mcbush

I was never an IP but did that drive a good amount as a student. Nothing wrong with it per se, but for me personally it's farther than I'd want to have to drive every day. But if you don't mind the distance, I don't think there's any other serious downside in terms of major city traffic, infrastructure, etc.

You're right, bad phrasing on my part. I don't want to air this guy's dirty laundry too much, but the early rotation itself wasn't discussed nearly as much as the bad TOLD or the early retraction of the gear. Suffice to say the board "acquitted" him (or whatever) of a lack of proficiency related to bad T/O data since he just did what everyone else did, but did find that he exhibited poor judgment in raising the gear before he was safely climbing away.

Never heard Baltimore described as fancy before...

Yep, here's the AIB report from that one: https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/180413-PACAF-JB Elmendorf-Richardson-Alaska-AIB NARRATIVE REPORT.pdf?ver=2018-11-15-200849-187 I never flew Raptors but somehow wound up on the FEB for the pilot involved. It mostly worked out okay for him because the error in his T/O TOLD came from a community-wide standard practice rather than anything he did wrong specifically. Given the procedures in place at the time, it was bound to happen to someone eventually at a high PA field... he was just the unlucky one.

Anybody know somebody who's done this? Never heard of it before, but from my two minutes of googling, it sounds like it could be either a really good or a really bad deal. Curious to hear experiences if anyone has any.

Correct, it was essentially mil leave on a day that otherwise would have been a day off, which then didn't meet their "day off" definition. In any case, I just talked to our head mil affairs guy, and based on his advice and experience, it sounds like this would be a losing battle and an unbelievable hassle to pursue, just like the first guy said. Going to wave the white flag on this one.

Looking for some thoughts about whether I should engage with my airline on a potential USERRA issue, or just let it go. I posted something similar on another forum but I'm sure we have more USERRA experience here. The crux of the situation is that our contract says you get additional pay if you pick up an assignment early on your first day of a reserve block. More specifically, it says you get the add pay if the early assignment is on the first day following a "day off," and then goes on to exclude mil leave from the definition of a day off. This led me to a situation where on day X, I had no obligation to the company and performed mil duty, and then picked up an early assignment the following morning on my first day back on reserve. Company says no soup for you... mil leave is not a "day off," and therefore you don't get the pay. My issue with that is that if I had done nothing on day X and that day had remained a true "day off," I'd be getting the pay... but because I performed military service, I lose the pay. To me, that concept runs afoul of USERRA. The relevant part of the law (38 USC 4311) says: "a person who is a member of... a uniformed service shall not be denied initial employment, reemployment, retention in employment, promotion, or any benefit of employment by an employer on the basis of that membership, application for membership, performance of service, application for service, or obligation." 38 USC 4303 defines a "benefit of employment" as: "the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, including any advantage, profit, privilege, gain, status, account, or interest (including wages or salary for work performed) that accrues by reason of an employment contract..." I spoke with a mil affairs guy at our union, and he seemed to think that this would probably be a losing argument, and that it certainly wouldn't be worth the hassle in any case. He's probably right, at least on the second part. We're only talking about $200 here (at least this time), so it's not like my family is going to starve to death if I don't pursue it, although I'm sure there are others that would be impacted by the same thing over the years and maybe the cumulative effect is significant... who knows. I'm just not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. Anyone have experience fighting a similar righteous crusade under USERRA? Any words of wisdom? Mostly just curious if y'all would dig in or just crack a beer and forget it.

What year group is the AD O-5 board this year, 2010?

Lump sum investing beats dollar cost averaging about two thirds of the time. There are a ton of studies on this... see, for example, this one from Vanguard. Let me ask you this: would you be willing to loan me money at 2.99% if I told you I were going to invest it in the broad market? If not, what interest rate would you charge me to make that risk/benefit math worth it to you? I understand that it depends on the length of the loan, but what's your ballpark?

Concur. If I were in my 20s, I would borrow infinite money at 3% to dump into index funds. Oversimplifying somewhat, but if you don't need the money any time soon, that's a damn good deal and a pretty safe bet. Over the past 100 years, the worst annualized return over any rolling 30-year period was 7.8%... (source)

As usual, luck and timing are everything, and there is no justice.

In theory, they should go in and give you points for each course once you've finished the entire program. I'm virtually certain that's true for courses you took in previous R/R years too. In practice, I finished ACSC in mid-Nov 2023 and don't have any points to show for it yet. Since it's only been 2 months and nothing happens fast around the ARC, I wouldn't find that weird at all... if nothing had happened up to this point. What is weird though, is that almost immediately after I finished the program, 5 of the courses I took (out of 15 or however many) did show up on my PCARS, but all of them are on the wrong dates and are apparently worth zero points. I sent them a ticket in myFSS asking about it, but of course haven't heard back. Bottom line at the bottom: might be possible depending on your R/R date, but you're gonna want to bang out these courses as fast as possible in order to leave yourself as much time as possible to hound the HR points nerds at the end. Worst case, they can probably credit them after your R/R year closes out and change your bad year to a good year, but I haven't pressed to test on that issue, so I'll defer to someone smarter than me.

Wasn't 4 the max? Or was there some secret HPO deal so the shiniest of pennies could go quicker than that?

They’re all attached to sharks instead.

Not to distract from FFDO and APA shenanigans, but word on the street is that a certain purple cargo carrier has offered its suddenly-overstaffed pilot group the "opportunity" to transition into a direct entry CA job at PSA (and then supposedly flow to AA from there) in exchange for $250k...? True? If so, am I missing something? Outside of a guy who's 64.9 years old, who would take that? Edit - Found the answer to my first question:

I could totally see that on the half-assed bio of an O-4 in the sq stan/eval shop, but as a sitting OG/CC? Weird.

Never flown Eagles either, and my experience in fighting them consists solely of popping flares and praying, but as a fatty driver formerly based at JBER for a long time, pushing it up during a demo is a sore subject for me. As everyone knows, C-17 pilots have famously fvcked it up many times over the last 30 years. Multiple gear-up landings, multiple departures from the end of the runway, accidently landing at Peter O. Knight instead of MacDill, the four engine flameout in Pakistan... not to mention the missions involving actual battle damage like the crew that took a SAM up the ass in Baghdad in 2003. Some amount of incidents are more or less inevitable after flying thousands and thousands of sorties over the course of decades, but obviously some of these risks are exacerbated by putting young crews in tight spots. Of course, that's ultimately the CC's call, and risk is a fact of life in the military and aviation, especially in combat. But you know what? Every single one of those guys made it home. After almost five million flight hours across the program, our only hull loss remains the 2010 crash at JBER, where some of our most experienced crew members (an EP, two IPs, and an EL) pushed it up a little too hard at about 850' AGL during airshow practice and put a jet in the dirt. Now every year on July 28, the AD and ANG C-17 squadrons at Elmo go out into the woods and sit around this clearing where there used to be trees, drinking and remembering four of our friends. I'm glad we do it, but I wish we didn't have to. Full disclosure, I didn't watch the whole video that got posted, but I bet I know what it looks like - it's probably freaking awesome. I was just out at Oshkosh this summer because I love a good airshow... who doesn't? But there's a different calculus and a different set of risks in decision making when one is trying to put on a good show. I can absolutely think of times in my past where someone was watching who I wanted to impress, and I pushed it a little too far and probably made some decisions that I shouldn't have. No doubt the guy/gal flying this show is a great stick and a damn good pilot. But if we're going to take arguably unnecessary risks in peacetime, we've got to take reasonable measures to mitigate that risk when possible. I've never been a demo pilot, so I don't know what proportion of the AF demo regs are well-thought out vs. pointless bureaucracy, but I do know that the answer isn't to just ignore them all and do nothing, and if that's what happened here, I've got no problem with sacking the person responsible for providing that oversight.

What do you mean, you people?

How long have you been in your current Sq/Wg? Are you going to have continuity there all the way through your O-5 board? If the goal is making O-5, a good PRF push from someone that knows and cares about you is going to help a lot. Best move in that case is probably just to embrace the suck and go be an exec for the Wg/CC, NAF/CC, or someone similar for the next couple years. Otherwise, like you said, just embrace it, do what you can where you can, and let the chips fall where they may.

But that would require intellectual honesty and a desire to solve the problem, neither of which are present here. Congress is no better than HAF DAF. You want to see the response I got last time I wrote my Congressman?

Did they re-unmask AAD on O-4 and O-5 boards? Guess it’s been about long enough for the pendulum to swing back the other way

You've got it right. Credit can be (and often is) greater than the "hard time" you fly based on various rigs, etc. Bid periods are basically months, although I think FDX does 13 bid periods a year. I guess you could adjust the percentage to 1.16 or so if you wanted to include the 401k contribution, or maybe to assume you're able to pick up premium some portion of the time? I wouldn't think too hard about it though. What you've got set now is basically what you should count on as a new hire.

Do you get points for doing distance PME while on short-term MPA as a part-timer? Or does the MPA prevent you from earning additional points for those days?

Just one guy's opinion, but if you're worried about promotion board results, you may want to reconsider the timing of this move. Who do you want to be when your PRF gets written: the experienced IP who's been around the squadron for a while, or the FNG that just inprocessed that probably isn't even qualified in the jet?

Not a FedEx guy, but at first glance it looks pretty rough https://fdxta.com/