Bumpass Ball

Hardly, It's coming from the top.

Side note, is there any hard evidence out there at this point that the helo was off altitude? The impact looks to have been slightly more than a half mile final to 33 so 150'-200' A would be on glideslope for the RJ. I know the publicly available flight track shows PAT25 at 300 just before but given the granularity of that data I'm not convinced that can't be explained by rounding/altimiter/baro error. Normally not a fan of speculating before the data is out but given that POTUS and the SECDEF both decided to go out the next day and publicly blame an "elevation issue" I think it's worth asking. Edit: Answered as soon as I posted, based on the CRJ data impact was 325'. No data from the blackhawk yet.

Compass Call probably isn't in the cards for you. The -130 pipeline is closed and its highly unlikely that the -37 will be dropping by January, plus like Beaker said the A-10 is leaving DM so the 11F join spouse opportunity won't be here much longer. For anyone else reading this in the near future however, this will be a pretty good gig in a couple years once the last few herks get towed across the street to AMARG and the EA-37B is fully stood up. Tucson/DM is an awesome location, and since we are already a GSU tenant the AFSOC takeover hasn't really affected us. From the pilot perspective, the actual flying itself is pretty mundane. We don’t fly low level, form, or nvgs and the new plane isn’t AAR capable, so if you are looking for something that will challenge your stick and rudder skills you won’t find it here. However mission wise there are a lot of really cool things you can and will do with electronic attack that have an outsized impact on the big picture fight. I'm still a herk guy so I can't talk in depth to the EA-37B, but those who have made the swap all love flying the gulfstream. Timing & stability wise, right now is kind of a low point of the transition in terms of both tail availability for both types and manning. A lot of stuff is in flux so it is difficult to say how things like PCS/crossflow opportunities and deployments will be in the future. Personally, I have spent a significant amount more time at home station than my friends in other MDS's, but a lot of that can be attributed to the -130 divestment and variations in luck/timing.

No more init quals for the -130, only upgrades or returning prior Compass Call peeps. Init quals for the -37 "should" open up sometime next year, but I wouldn't bet anything on the timeline.