Pooter

Pretty much nothing will change for my day to day life under Biden. I don't believe that any president has much of an impact on anyone's daily life at a policy level. But I won't have to do daily mental gymnastics to justify the stream of consciousness Twitter rantings of an egotistical asshat so there's that.

I think trumps tantrums grow more severe and indefensible by the minute. The man has never lost at anything, never been told "no," and as a result he will continue this classless flailing for as long as he can. It will accomplish nothing except turn off more moderate voters from republicans and delay conservatives from being able to take control of their party back.

Flyovers are excellent training and I don't care who you are or what you fly. Simply being able to be at a specific place at a specific time has more real world combat implications than any BFM larping you'd rather be doing.

This has been one of the only fun parts of the last few months of pandemic/civil unrest: watching something we already knew gradually dawn on the rest of the population. I almost want Biden to win, if only so that it takes away the trump scapegoat and forces the left to take a look in the mirror and figure out why the parts of the country they run are invariably dumpster fires.

I kindof hope climate change wipes us all out a-la speed of heat's ramblings so we don't have to suffer through whichever dysfunctional administration wins next month

I don't think there's anything a rational person can take away from this debate other than trump being completely unhinged. His interruptions and constant riffing overshadowed any possible Biden missteps and was the absolute driver of chaos throughout the debate. No one is talking about joes policy stances, or his mental slips, or his refusal to denounce antifa because trump simply would not shut up. You know it's bad when you're the republican and the Fox News moderator is fed up with your antics. On top of that, Trump had a few good lines here and there and joe definitely tripped up a few times but it was all lost in the ever-present cacophony of his stream of consciousness jabs. Maybe this style would have worked to dominate a stage of 10 candidates early in a primary. Maybe it would have worked with a large audience with applause breaks. But this was not that. It was a one on one debate with clearly defined rules and no active audience to pander to. He ended up looking like an unruly toddler and that is THE story of the debate. You can say that this is just trumps schtick, and you'd be half right. But this was a uniquely bad showing and perhaps the schtick is getting old.

I knew it would happen eventually but I didn't think it would be this soon. And I hoped it would be at least a little more subtle.

You're right. This is absolutely a solution in search of a problem. I don't think there is any long term race or gender based washout data that exists, let alone any that supports this idiotic COA. But what's worse is that the people who this is geared toward are actively recoiling against it. The person who brought this dumpster fire to my attention is a female pilot. When I asked her if this initiative would help female student pilots feel more included and improve their performance, she said not only no, but f*** no. Turns out a good way of making people feel like they're part of the team is to not sequester them over on the side doing their own special thing. Women and minorities can do anything in the Air Force.. except avoid being pandered to by generals.

I don't envy the position those instructors will be put in. Washing someone out of that class for performance will be next to impossible, but don't worry, leadership will still insist they aren't changing the standard. And god forbid a student in that class develops an attitude problem. You might have to use your white male privilege to mansplain to them why they're on Mil Cap. But I think the real travesty here is what this is going to do to the students who did not ask to be in this class. UPT is hard enough without being forced into a contrived social justice experiment. And like it or not, the stink of being in the woke test case class will stick with these students long after their time in UPT.. much like the VR babies our wonderful banzai flights are churning out. I really resent that leadership is foisting their political insecurities on these young officers right as they start their careers. To the students: good luck, study hard, and fly safe. Try not to let this political nonsense distract you. To leadership: I cannot wait to watch this inevitable PR sh*tstorm blow up in your face.

So it's not full segregation, they're just robbing the diversity from the surrounding classes to make one super diverse class.. Sounds like this is going to accomplish a lot

In tonight's installment of "Ideas that sounded good but JQP will have an absolute field day with".. Has anyone heard about this new "America class" initiative at UPT bases? Apparently AETC leadership has decided to create entire UPT classes of only women and minorities.

I hear you and I think that would make a great top off for a t-1 complete student. The problem with that airline style of training for direct from T-6 studs is that they realistically have left the UPT nest to fly off-station twice. Even with great sim fidelity you can't replicate the complexity and randomness of flying in the real world. And that is exactly what the out and snack portion of t-1s accomplishes. High fidelity airline sims are for teaching already experienced aviators type-specific tasks. They are not for teaching Stanley how not to be an asshat in class bravo airspace. Also high fidelity airline full motion sims are probably as or more expensive per hour than a t-1

Former next instructor here. Genuinely saddened and ashamed that big blue took something with a lot of promise and decided to use it to increase quantity rather than quality. Can't say I'm even a little bit surprised though.

Trump is a dumpster fire. The democrat platform is a dumpster fire. I will vote for whoever can be proven to be slightly less of a dumpster fire. Go

For what it's worth, here's my advice on pilot training. Don't worry about getting non-vol'd to helos, they only really give those slots to people who make it known that's what they want. But like others have said, just keep an open mind. I'm going to let you know right now that your class is going to have a bunch of dudes just like you who think they are drawn to fighters, or CAS or whatever. A lot of them are going to struggle with airsickness, basic aero, pulling g's, and basic formation. There is a moment in UPT, usually early in T-6 formation, where students realize what they thought was a graceful, fun roller coaster in the sky is actually a hot, sweaty, stressful, painful, violent, very difficult mess. The T-6 formation phase creates a lot of T-1 converts.. and that's not a bad thing. People just don't know what they don't know.

Except it isn't that simple. At all. Most people already believe exactly what you just said. But that's clearly not good enough, which is why we're forced to have this endless creep towards full wokeness. If it was as simple as treating everyone with respect and basic dignity we wouldn't have people suggesting slavery reparations, or that we should suspend due process to #believeallwomen, or that we abolish the police.

This concept of "the patriarchy" is nowhere close to mainstream progressive thought on the subject and you know it.

The difference of course being that kaepernick signed a contract with his employer thereby agreeing to follow rules listed in things like the game operations manual and the players handbook. Then he violated those rules, went on a self-aggrandizing campaign against his employer, and drove a wedge into his team's cohesiveness.. all while his performance tanked and he blamed it on everyone except himself. It's just such a mystery why current teams won't touch him with a 10 foot pole. So yeah.. almost the same thing

The other reason that intelligent people will go along with the woke narrative is out of fear of retribution. Look at what just happened to Drew Brees for simply saying that he doesn't agree with disrespecting the flag. If you don't parrot the orthodox line 100%, you risk being cast out, and unless you have future hall of fame franchise QB level job security, you might lose your livelihood too. This risk aversion governs a lot of people's actions, especially those who don't follow politics that closely. They see other people getting in trouble and think to themselves "oh I'd better not do that." This is how you get businesses issuing non-committal pandering woke statements and senators kneeling in kente cloth.

I'm just tired of people insisting that every statistical difference between races/genders is automatically linked to structural injustice. As an example: orders of magnitude more men are incarcerated than women. Does this mean courts are violently skewed against men? Does an oppressive matriarchy dominate the justice system?! Or is this indicative of broad behavioral differences between men and women resulting from everything from biology, to evolution, to social norms etc... The problem is that no one wants to talk about behavior.. or the factors that influence people's behavior. It's much easier to blame statistical differences on a nebulous boogeyman like "the patriarchy" or "structural racism."

I think a viable third party candidate would go a long way toward fixing our broken political discourse. The idiotic binary we have going on right now does nothing but entrench people to the point that they can't even talk about ideas they don't like. Maybe a third party could pull us out of this good vs evil dynamic. It's gotten so bad that I feel like the parties have abandoned ideas entirely are just nominating more and more absurd people to spite the opposition.

Valid.

I'd be in support of "changes" if that's what was actually going on. But we are seeing predominantly cuts, not changes. If the priority was to update the training to improve quality, we wouldn't see this sudden decrease in overall events and flight hours. We would see that time put towards teaching other, newer skills. Big blue's priority is to make more pilots.. faster.

Well I'm glad they at least added the nav check back in for 38 bound students.

I agree with you in general terms. Older generations tend to think they had it harder, uphill both ways, new kids just don't get it etc... But many of us have personally observed UPT get watered down in very measurable ways in the last 3-4 years. We're not talking long-term generational bias here. I saw the syllabi get noticeably shorter and less rigorous over the duration of one assignment. Just some T-6 examples since that's what I know: No more ELPs No more formation landings No more advanced aero for T-1 bound students Lower check ride MIF on a multitude of maneuvers 30% fewer sorties overall 50% fewer checkrides 50% fewer solos Now we can debate the pros and cons of each, but I think it's undeniable we are plainly doing less total training time and events. I've always said that if you get enough ADOs in a room who are worried about timeline, they could come up with a reason to waive any sortie in the syllabus. "What's one sortie after all?!" "Is the pattern-only solo really that important?" "Does this T-1 bound kid really need to form solo? Lets just waive it." This thought process is insidious and has resulted in a gradual whittling down of our core training. And it happens in all of the perfectly well-intentioned syllabus rewrite conferences too. Everyone is looking to "improve efficiency" because there isn't an OPR bullet for holding the line and keeping quality training the same. VR training was never intended (by the people developing it) to replace regular UPT events. Or speed up the pipeline. Or fix the pilot shortage. It was intended to improve training by providing an additional resource that was more accessible than standard sims. Having been involved with it from the very beginning, it's incredibly frustrating to watch the air force twist a good thing and pitch it as their silver bullet solution for problems they created.. But I suspect I am very much preaching to the choir. \endrant