff out as it’s happening because we can get easily distracted by our dope ass military fucking shit up (admittedly awesome.) It’s much easier with the clarity 20 years of hindsight provides to see that Iraq/afghanistan were an exercise in futility. I genuinely hope this is wrapped up quick and I’m eating crow with you guys telling me I told you so on here in a few days.

@FourFans disagree on all points. -the Iranian navy was not “much vaunted” to anyone except the Iranian regime. now that we’re in this stupid boondoggle I’m happy to see it decimated, but I’m not particularly impressed that we could do it. Like I said I never had any doubt in our abilities to wreck shit.. but what is the plan now? -a small dog cornered can still do a lot of damage especially in their own back yard. And they’ll be hell bent on rebuilding with the express purpose of getting revenge. Has Middle East insurgent math just flown right past all your heads all these years? When you whack the top guy in a government and bomb everything to shit, it doesn’t just stop being a problem. You create a power vacuum where often the most violent and radical people then take over. Hmmm wonder if we’ve ever seen this before 🤔 -trump isn’t holding his cards close to disguise some 4-d chess plan. There is no plan. We are making this shit up as we go. Rubio and Johnson already accidentally admitted we got pulled into this by Israel who was gonna go with or without us, and WH and mil staff are now leaking trump is getting frustrated that this thing hasn’t wrapped up already. He’s the one offering off ramps to Iran and they are choosing not to take them. -lastly I think it’s perfectly within bounds to criticize foreign policy as it’s happening. I’m far more “in the arena” than trump ever has been or ever will be, so I don’t accept your “let it play out” suggestion. It’s our asses on the line and time away from our families to go fight the war of choice that trump explicitly campaigned against. And as with the rest of our middle eastern boondoggles this one looks like it’s going to drag on far longer than we initially intended and result in tons of money spent for negligible gain

Dude you post this like we’re out of the woods already, except: -Iran is striking civilian oil tankers as we speak -regime is not changed, in fact we now have a more hardline ayatollah in charge with nothing to live for but revenge -if midnight hammer was such a glowing success why are we back here doing the same shit 6 months later -nuclear material is still not secured (and probably won’t ever be without a catastrophic boots on the ground op) -regime is now backed into a corner in survival mode where their only real move left is terrorism, attacking soft target civilian infrastructure, and even more severe internal repression -trump admin has signaled off ramps now multiple times and the Iranian regime isn’t backing down -no discernible plan on our end other than to just keep blowing stuff up And none of this is to say the boys aren’t doing amazing work over there right now. They are. But wrecking shit was never our weakness, it’s having any semblance of a plan for what comes next

@Clark Griswold I just say 50 by going off historical precedent. We were supposed to get 700+ raptors and 100 B-2s. There are already talks of cutting F-35 production in favor of NGAD paper promises. We’re dumping the wedge tail and can’t field a single engine jet trainer without a litany of issues. I’ve ranted about this in other threads before but I don’t think we have the attention span to stick with programs or build jets in numbers that are tactically relevant anymore. I would bet on getting 25% of the airframes we originally planned for. 50 would be 50% of the original B-21 order number which given how f-ed our acquisitions are right now would literally be a moonshot best case scenario. Would love to be proven wrong

Back on the B-21 topic I think we should all keep in mind that we’re probably only getting 50 of these things (if we’re lucky) so the question here is how comfortable are you trusting a very limited strategic asset to a single pilot? Bomber pilots will all tell you these long duration sorties really wear you down and little mistakes creep in as the fatigue gets worse. The airlines have figured this out too and they operate with a far higher degree of automation than most military jets. I know our fighter brethren are all high SA giga-chad superheroes who can do everything themselves but with all due respect if you haven’t flown a sortie over 24 hours un-augmented, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You need two pilots on this plane unless you’re comfortable putting them into the ground on a semi regular basis.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here but even for a decent pilot it takes numerous hacks at landings and A/R in a heavy aircraft before they’re even remotely close to safe. And this talking about a winged pilot who has flown UPT fingertip/CT/fluid maneuvering and then done all that stuff again in the FTU as well. The scope of the upgrade required here is to bring the WSOs up to speed is basically just.. pilot training. This is an idiotic and borderline suicidal idea enshrined by a 4-star who was on their way out the door and in search of a silver bullet to fix their self-inflicted manning problems. Probably the suckiest part is that when it’s inevitably walked back the WSO union is going to feel even more betrayed and sidelined than they already do now. And then we’ll be back to square one where there’s still no plan of what to do with them.

An interesting wrinkle here is that the B-21 is already flying.. with two pilots. So I don’t know at what point they’re planning to transition to single pilot ops or how global strike plans to train up some WSO monitors who could theoretically AR or land in a pinch. Just an all around wildly bad idea. Root cause here is they have no clue what to do with WSOs as airframes that have them gradually go away, while we simultaneously hemorrhage pilots. Get stoned, kill two birds I guess.

Picking countries and percentages for tariffs:

ooof that is a bad day. The canopy fracturing system in the T-6 is gnarly

I know incentive riders can do wacky things and I have no idea what happened in this case... but you're fucking up if you don't put the fear of god in them regarding the ejection handles and the seat in general. I don't care how much egress training they got, every incentive rider I ever flew with got another cockpit fam brief from me and I personally helped them strap in.

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that anyone in senior leadership is concerned with actual skillsets or experience. What is happening is very simple: We can't maintain the jets we have and we can't acquire new ones in a reasonable timeframe. At the same time we must keep the slides green at all costs. The only answer left (short of offloading the entire operation to the civilian world) is to retcon what a UPT grad is. It costs AETC nothing to churn out crap and dump it into b-courses across the other MAJCOMs. B-course instructors will still wash out the weak swimmers, but at that point finding them a new home is an ACC/AMC/AFSOC/AFGSC problem. AETC's hands are clean (on paper) and the brass at Randolph have figured this out. They can even pitch the UPT cuts as #innovation and cost saving to keep the (even more out of touch) GOs in the Pentagon happy.

AF AMN/NCO page must be tracking this thread revival because this is perfectly on cue

Why do that when you can just crucify the inexperienced crews when they inevitably put more jets in the ground

The fact that they're calling it "F"UPT without even a hint of irony tells you everything you need to know.

Yeah I think the word is out that these have durability/safety issues now. When I shot at small arms about a year ago people were stoked about the new equipment, and honestly I thought it was pretty smooth. But that could also be because my benchmark was the broke-dick M9's they've been abusing for decades. Shame that we can't even get new stuff that works, all the way down to a f-ing sidearm. The craziest part of this whole thing is the Air Force's insane "duty load" policy that they teach everyone - round in the chamber, safety on FIRE, and holstered. They even tell aircrew to do that which is borderline suicidal to do inside of a pressurized cabin. Sig mechanical issues notwithstanding, the other services think we are absolute clowns when it comes to gun safety and I have to say that I agree.

In other news, the saga of Sig P320 uncommanded discharges continues, this time tragically claiming the life of an F.E. Warren Airmen. I'm not super smart on the internal mechanisms that led to these problems, but I know it's been a controversy across the gun world for quite some time, with Sig even claiming they fixed the issue on newer models at one point. Sad it took an airmen dying to finally do something about it. In summary: classic air force waiting until it's too late to address a clear safety concern. Also Sig is absolutely cooked.

go easy on the guy he's having a hard day at work

RJ Capt doing a stream of consciousness debrief to the entire cabin 😬

I think the problem stems from how asinine and obvious your debrief of the whole situation is. “Just shut down the engine if you see a guy trying to dive into it.” yeah no shit sherlock, THEY DIDNT SEE HIM It’s like telling the person who just hit a deer on the highway in the middle of the night “hey man hit the brakes earlier next time and you won’t hit a deer” Sick thanks dude, I’ll be sure to see the thing I couldn’t have seen sooner next time

We need a full investigation Epstein may have been killed in federal custody We have the files and promise to release them The client list is literally on my desk We are reviewing the files for imminent release We need to comb the files to protect the victims The FBI actually just gave us even more files which we now need to review NVM we're not releasing the files There actually never was a client list The files are a democrat hoax Are you still asking about the files What even is a file

Didn't fly the AT-6B but I know any variant of the T-6 sustains energy better than a 38 which we got by with for well over half a century. And the cherry on top is your ASD can be longer than a 0.8 😆

I think you're the one fixated on being "technically right" brainstorming a perfect hypothetical pilot reaction in a scenario that lasted a grand total of 26 seconds. I don't know how you do ground ops but I don't spend the entire time craning my neck to check my 5 and 7 o'clock on the off chance a suicidal spanish drug addict decides today is the day he's going to swan dive into one of my engines. Yes, if you see a crazy spanish man running towards one of your engines, probably shut it down. Would it have made a difference in 26 seconds? Absolutely not. The main fan would have still been spinning plenty fast to kill him and the cowling only sits 22 inches off the ground - plenty low enough to jump into without aided engine suction.

Possible stupid question, but is he wearing anything company-specific in those videos? Looked to me just like a generic captain outfit with white shirt, epaulettes, tie, and a fly safe lanyard, but I'm not smart on the details. And I would think AA would come down pretty hard on anyone wearing company-specific stuff postulating about random incidents, no?

Not an AA guy but its interesting that his first flying-related video was only posted 9 months ago according to his youtube channel. Since then he's posted dozens and dozens of them and the India crash videos went particularly viral with views in the millions. Don't know his age but from the looks of it he is nearing mandatory retirement and is attempting a career pivot to old man internet aviation influencer/guru.