Hacker

What makes you think that post is the result of a "story"? That is exactly what the IG is there to do: protect the company.

So, if any AF leaders are reading this, and wondering what the rank-and-file mean when they cite "cancerous leadership" as their reason for leaving the military...

I just broke out a pair of new-old-stock Addisons that I've been hoarding for like 15 years so I can get out of the "warbird-pilot-athletic-shoes-and-flight-suit" club.

Got it, I didn't get the full picture of what you were saying with respect to the retired dudes being management pilots at the airlines.

For what reason? Maybe I had a different experience, but since retiring my attitude is: What's there to hate on bros about? Hell, I don't even really hate on Navy pilots anymore either, despite their known shortcomings as both men and aviators.

Card counting is quite a skill. Is that supposed to be a strike against him?

No, actually, it isn't supposed to be part of the Executive Branch's powers....it is Congress relinquishing powers it is supposed to have. "Rule making" is supposed to be performed by the "Legislative Branch"....hence, y'know, the name.

Government only has the powers that they're given by the people, and everything else they don't have the authority to do. So where's that part in the Constitution about the Government having the power to tell you what to wear?

If you can't actually argue the points with logic, it is perfectly valid to just go ad-hominem instead.

I can almost read the nametag....General Liquid.

This is the most terrible justification in the entire philosophical pantheon.

I had a short relationship with a Cherokee 235, as well as getting my private in a Cherokee 160. I chose it over a Bonanza or a Comanche, mostly for market price and what I needed in a "family cruiser" at the time. It was a very enjoyable airplane with a relatively good amount of useful load (1500-ish pounds, depending on gas, etc) and easy to find someone to maintain. It is not particularly expensive to maintain, although mine had its original 70s-era panel and no upgrades, and was going to cost a fortune to update with certified avionics if I wanted to keep playing IFR games with it. The 540 is a reliable engine in my experience too. Don't have much to say about them overall; less expensive than a 182 with comparable performance, can actually haul 4 people (although the back seats are better with kids) and some bags, and typical GA maintenance costs. I sold it rather quickly for PCS reasons, and if my family and mission circumstances were the same, I might own one again....but they aren't. EDIT: Since this is a thread about costs, I'm adding that my costs of ownership probably aren't relevant today as it was 20-ish years ago. I could afford it as a dual-incone-no-kids 1Lt/Capt at the time, though.

I'm still perplexed as to why people suddenly believe that formation landings are this massive risk. Compared to the number of times they are performed (with regularity) incident-free (also with regularity, even with student pilots at the helm), the rate of incident/accident is phenomenally low. By definition, based on that data, they're not "risky". Yes, there is a small margin of error (just like a vast many things in high performance military aviation), and the consequences of some modes of error can be severe and/or fatal (just like that same vast number of things in high performance military aviation)...so what makes formation landing now some kind of exception?

To be fair, the PIT enterprise at RND produces a flying instructor that is orders of magnitude better than what the FAA's CFI-creation process is. I went to PIT as a salty O-4 who already had more than one IPUG program under my belt, and as @BashiChuni mentioned the "Instructor Fundamentals" academic course taught by the blue-suiters was the first time in my career that the AF had actually made an attempt to teach me how to instruct. It was probably one of the most useful academic courses in my entire AF career. It wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it actually codified processes to both platform instruct in the briefing room, as well as gave specific tools on finding root causes and instructional fixes to in-flight performance. It actually explained and put names on a bunch of tools that numerous Patch-wearers and IPs had been trying to explain (but were not actually teaching me) in the process of mashing my balls to mush in hour 13 of the DCA IPUG debrief. That course at PIT could have actually used a healthy dash of improvement with some of the WIC processes that were vogue out in the ops world at the time (the "perception-decision-execution" method of root cause analysis, for example), but it was good. It is something that *all* new instructors at every level of the training pipeline could really use.

There's no decision that's too conservative for the risk-averse faction of AF management.