FourFans

Dude I’ve got a CONUS-Dubai leg coming up in a week. I’m kinda hoping I get to see the OCA push from WAY far away. Better yet, make me divert. That always leads to some nice bonus money. Especially in that particular cornhole of the world.

I’ll bet there are some Raptor dudes in the sandbox begging to get let off the leash.

I’d have to defer to the sim cert team at LRF. My knowledge dates to 2020. That’s the last time I was in the know with those guys. They’ve since PCS’d on. Well ain’t that about a bitch! I got it put on my ticket in 2019. Seems dumb not to have the equivalence. Anyone here tried to get a 382J type recently? It felt like every all C-130E/H was utterly unique, while every J is exactly the same still. Can’t see how a 382J would be any different than a C-130J. I’ll bet it’s the block upgrades. 6.0 and 8.x are treated as different quals by the USAF.

C-130H and C-130J sims are certified Cat C or D (Full Flight Sims) sims and count for sim hours in the civilian world for maintaining currency. Yes there is a civilian type for the C-130J (L-382J type rating is different than the L-382 type). Yes, there are civil carriers that operate the C-130J. They exist, the end. If you doubt the certification of all the C-130 sims, go look up the Sim Cert folks at Little Rock. Certifying our sims to an FAA standard is literally their entire job. It's sim time. Log it and keep track. It doesn't count toward total time for civilian companies (though there may be a few exceptions). Don't expect to get anything for it though RIGHT NOW. Realize that at the drop of a hat the FAA or some airline you might fly for in the future may want to see that sim training, or even count it towards some time counter they track. The civil aviation career field is known to be ossified and immovable...right up until it changes over night. Be ready. Long view: It's professional training you've accomplished. Keep track of it in your own logbook. If you don't have a personal consolidated logbook (all civil, UPT, mil flying) start one. You're a professional and that is your professional resume and professional journal. I've met more than enough airline pilots who stopped logging their own hours when they got hired at their "forever" airline, only to be shocked years later when they needed to find a new flying job and had to scramble to make sense of the 'flight log' that their company kept. Pro Tips: DO NOT TRUST USAF HARMS RECORDS TO KEEP TRACK OF YOUR FLYING Keep your own logbook. Also, yes it will be years before your log PIC time. That's normal. Don't fudge those numbers to make it look like you've got turbine PIC before you should. Airline hiring shops see right through those tricks.

I know, I know, two seasoned veterans having a serious discussion about ethics and yes, innocents dying is legitimately never good and it's a tough situation...but all I keep hearing is:

Rule number one of fight club

Off the top of my head: Mattis, Pence, Pompeo, Carson, Ross and I'll even throw Nikki Haley in there. They are professionals who had gone and actually done shit to an expert level outside of the Beltway. Were they perfect? Not by a long shot. But they sure as hell weren't DEI hires or 'yes' men. Again comparing apples to apples. That admin to this one. There are a few absolutely excellent players in the Biden Cabinet. A very few. In fact, I'd only willingly call Jake Sullivan the ONLY rockstar on the cabinet or in senior functions/advisory capacities right now. Blinken isn't horrible. However the talent they bring is by far overshadowed by the fact that most senior individuals in this admin were selected based on skin color, sexual orientation, or political/narrative reliability instead of professional merit. Point in case was this nomination for the FAA who ended up being withdrawn. https://www.c-span.org/video/?526360-1/confirmation-hearing-faa-administrator-nominee That's the level of competence this admin WANTS in place. That's par for the course, while it was not in the prior administration. Again, not that it didn't happen, but it was the exception not the rule.

Frankly, I'm glad to see it. The USAF and USSF need to think joint from day one. Attending other service tactical and leadership schools is a great way to ingrain that joint understanding. Hell, I wish we sent a good slice of USAF JAIs and all AMLOs to Pathfinder, even if they fail out.

No. Not what I'm arguing. I am identifying the false argument that just because someone votes republican does not mean they have their: Just because someone is an evangelical who voted for Trump does not mean they actually support Trump. I would argue that many of those votes were votes against Biden, not for Trump. Every evangelical I've spoken too, hell most everyone I've spoken to doesn't support either Biden or Trump. So equating a trump vote to having your head shoved up is has as 08Dawg asserted is completely asinine. By that yard stick, everyone who voted for Biden supports letting your kids get addicted to hookers and blow and then covering it up. Nope, not a valid argument. My personal opinion is that voting 'against' something is a stupid way to vote. You Vote FOR something, not against it. But I've found many democrat voters who dislike Biden but will vote for him again because they personally don't like trump. They compare their personal dislike for Trump against the political narrative that they like about Biden. Completely irrational. We're supposed to compare Pros to Pros and Cons to Cons. Policy to policy, personal dislike to personal dislike, admin performance to admin performance. How they can ignore the train wreck that's been the past three years because they have an emotional aversion to a man who is emotionally repellent yet brought in admin folks who were actually competent and focused on job performance instead of DEI, I don't know...but it is what it is, not what I want it to be. As for your statistical analysis: near miss. Compare apples to apples, and read the footnotes in your own posting. You misunderstood the argument: That binary voting patterns do not tell the nuanced story that many Republican votes hate trump and that most democrats only verbally support BLM while recognizing the racist organization for what it is. Cherry picking stats from two completely different voting blocks (one set is from 2023, the other 2020), and then raging that this is a RATIONAL argument while trying to make it completely black or white is telling. It's a nuanced subject...which is my point. Calling all Republican voters trump butt snorkelers and all democrats BLM rioters is hideously out of touch. Yes, I'm aware you didn't say that. You did, however, leap to a violent and binary defense. It's telling. Before you repost anything Pew, NIH, CDC, GAO or any other government agency puts out (yes they publish good stats, but context and analysis are more important than the numbers), go read these books:

Tight chin strap, but on which chin?

I could also say bricks are edible, that doesn't make it true. Why do you associate Trump with evangelicals? That's a false association. Did some vote for him? Yup. Do some evangelicals also vote for Biden? Yup. That's like associating Democrats with BLM. While there is a connection, it's tenuous at best and therefore inappropriate in any rational debate. Put down the paint roller and pick up the detail brush.

Because some people say more words than others. Yes Green is a RETARD. That's one. I'd guess you can count the number of truly retard level right wingers on a couple hands. Not so with the left. The current (i emphasis that because in two years it might be the entire opposite) situation is that the democratic party is entertaining a untenably high number of radical leftist. Saying the Left and Right both have their radicals only makes sense if the number of radicals and the power of their voices is roughly equal to the point of providing some form of balance. It isn't. Not by a long shot. The left is has gone extreme left to an excessive degree that is in no way counterbalanced by the radicals on the right. Hell, there is no such thing as balancing radicals in the first place. 'Just admitting' both sides are divisive (which is true) is a false premise, and reduces reality down to an 'even' status that simply does not exist. In the inverse, it's like putting Tom Brady on a middle school JV team and lining them up against the KC Chief's D-Line and saying "well, they have Tom Brady so lets admit we have great players on both teams". Not a viable argument.

How? How the hell does someone like this not only get elected, and RE-elected, but placed in charge of a subcommittee on Space and Aero?! Surprising that she's not wearing a mask, bird flu is coming.

So many questions. Such as: How have we not thought of this before?! Who else is going to educate and train the Martians in guerilla warfare against the occupying Chinese?

The power of placebo and positive thinking!

Hot off the press: UPS will be hiring again. For those looking, get those apps updated for the ponderously impossible to understand process that is UPS hiring.

Experienced this as well in Europe and Africa...but I realized, they shouldn't be competent at operational planning...that's what military planners are for. State is supposed to be diplomats. They're also supposed to have the brains to realize that operational planning (especially in military related activities) should be pushed to the military, because we're pretty damn good at it. The perennial American diplomatic problem is that when things go beyond diplomacy, our diplomats seem to think they are always the smartest in the room...and they never are.

Dammit. I retired last year!

100% agree that our economy, domestic, and foreign policy would have been stronger...not to mention possibly having, oh, I don't know...a secure border. But I'm sure there would have been a totally different set of down sides to deal with. Every administration sucks at something. Some (meaning the current one) more than others. As for that list of 'accomplishments' the fact they put "Lowering Costs of Families' Everyday Expenses" at the top of it tells you all you need to know: It's complete bullshit. Notice the complete lack of reference to immigration or border security on that list? There are things this admin has done well: For example the Chip Act. There are lot more it's done poorly. My point is that we have no idea what Trump would have jacked up and done well in a second term. Any conjecture on that plane is exactly that: conjecture. We DO know that had he won, we'd almost be done with hearing his name ever mentioned again in the press, and we'd have avoided the trainwreck that has been Biden. I PROMISE you that when Biden wins again, we'll hear nothing but "Trump's fault" for another 4 years, not to mention the "Trump 2028" crowd who won't shut up until that moron is dead. If Biden wins, I'll be hanging it up concerning general elections until Trump is dead or he actually opts out of running.

Imagine a world where Trump won in 2020: The economy would have done...probably the same things it has done, with a little difference accounting for NOT locking down domestic oil production. Putin would still be putin and probably invaded...and we'd never have had to deal with Biden and we'd be 8 MONTHS AWAY FROM NEVER HEARING TRUMP'S NAME AGAIN. If Trump loses, guess what, we'll get to hear his name for the NEXT FOUR F'ING YEARS AGAIN! Not to mention deal with the ossification of policy and retardation that Biden's admin (let's admit it, Biden doesn't do a damn thing, his admin does everything). Please for the love of pete, can we just elect trump so we can get this F'ing pain over with already?

By this yardstick, 4 of our past 5 presidents were completely corrupt. Care to provide your way forward out of this problem?

Yes. However, as mentioned, somehow the President is exempt from the clearance investigation requirements while in office

Point of order: No we don't. I actively refuse. Someone wants me to call them something specific? That's fine, we can discuss that in that moment. But someone else's mental health issue is not mine to track until I meet them and I learn the specifics of their case. In my world, there are men and women. Some have mental health issues.

At my new company it's delineated who's operating and who the relief pilots are, which is kinda nice. If a relief guy needs the landing, we just audible at the plane, never had an issue with that. My prior outfit was slight less...organized.