Flaco
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Posts posted by Flaco
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5 hours ago, MooseClub said:
deployment #1= “this is awesome!”
deployment #2= “cool, I got this”
deployment #3 = “I’m the old pro now”
deployment #4 = “well, here I am again”
deployment #5+ = “ok WTF are we doing here!?”
+1 for accuracy
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2 hours ago, BashiChuni said:
You guys are missing the point.
We’re rapidly becoming a military class system separated from our fellow civilian countrymen.
Not only that but becoming extremely entitled with all our “benefits”.
Common question I get asked when I tel military people I’m planning to get out is “oh I wonder what your disability rating will be!”
YGBSM I’m a healthy dude I don’t need any disability.
“Oh but you should get checked out just in case you can get some money from the VA!”
thats the type of entitled thinking that’s seeping into our military culture. Entitlement. It’s not good.
Spot on. I had a candidate for political office knock on my front door the other day and ask my what my concerns were.
When I told him that the US public and elected officials had lost accountability of its military and almost entirely ceded control to the President (and largely, the generals) he looked at me like I had just stepped off a UFO.
It was as if he wanted to say "How dare you question what our military is doing? Every man and woman who wears the uniform is a hero, and every mission he does is just and right and holy and in keeping with the best traditions this country has to offer!"
Then I asked him, politely, if he could tell me some of the countries in which we had troops that were actively involved in armed conflicts. He mentioned Afghanistan, struggled to find any additional countries he could name, and began stuttering. In his mind I could see the Ma, Apple Pie, and American Flag T-Shirts give way to an overwhelming sense of embarrassment that he, a candidate for public office, had no clue what our military was doing.
The fake hero worship that we have all encountered is the US public's apology for the abdication of their civic duties and not actually giving a shit what their military is up to.
The pilot shortage and likely coming shortage of the other branches will probably fix this long term - people will stop volunteering for the military and/or get out when they realize there's no coherent strategy in the conflicts we are engaged in, but the disconnect is a major problem.
Just ask the Romans....
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-price-of-professionalization
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45 minutes ago, Chuck17 said:
So... if they’re going to be lost anyway, you make an interesting case for longer commitments and less bonus money...
Yeesh.
Chuck
Chuck,
The cynical side of me says the Air Force has already figured this out and has given up on retention. They will try to produce their way out of the hole. Pencil whip IP status, green up the slides. It's just going to be a much younger man's game. The machine will continue to function.
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1 hour ago, ClearedHot said:
What you identify as poor leadership is actually someone asking you as an IP to be a ing adult, sorry that is so difficult for you. Enjoy the airlines, I am sure you "me only" attitude will serve you quite well in the interview process.
For the record I retired to get away from caustic leadership and a broken system, I think most of the people that served with me (some on here), know I was not into the you should be ridiculed because I was ridiculed routine, but getting offended because someone asks you to make sure you training paperwork is squared away...dear god, get the sand out of your ######.
If I'm reading correctly, the commander didn't ask them to do their jobs correctly. He threatened to revoke their IP status if they didn't do the job correctly, before any of them had actually screwed up.
Does your chief pilot at the airlines proactively threaten you with punitive action?
The supply and demand curves have shifted and the Air Force is losing the competition for talent. Commanders in need to think counterintuitively. If a commander actually cares about retaining people, the only way to do that is to ask, nicely. Even then, it is likely that macro forces outside of his control will dictate that a large number of pilots still leave. But maybe, just maybe, he can appeal to the best in his pilots and keep an additional one or two of them around that would have otherwise left.
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5 hours ago, ClearedHot said:
I grew up with fear, sarcasm, and ridicule as a tactic used by my IPs, the leadership, and the rest of the institution. It worked well, and I didn't complain.
The ops tempo was reasonable, I was flying 20 sorties a month, and push-it-up, fun TDYs were plentiful. I had never heard of a CBT, SAPR, Green Dot, and there was no airline opportunity.
Let me suggest that that era is gone. What this "special snowflake" is trying to say is that the Air Force doesn't have the cards to play the dickhead commander routine any longer. It's a bluff.
The snowflake is gonna bail to the airlines at his first opportunity while the commander keeps wondering why he's losing pilots.
Adapt, or die. The ball is in the Air Force's court.
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On 12/19/2017 at 9:11 PM, Clark Griswold said:
Concur.
For this to take hold and move forward, I don't know if the retirees pre mid-90's would believe how it has gotten or maybe they would, just don't know as I don't have a lot of contact with retirees from that time.
What I am thinking of is a core group of retired officers and senior enlisted members coming together (virtually or IRL) and contributing what they think the "problem" is and then distilling that into a coherent message. When we start to discuss this as current and former members, our experiences and perspectives tend to get us to focus on the specific problems in our operational / support communities. For my two cents, we have to find the motifs running thru all those vignettes and opinions to come up with the overall updates required for the AF in this era.
I say updates rather than fixes as I believe the AF is not absolutely fundamentally broken, just needs a major update to work effectively in the modern operational world, the current economy and culture and to fully realize the changes the latest revolutions in tech and evolutions in warfare have brought.
Approaching the powers that be with the idea of updates I think extends a more palatable idea for change as we're really talking about convincing politicians, senior civilian officials and AF officers that what they have spent their careers in service to is not fundamentally bad but needs major update.
My hope is that if we assemble a large enough chorus for reform, it will be loud enough that it can not be ignored.
I'm in. Some spitballin':
1.) Someone internet smart needs to set up the infrastructure. I'm thinking closed forum. Need to have a way to verify legitimacy/credentials. I think it should be limited to current and retired members with a cutoff based on how long someone's been out of the AF. 2 years? 5 years?
2.) Need someone with the proper academic / research background to administer and curate responses. That way they're taken seriously by the PTB.
3.) Could be a series of surveys or free-form responses. Curator assembles and distills data into coherent format.
I don't know about you guys, but I went off the top rope on a few of those "climate surveys" that get sent out. Go figure, the narrative that was put out by the AF after each one was, in effect, "slides are green!" while we all were staring at the dumpster fires. So I stopped taking them several years ago.
I think there would be huge traction behind a project like this. We all want the Air Force to pull out of this nose dive, but we know the current leadership can't do it. They're too entrenched in the faulty logic that got us here in the first place. I believe the only way to fix things is to get a coherent message directly from the O-5 and below croud to congress and the American public.
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On 9/10/2017 at 3:40 PM, matmacwc said:
Even the Goldman Sachs Elevator (GSE, google it for hours of entertainment) guy makes a comment that late bloomers aren't really welcome, unless you were military. Specifically he says fighter pilot, but you get the idea.
On 9/10/2017 at 8:20 PM, nsplayr said:The book by the GSE Elevator guy is really hilarious, highly recommend.
Thanks for point out, I haven't laughed that hard in a while. I thought this was one of the best quotes:
"Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools."
He didn't credit the source, so I had to look it up. Go figure, a fighter pilot said it...
Sir Douglas Bader, a WWII RAF ace. It is also sometimes attributed to Harry Day, also of the RAF.
More importantly, I wish we had leaders who understood this quote.
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On 8/28/2017 at 0:22 PM, pbar said:
Hasn't been my experience. My wife has wanted to start a bar/restaurant forever and so we decided to go ahead and do it concurrent with my retirement. In preparation, I read a couple "how-to" start a business books and attended a Boots 2 Business course on base.
Now I understand why many entrepreneurs say you have to fail a couple of times before you become successful.
Many businesses will lose money and then fail after a few years. But there does seem to be a point in business where if you a doing a good job and stick with it, word of mouth reaches critical mass and that's where the business will take off. In tech they call this "hockey stick" growth. I'm not in the tech world, but that has definitely been my experience. Stick with it long enough, you'll become and expert in whichever field you're in, and the market will reward you. Best wishes to you man!
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Surprised no one has mentioned starting / buying a business. Military aviation is actually a very good training ground for entrepreneurial activity - whether you realize it or not, all of us have acquired skills in calculated risk taking, assessing the enemy (competition), solving problems on the fly, task prioritization, time management, etc.
Pick something you're passionate about and be your own boss. I'll bet anyone posting on this board would do much better than they imagine.
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1 hour ago, Lord Ratner said:
Words of Nostradamus
Shack!
Can't wait for the epic thread revival....
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6 hours ago, JeremiahWeed said:
But, the thing to remember is the guard isn't supposed to provide a combat ready pilot tomorrow. It's a pool of mostly high time guys who have the experience base to be away from the jet for a few weeks or fly limited sorties. It's never been expected that an ANG unit would be the equivalent of a AD unit for day to day ops. If they're needed for combat ops, they're going to spin up quickly and be both combat ready and capable.
That is rapidly changing. After 10+ years of NGB and NGAUS leadership yelling from the rooftops, "We're just like active duty! Give us money! Give us equipment!", the guard has truly become the "operational reserve" that our senior leaders begged for. Of course they never considered the consequences.
Most Guard babies that are airline eligible will be out of the Guard in the next 5 years, leaving only recently separated active duty and a few deployment-avoiding lifers who crave the opportunity created by the vacuum to make General at NGB or state staff. The culture will continue to shift toward an active duty-lite mindset - "90 day TSPs are nothing compared to the 180's I did on active duty!"
The younger guard babies will be sorely disappointed by the few stories they remember hearing of how good the Guard used to be, and they too will punch at their earliest opportunity for the airlines.
Federalization complete, the Guard will no longer be a proud collection of state militias comprised of local citizen soldiers, but rather a stopping point for those separating active duty, who have little knowledge of unit history or interaction with the local community.
The active duty's culture and retention problems have already become the Guard's culture and retention problems, merely lagging by a few years.
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The only thing that will fix the Air Force is a no-shit shooting match. Within a very short period of time, the weenies will be fired because they can't lead in combat, and the warriors will rise back to their rightful place at the top. The American public has become fat, dumb, and happy and that's why the Air Force is in the state it's in. Excellence is borne of strife, not prosperity.
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4 minutes ago, the g-man said:
Yeah that's right, except member 3 would only be charged 1 day of leave since they returned on a non-duty day.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Right, forgot about that. Ok, thanks all. I think I've got what I need.
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OK, I think I'm getting it.
Commander says local area is 4 hours drive time.
Member 1 takes family on short weekend trip 3 hours from home. Leaves on a Friday evening after work, returns on Sunday evening. No leave required.
Member 2 leaves on a Saturday for a destination 3 hours from home. Returns on Tuesday evening. Leave required Saturday - Tuesday.
Member 3 leaves on Saturday morning and drives 7 hours to destination. Returns Sunday evening. Leave required Saturday-Sunday because outside local area.
Do I have this right?
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Thanks for the info everyone. I've looked on AF portal for a link to the supps but couldn't find any.
Anyone have a link to where I can get these policies in writing?
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Doing a little research. Can you guys give me examples of what your WG/CC has defined as the "local area" for leave purposes?
If you could point me to where I can download your wing supp to AFI36-3003 or the written policy letter that would be even mo betta.
Thanks all.
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On January 19, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Butters said:
I am not one of these scared little kids that that thinks the world outside the Air Force is this completely foreign culture that I have no chance of ever understanding. I know how to wear a suit (I have been doing it my whole life), I know how to present myself in a interview (I have done several, in the Air Force and out) I know how to Network (been doing that as well, helped me to stay at the same base for 11 years). I know how to read about an Airline or Air Line to see what is important to them. Also, Emerald Coast does not take the GI Bill.
You're gonna be a blast on a 4 day trip.
Butters: "Meet at the bar for a cold one?"
Captain: "No thanks man, I've got some 'stuff' to take care of, gonna call it a night."
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Argo, are you going to provide any counter-argument, or just lurk in the shadows and down vote every post that doesn't fit the desired narrative?
Standard SJW response is to yell and act offended while offering no logical reason for doing so. Our country has created a generation of retards.
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Enormous entitlement programs also became the norm in old Rome. At its height, the largest state expenditure was an army of 300,000–600,000 legionaries. The soldiers realized their role and necessity in Roman politics, and consequently their demands increased. They required exorbitant retirement packages in the form of free tracts of farmland or large bonuses of gold equal to more than a decade’s worth of their salary. They also expected enormous and periodic bonuses in order to prevent uprisings.
The Roman experience teaches important lessons. As the 20th-century economist Howard Kershner put it, “When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare.” Putting one’s livelihood in the hands of vote-buying politicians compromises not just one’s personal independence, but the financial integrity of society as well. The welfare state, once begun, is difficult to reverse and never ends well.
Rome fell to invaders in 476 AD, but who the real barbarians were is an open question. The Roman people who supported the welfare state and the politicians who administered it so weakened society that the Western Roman Empire fell like a ripe plum that year. Maybe the real barbarians were those Romans who had effectively committed a slow-motion financial suicide.
http://fee.org/freeman/the-slow-motion-financial-suicide-of-the-roman-empire/
Whether we (servicemen and women) will take part in the collapse of the treasury is a choice. But if you choose to watch Rome burn, please don't use the excuse that you are just "playing the game." That is beneath us.
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A toast...
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I know a lot of guys receiving disability payments...not a single one of them is in a position where they would do a specific job to support themselves or their family if they could, but can't because their 'disability' prevents it. Of course those people exist, but they aren't even close to the majority of people receiving benefits, and it's sickening.
My TAPS class was worthless in every regard, except one. It served as a fairly comprehensive guide on how to exploit the VA disability system for personal gain. It bordered on a class about how to defraud to program. It was disgusting to see people who were nodding off in the middle of the class perk up and start asking questions when it came to how to ensure a monthly payment from the government in return for nothing.
I have neck, back, knee, and hearing issues...all of which developed while I was on active duty. The VA considers them service connected, and for all I know my time on a constantly vibrating platform with 8lbs of gear on my head under 'high' G's didn't help. But you know what? I was a decade older when I separated. Getting old sucks. Your body starts falling apart whether you're in the military or not. Just because it fell apart while I was on active duty doesn't mean my job led to the problems. I wake up every morning, dress myself, and go to work. Even if it involves some pain, I don't want a government handout that could otherwise go to a guy who took a face full of shrapnel, lost a limb, and is legitimately excluded from performing many jobs that he might otherwise hold if healthy.
It always blew my mind listening to retired guys bitching about how their disability check was late again while they piloted a commercial aircraft making $200k a year, and in their previous breath were complaining about the entitlement generation and Obama phones.
Shack brother.
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“Knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right.” - Theodore Roosevelt
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Why would you find it difficult?
Because neck, back, and hearing issues does not make one disabled, even though good 'ol progressive Uncle Sam might say so. One only becomes "disabled" once they accept the label. And if I refuse the label, yet accept the payment, what does that make me?
Every dollar that goes toward mandatory VA entitlements is likely to be taken away from military O&M budgets, further straining the force. This is a zero sum game.
"PerCapitaInflationAdjustedDefenseSpending" by Johnpseudo - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PerCapitaInflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG#/media/File:PerCapitaInflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG
See that swell in the VA budget? There are a lot of folks in there in the sleep apnea / PTSD check of the month club.
Want to do something great for your country? Resist the urge to reach in Uncle Sam's pocket, even when he practically begs you to.
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I didn't miss it. I dismissed it as speculative. The va disability system is designed to account for partial disabilities. It should be no surprise that 12 years of violent conflict for hundreds of thousands of individuals has led to an increase in partial disabilities. I'm avgually surprised the number isn higher.
You dismissed an article published in a peer reviewed professional journal written by a psychologist experienced in dealing with VA claims as speculative? That's convenient.
Do you find it difficult to imagine that along with the thousands of actually disabled service members deserving of VA benefits, there are also a large number claiming disability fraudulently? Or that it has become increasingly easy to receive a VA disability rating as a result of political pressure and a lowering of the definition of "disability"?
Here's the full-text article if anyone is interested: http://www.veteranslawlibrary.com/files/Veterans_Symptom_Validity_Russo.pdf
The new airline thread
in Squadron Bar
Posted
FAA Definition
FAA Regulations (14 CFR 1.1) defines flight time as “block time” as follows:
(1) Pilot time that commences when an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight and ends when the aircraft comes to rest after landing; or
(2) For a glider without self-launch capability, pilot time that commences when the glider is towed for the purpose of flight and ends when the glider comes to rest after landing.
ICAO Annex 1 Definition:
Flight time — aeroplanes. The total time from the moment an aeroplane first moves for the purpose of taking off until the moment it finally comes to rest at the end of the flight.
Note — Flight time as here defined is synonymous with the term “block to block” time or “chock to chock” time in general usage which is measured from the time an aeroplane first moves for the purpose of taking off until it finally stops at the end of the flight.
Apply early, apply often my friends...