Leaderboard

Shack. I had a long talk with one of my mentors about this stuff today, and included the concerns expressed here. He said essentially the exact thing that Rainman said, and has weathered the ups and downs of the same course we are on for the last 28 years. Amazing the perspective when you find a guy who's BTDT and is willing to offer advice. Bang-Bang Guidance is a great way to put it... One note to add: In the opinion of said individual, you'd better be willing to sprint the rest of the time you're in if you plan on staying to 20 and beyond. There is no rest, there is no "I have arrived" assignment. Those moments come and are much like brushing past someone in a crowd - in a flash, they are gone, time to get back to business. It's not the end of the world if you don't get school on your major's board - your career prostects arent sunk unless you believe they are. Im interested about the coming 2-3 years in light of the coming hiring thaw WRT the airlines. We aren't there yet, but it's coming. There will be plenty of work for all of us to do, and some will realize they don't want to stay on over all the BS and multiple deployments and missed family time and BS non-mission, non-kinetic horseshit that goes along with staying. I can't blame anyone for that. I don't think ill of them in the slightest. Staying on as a career is real bitch. More would do it if it wasn't. In light of this recent corn-holling the experienced past-over dudes received, I'm sure there are plenty of dudes out there that are having serious doubts about staying in, taking the bonus or even making it a career... I'm not surprised that young dudes are worried about getting queep done. That's what they see OLD DUDES worried about. Right or wrong, you have to know your shit in the jet, be an EP/IP/WIC dude, get your masters, do your school, get the right job opportunities and strats if you can if you want to stay and get promoted. There's no way around it. Bloom where you're planted, don't bitch about where you grow. The rest is all timing, and ultimately timing is everything (Rule #2). When all else fails, FIDO - Fuck It, Drive On. This is also the time (Sr Capt - Major) that the careerists start to show their true colors. They bust out the industrial strength knee pads and go to work. Friends who were once friends will turn out not so friendly - what Boyd was talking about in his "To Be or To Do" speech. I've seen it and it sucks. As was said before, I think the take rate on the bonus in the coming 2-3 years will be very telling indeed. If the bonus goes away, watch out - the flood gates will open. Right now, the leadership knows that they have to get to numbers closer to what T. Mike attempted all those years ago - 316,000 - 320,000. Money is running short - the country is broke, mired in 3 wars we can't seem to end. There will be a continuing shrinking personnel, training and infrastructure footprint... If you've got a senior guy whose ear you can bend and bring this subject up, I highly encourage you to do so - Old dudes offer great learning. Chuck

If I don't spend another day of my life anywhere near that shit hole it will be too soon! Here is what I think we should do... Petraeus should gather all the Tribal Elders, "Gov't Officials" and even all the terrorist leaders and take them to some mountain top with a nice view of a remote valley (plenty of remote valleys in that dirt hole of a country). Then they should just set off a small scale nuke in the valley for them to look at... "Listen here you ass clowns, we're all leaving... we're all leaving now and we aren't coming back! If we hear you even say as much as a Jihad knock knock joke we're gonna turn this place into a giant bowl of glass like we should have done almost 10 yrs ago! Any questions?!?" I'm guessing a bunch of them will run across the boarder to Pakistan to let their buddies know, so hopefully word will travel fast over there! BTW... When was it that they announced the troop withdrawls from Japan, Germany, and Korea again?

Great points Chuck, but here is the $120K question... Why now? There are targeted goals of getting down to these numbers, but the AF has no idea how many folks they are going to be losing in the next year or so. I'll tell you one thing though, if the line down the street and around the corner for pilots who put in for this latest VSP train wreck was any indication then our pilot force is going to get decimated of experience (Of course the SECAF being surprised that so many pilots applied for VSP should tell you that senior management doesn't quite get it). I'd say the hundreds of pilots who were hoodwinked into applying before being told they weren't going to be considered are pretty much out the door at their first opportunity. A buddy of mine in the Res said he called the local ATP guy to get that knocked out as he is starting to put his stuff together to put in apps in the next year. The guy had to put him on a wait list because he was already pretty booked for most of the summer... mostly AD guys! Obviously nobody is going to be advertising that they are going to be jumping ship at 10 yrs, so we won't know until it actually happens, but I think Big Blue jumped the gun on this one and will have to turn around in the next 1-3 yrs and have to pay these same guys to come back. Let me just throw this out there as food for thought. I did my fraud, waste, and abuse throw away Masters research paper on the FAA raising the pilot retirement age from 60 to 65 and actually learned a lot about airline hiring. Prior to 9/11 the airlines obviously hired from two pools... military trained pilots and those who either originally went to an aviation school (Embry Riddle, South Dakota, etc) or just did it the really hard way of paying their way up through the ratings from FBO's etc. The aviation schools are really expensive since you have to pay for the actual flying on top of the normal tuition and since 9/11 there have been very few jobs out there... naturally their enrollments went way down and hasn't improved much in the past 8+ yrs. Why would you pay a lot of extra money for 4 yrs knowing there was no chance of getting a job when you graduated? So what was probably closer to a 50-50 hiring group between civilian and military is now pretty much going to be mostly military. I wasn't a math major, but this is what I see... 10 yr Maj w/ 3,000 hrs + 9 yrs of shitty deployments + good dudes getting booted at 15 yrs + Southwest hiring + Res job = Mass Exodus and a Decimated Pilot Force

Its better to celebrate of how he lived than mourn how he died.

The bummer of this whole mess is that everyone knows that if you get passed over twice that you can get kicked out, but when was the last time they decided to not offer continuation for not making Lt Col? They have pretty much offered it to everyone and now just stopped with no warning! I know several guys who were offered continuation through 20 as Capts! 5 yrs ago there weren't a ton of folks getting hired to fly on the outside and of course the economy wasn't the best, so the majority of these folks might have stayed in anyway. The problem now is that there are going to be plenty of flying jobs on the outside and these guys hitting 10 yrs have been getting bent over with TDYs and deployments the entire time. Just the fact alone that the airlines are going to start hiring again in significant numbers would have hit the AF pilot force pretty hard, but now Big Blue hasn't given them ANY incentive to stay. In fact, I'd say they are actually giving them an incentive to leave. The Guard and Res are going to be lucky enough to be flooded with talent because I think most people learned the biggest lesson of post 9/11 separations to fly for the airlines is to keep your day job! AD is going to be definitely hurting for experienced pilots in a few years, especially with this back door RIF. Another unintended consequence... with continuation possibly ending and a lot of folks leaving at the end of their ADSC there are going to be a lot less bodies to put in the CAOC and OEF deployments. Are 365s going to be the new norm for everyone in the AF now? Not helping the "stay in the AF" recruitment team any! AFPC also just non-vol'd anyone with 120 gates to staff this year (few exceptions). Are they going to have to turn around next year and drag those folks back to the cockpit? I'm sure many would rather go back to fly, but what a pain to have to PCS again so soon. It is easy enough to sit here and say how dumb they are for doing these things and we may very well not have the Big Picture, but Big Blue has proven one thing over and over and over again... we LOVE to repeat mistakes!!!