DirkDiggler

I briefly spoke to this in my reply to Viper. There is concern amongst AETC leadership about whether students will be able to handle the transition from a light twin straight to the T-7 (should the program ever get going) given the big disparities in performance between the two. There's no mass historical data that exists for that. Expect in the next few years the AF will send a couple of SGTOs from IPT to Italy to fly the M346, which supposedly has similar performance to the T-7 IOT get data on how students perform. Now if the bulk of students can't handle the transition, I don't know what the AF is going to do; I doubt they have a plan for it yet.

Current plan for IPT is Private, Instrument, and Multi ratings. I doubt this will change. Flight schools involved in the program must provide the same instrumentation across all the platforms students will be training on.

This is the Bobs' long term vision, at least for now. There's some concern about students being able to handle going from a Diamond or Piper twin straight to a much higher performance jet. Expect in the next few years for a couple UPT SGTOs to go to Italy and fly the M346 to see whether students can handle the transition.

Interesting article. The Russia-Ukraine War: It Takes a Land Force to Defeat a Land Force

You're thinking of a different Liquid. He doesn't come onto the BO forums anymore.

Glad to see that most, if not all survived.

Glad they got out, that thing came down fast.

Little long but hilarious for anyone that's had to do Cyber or Security training.

The SMPs are worthless pieces of shit. It's actually kinda shocking how badly that program has come along/matured but we're still stuck with it. About ~6 months before I retired the company that builds them sent a roadshow to all the MC Sqs to address all the concerns/issues everyone was having. Their basic pitch (I wasn't personally there, was deployed) amounted to "turn them on in this order, we know they don't work correctly right now, there's nothing we can do about it, but trust us when we say they'll work great in CR2". Embarrassing.

Unfortunately this problem isn't limited to just AMC, it's infected other MAJCOMs as well.

The AF, in their infinite wisdom, split the contract to maintain the T-6 in two, one for actual MX on the jets and one for the parts sustainment/sourcing. Once the health of the fleet started to decline, it didn't take long for the two companies involved to point the finger at each other when they couldn't make their contract metrics. As LookieRookie mentioned above, the fleet has a pretty serious DMS problem (which is kinda wild given that the aircraft themselves just aren't that old) that is having a huge impact on tail availability. My buddy at 5/8 told me all the UPT bases are suffering, but CBM is in the wort shape. They have about 90 something T-6s and on any given day only a third are flyable.

The problem right now (and the one AETC 5/8 is trying to work around) is that the T-6 portion of UPT is fucked/is the bottleneck right now. The T-6 fleet is in bad shape, it's getting worse, and there's no easy or expeditious way to fix it. The T-38 is well past any reasonable service life, and the T-7 is obviously delayed. This IPT concept is the latest attempt to get to the 1500 pilots/year production goal that the AF can never achieve. Believe it or not but the money issue for IPT was actually one of the smaller issues getting the program started.

I really enjoy shooting my Ruger 5.7mm PC Carbine. Just a really fun gun at the range. I don't like my Ruger 5.7mm pistol (both were impulse buys so I have no regrets, as M2 said above I've got several guns in my collections that I bought and was not impressed with for various reasons). I don't use either of them for home defense. My buddy has the same Ruger PC Carbine chambered in 9mm, it got a tad more recoil but he pays about 50% less than I do per round so if cheap plinking is what you're looking for the 5.7mm probably isn't it.

Tab 2 - Jan 25 CSAF Update to DAFI36-2903.pdf I usually try to give people correcting uniform wear the benefit of the doubt since it aggravates me when I see people who look like a bag of ass in uniform. That being said, I didn’t think I’d ever see the CSAF pushing official guidance on gig lines. We really must have all the big problems in this organization figured out if this is what the top dogs are focusing on…..

Yeah I don’t think that’ll buff out. Glad the pilot punched!

#4 on the flyover gave me a chuckle. Even one of the civilians at my local asked, “why is that one plane so far from the others?”

I think I saw on LinkedIn a couple weeks back that he was taking a job at HTeaO so I think he may be retiring. Not 100% sure though.

The 193rd in PA with MC-130Js and the HC-130J Guard/Reserve units in Long Island/Patrick/Moffit/Alaska (probably one I'm missing) still have CSOs; might be an option for you if the UPT thing doesn't work out.

So what do you do with the remaining 33.8 seconds?

@Shaft34 I hope you guys are staying as safe as possible given the horrific conditions out there in CA. Also hope you guys are able to start rolling those fires back soon.

We currently have 1 guy I know of in the MC-J pipeline that requested to be transferred. Seems like a really good dude; I haven't asked him his reasons for transferring. Last year before I retired there were rumors that AFSOC was about to send a whole lot of CV guys to MC-Js due to all the previously mentioned thrash and AFSOC parking a good chunk of the fleet at CVS; I haven't seen that reflected in the guys coming the pipeline yet. FWIW, my posts weren't meant to scare you off CV-22s if that's really the airframe and mission set you're most interested in. I have several CV buddies and all of them loved flying the aircraft. AFSOC is a phenomenal place to be in the AF. It's just that right now (and honestly for the foreseeable future) the CV-22 program has a lot of issues that don't seem to have any quick fixes. Their MX rates are atrocious (if you ever go to an AFSOC Wing Standup and watch the CV-22 MX officer brief the status of the fleet you'll understand) and the last 2-3 years it seemed like AFSOC was looking for a replacement (which won't come anytime soon, not sure how Connely being at the helm will affect this). Just data points for you to consider. Best of luck in whatever path you choose.

We currently have 2 former CV-22 students in the MC-J pipeline; they got non-vol’d to us after last years stand down. Poor guys went all the way through New River and most of the way through the ABQ CV-22 sim before they were swapped. Tough time to be an Osprey guy right now.

Ha! One of my favorites. In my EWO days was on a TDY up to Bodo, Norway. Was Blue Air for a big LFE they had that week. We manage to get in and hit our airdrop without getting shot (lots of fjords and rocks to hide in, and our screen was able to keep Red off us for the first 15-20 minutes). As we're egressing, one of the Red Air guys regens, and proceeds to just blast straight after us. My aft jammer was tits up but like I said, lots of terrain to hide in, the front jammer was working, and there was solid overcast layer above so I felt like we had a chance. There were two Blue guys fairly close to me, I'm yelling that I'm spiked (Bitch give me some help!) but they were busy with another regen. Anywho start to notch the guy, GCI is giving me good callouts, I figure he's just gonna fly overhead cause of the overcast layer/mountains all around and then get shot by Blue. All of the sudden my LM calls "Hey I think I see....Holy Shit!!!" followed quickly by Pilot saying "Jesus Christ" and then "Fox 2 on Talon". Guy came right through the overcast, shot us, flew underneath us, then lights the burner and rockets right back up through the cloud deck. My pilot looks back at me and asks WTF was that. All I had was "Aaahh, yeah, they got us". In the debrief I asked the guy how he was able to get below the WX like that and he says he's been flying in the same patch of terrain for 20 years so he knew where all the high stuff was based on where the peaks were sticking up above the cloud deck. Can't notch that.

Well done sir.