Leaderboard

(...not an attempted barrel roll....) 🙂

You can fly HH-60s or CV-22s with helicopter only restriction, and that acft qual course is pretty much all that is required after your ARB is complete.

Yes, it certainly would have. However, sitting back and stating that the situation turned out about as well it could is nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking. We got lucky. We had a guy steal an aircraft, and fly around a major metropolitan area stating the end result would have him dead. Suicide... along with how many others? I'm not sure it gets more "mental health crazy" than that. And no one knew how this would turn out until he was a smoking hole at 2047L. Was anyone confident at 2015L that he wasn't going to bury this airliner into the city? I don't know who gives the order to shoot down, or if the ROE allows the pilots to make that call. And I'm not arguing it's a painful call to make. But have we not determined the triggers that will result in an engagement/shootdown 17 years after 9/11? Has this not been rehearsed time and time again? If this DID meet the triggers, then I'd like to know why a shootdown was not executed. And if this hijacking DIDN'T meet the criteria, then I'd like to hear that along with an explanation as to why. Instead, we seemed paralyzed by our fear of Jim Acosta and the news media asking questions post-shootdown. Had this guy ended his life by plowing into Seattle's Columbia Center with a pair armed Eagles watching with their hands tied, this would be a very different day in America. Again. One more thing to ponder: had this guy had an Arabic accent, and had he been transmitting "Allah akbar!" on the radio, would that have changed the outcome? Or would that simply bring more allegations of racial profiling in America by MSNBC? There is a lot that is going to have to be discussed and acted on within the Air Defense leadership corps and the gov't officials that make these decisions.

We’re still planning to sell these bastards the F-35? We should get out of Incirlik and work our damndest to get them removed from NATO. That prick leading their country is nothing but an Islamofascist. If we let them touch an F-35, they’ll have Russia and China closely examining it in short order.

That was pretty kick ass. I got to meet Dave Groark years ago in Mesquite Texas, while waiting for a student. He was nice enough to give me the fifty cent tour of his T-6. I saw his name painted on the side. "Dave Groark? I was just re-reading my copy of Going Downtown the other day! You wouldn't happen to be that Captain Dave Groark from the 355th TAC fighter wing, now would you? He smiled and admitted he was. I asked him if Jack Broughton was the exceptional leader he appeared to be. Not really a legit question, the record speaks for itself. "I'd follow him straight to hell today if he asked me." Was the reply. Those dudes are BAMFs

I'd bet they're hiring so many because they're anticipating a bunch to wash out. I could only imagine the amount of oversight that project must have. It's hard enough for the avarage guard guy to prove he's "worthy" of a fighter. Let alone a 35.

There is a far greater than 0% chance that the guy maniacally laughing about crashing 50,000+ lbs of metal and Jet-A decides to turn towards the major metro area what, 3 nm miles away and go out in a bigger bang of glory. Then what? The hostile aircraft is orbiting over the water, ******* do something! What’s next? “Yeah the bears were over the lower 48, but their bomb bay doors weren’t open yet”? Hostile aircraft flying over water, shoot it down, end of story. If you can’t shoot down a stolen, erratically flown aircraft within 2 mins of killing thousands of civilians then save tax payer money and cancel the entire homeland defense mission! What a joke.