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Funny thing though, if all of the instruments rely on one single sensor to function, a systemic failure is more likely. The thousands of scientists that form the consensus on climate change rely on temperature data from only three sources. Data that has been heavily and repeatedly revised over the years, and always towards supporting the popular theory. For example, using ship bilge temperature data instead of more accurate bouy data. Or how a well documented temperature spike in the middle of the 20th century had been slowly disappearing from the data sets despite no new data from that time. I could go into more examples of illogical temperature station changes that have been exposed, but it's not my job to do the research for you. When a global warming model successfully predicts the future climate, maybe I'll give it a fresh consideration. Until then, I'll file it with the "guaranteed" catastrophes of global cooling and overpopulation that enjoyed "scientific consensus" in their day.

I don't pretend to know what it takes to make a good co-pilot or AC in the heavy world, so I don't understand why non fighter guys think they know what it takes to build a solid wingman in a fighter squadron.

Appears the wait is over....AFPC updated with 19 Jun release.

I think the actual solution would be the opposite -- ensuring the PIT syllabus and graduation standards are high enough to take a MAF dude and make him a competent T-38 IP. I'd love to see MAF-background 38 IPs do a mandatory IEP (or multiple IEPs) to see what IFF is all about, too.

Incorrect. What, ~3 form rides in IFF? The only ones that get a dedicated form ride in the FTU are internationals. IFF/ FTU syllabi are built on the assumption that UPT taught them basics, like formation. I left Luke back in the day with almost 100 hrs. Punks now leave with <69 hrs. There is no room in the syllabus for re-visiting basics. When they suck at admin the end up on CAP and unable to do basic employment tasks like running FCR/TGP, using visual references to find a bomb wire or executing a valid threat reaction. There is only room on the iceberg for so many penguins. When students spend so many brain bytes on form/admin, they fvck up many other basic tasks. Worst case, they try to do everything, prioritize the wrong things and run jets together. This has happened and will continue to happen. Having an attitude of “these 20+ Dedicated form rides in UPT aren’t critical, they’ll fix that shit in IFF/FTU” shows that you don’t know what the hell you're talkingg about. Get over the butthurt. It’s not about IP ability/aptitude, it’s about IP skillset/experience.

Because this is how you get students who fly tac formation using the A-A TACAN, fly their turns using heading bugs and while looking at a PFR, execute the mechanics of the rejoin using numerical countdowns and airspeed cues, etc. In other words, all of the bad crutch techniques that have to be un-taught during the formation phase at IFF. Students who can't instead simply use the actual visual reference and "feel of the jet" techniques that are required to fly tac form while also being a good wingman. The techniques that, themselves, are only developed over many hours of having to fly tac form and also be an on-board systems and weapons manager, where you don't have time to use the crutches. Yet again, we are talking about experience, not talent.

Wow. When did they start using lube?

I bet your very active in your Homeowner's Association and was the kid who always reminded the teacher they forgot to assign homework on Friday afternoons.

Right. So after what, a decade of practically no major hurricane activity during the period models predicted would be hardest hit, the first big storm is evidence of GW? This is the type of shit I'm talking about. Absolutely anything that counters the theory is ignored, or scientifically-explained away after the models were wrong, while any otherwise normal or slightly abnormal occurrences are proof. https://www.thegwpf.org/as-polar-bear-numbers-increase-gwpf-calls-for-re-assessment-of-endangered-species-status/ The downside is that diverting resources to projects that fail to deliver the promised gains are keeping us from other projects more likely to deliver results that benefit humanity. It matters because there are many, many real threats to the environment that aren't getting the attention or money they deserve because some dipshits want to control the air. And it's astounding how little climate scientists talk about the biggest threat to global warming, the sun. Much in the same way people complain about military spending or welfare, national wealth is not finite, but neither is it infinite. I'd rather clean the oceans, or protect the rain forests, or the white rhinos, than burn it on a theory with more gaping holes in it than BQZip's family reunion, and a bunch of artists, actors, and politicians as it's biggest proponents.

Here's how you do it. You get the reserves to increase their AGR billets at all the UPT bases so you can take a former CAF pilot gone airlines and bring them back on a 6 mo, 1 yr, 2yr AGR tours while on mil leave from their company. You may have quite a few reservists willing to do the full-time thing for more AD points towards a reserve retirement. Even better, if there are ANG units close enough, you may find some ANG pilots to do it also.

Returning a salute is a lot different than bowing to a king. Bowing is a sign of submission and is not a military or US custom/courtesy. Returning a salute is a sign of mutual respect and is customary, especially for the CiC. Not returning a salute is a sign of disrespect. When on a historic foreign summit, why on earth would he disrespect a general of a country with whom he is trying to mend decades long strained relations? Trump returns salutes to a brand new E2. Sign of mutual respect...he's not showing submission to said E2. I haven't been to SERE in a while, but last I checked you are required by the geneva conventions to salute enemy officers who outrank you if you are a POW. But you aren't required to bow. Trump bows to no one. Apples and oranges. Of all people, I'd think a military member would understand the distinct difference between bowing and returning a salute. If he initiated the salute, that'd be one thing (still nothing like a bow). But he didn't.

We can’t, and we are. this is preceisly why open minded debate is so important. By the way, we’ve never had a public reckoning with past scientific certainties that turned out false: I recall being taught that acid rain would destroy crops by 1990 and the world would starve. How about that hole in the ozone layer 80s kids were forced to fear? “Every expert agrees this scary thing will happen soon, no time for questions, do what we say now!” has been a progressive TTP for a long time. Listening to each other politely and crafting arguments that convince is hard. Squashing disagreement and ordering compliance via fiat is easy. Which method would you prefer to be used on you?

Lol, I have read the data, and analysis. Using ship data was insane. Look at it this way. Don't you think it's odd that the adjustments to imperfect instruments always seem to work in the direction of the proposed theory? If you look at the adjustments made to weather stations, old temps get revised down and newer readings go up, even for stations that have had no surrounding infrastructure changes or equipment modifications. Similar to how satellite data, by far the most accurate measure of global temps, doesn't paint the nightmare scenario the true believers would have you believe. Where's the flooding? Super storms? Extinct polar bears? Hell, where's the predicted temperature increases? How many forecasts have to fail before you doubt the premise? How many scientists need to get caught bending the established rules of science? You should never trust a theory that demands the end of debate. Ask Judith Curry, she's a much better source than I am. I could be wrong. But the difference is that you trust the experts. I choose to read their literature, and it is lacking.

Copy, 11F not required to instruct T-38s.

No one is judging. $20 is $20.

I like chicks and I don’t fly C models.

"Somehow, despite a 100% promotion opportunity to major, we only promoted 80%"

I love you guys. Party at my place regardless of how this goes down.

I think we are all hoping you don't.

Yes, thank you, we all get it. I am getting promoted.

What do the smart folks here calculate as more valuable...years added on to AD retirement, or years/seniority lost at a major? I can't imagine a scenario where an additional year of AD retirement is worth a lost year of seniority/longevity.

Ha ha. I could totally see them doing this.

No, you're not working for 2/3s pay either. That''s the same incorrect logic as the working for 50% pay argument. It's fallacious reasoning based on retirement being only 50% of base pay and discounting what the 2.5% increase means in real dollar terms because 2.5% is a very small number. In simplest financial terms, at 20 years you're working for: (100% pay + any bonuses) + (2.5% added retirement) - $54K. The $54K is what a Lt Col would get if they retired at 20 and you forgo by continuing to work. The 2.5% retirement increase for a Lt Col averages about $3K per year past 20. It's also almost zero risk. Using a conservative 4% rate of return, you's have to earn $75K net to generate the same annual income stream increase. However, you're giving up the $54K in retirement income, so you subtract that from $75K to get $21K. This $21K net would get added to your full Lt Col pay when making a comparison to a civilian job. So what you're really working for in that 21st year is Lt Col salary + any bonuses + $21K. This would be a base income number that you would compare to a civilian job to see if you would do better or worse financially by leaving at 20 years. You'd also have to add in extra money to account for your tax free BAH/BAS pay. Granted there's tons of other factors that go into the decision of when to retire: QoL, you prefer money in the bank as opposed to a gov't pension/annuity that goes away when you die, risk tolerance, etc.

I'll save him the trouble.

Yes. Appropriate and to the letter of protocol.

Regardless...in today's DOD timelines....add 5 years min to the dates in this article. ATIS

Tried to register for ACSC and it said that my rank was not eligible, so I went back and changed my rank to Major and it still said not eligible. So it obviously doesn’t just look at the rank in your profile. Not putting too much stock in it, but here’s to hoping.

True, but ideally those guys would learn solid formation and admin habits in -38s, then start fine tuning those habits in IFF, then have admin and wingman 101 type stuff down solid by the time they get to the B-course. When they dont have solid admin, they become a hindrance to the formation and tactics suffer. Not that non fighter guys can't teach the basics to a certain standard but they just lack the experience to understand how mistakes in admin can snowball into larger problems down the road, i.e. a new wingman almost hitting his flight lead on a radar assisted trail recover at night because he wasn't taught solid habit patterns.

Use to be that if the list made it through Air University already that you could register for ACSC in correspondence and if it let you then you made major. Edit. Don’t know if it’s still that way. And that was active duty.

That is exactly what I meaon by further regulation. Health "insurance" stopped being "insurance" when the government forced people to enter into business where the business was forced to cover things it didn't want to cover. Here's a simple analogy you should be able to understand: Homeowners insurance. If the government forced the insurance business to take a new customer whose house had been burnt down last week and then also forced the insurance company to pay to replace this home after the fact...and then also force me to do business with said insurance company, then this is no longer insurance. It's government mandating that homeowners with insurance who have not had their house burnt down pay for someone's house who didn't pay into the insurance pool before it burnt down. Or even worse, forcing a homeowner who didn't want insurance to pay for the guy whose house burnt down. Like I said, this is not insurance. As for the rest of your post (which came across as quite emotional by the way), I'll gladly respond once we can understand each other as to what is and isn't insurance. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2016/11/01/why-should-the-young-and-the-healthy-bail-out-of-obamacare/#309d294f1f69

You have to believe the threat, which I do not.

My guess is that there are gonna be some surprises or something on this board and they are working on the “optics”. That is the only reason for them to hold onto approved results.

Despite rumors on the AF Promotions Page, the SRs do not have the CY17D lists as of 1300 EST today. Gen Kelly, AFPC 2Star, announced via email that the 19th will be the release date. I called AFPC Promotions today and talked to the OIC. She told me that the big wigs at AFPC were having a meeting about the CY17D board around lunch today. She says that she is “hoping” to get the lists to the SRs by the end of this week and release the board sometime next week but has been told to hold onto them for now. I pressed her for the reason for the delays and she said that from her standpoint there is no reason to delay the release and it seems like they are just holding onto the results for no apparent reason.

To me it always seems the majority of folks write off a military pension without really understanding how much money it takes to generate the same guaranteed income stream. People scoff because it's only $54K a year for a 20 year-O-5, but don't realize it's also pretty much zero risk. Using a low risk 4% rate of return for an equivalent investment, the day you retire as an O-5 it's like the government just deposited a $1.35 million check in your investment account.

A benificial "WTF": https://fortune.com/2018/06/12/aldis-scotch-whisky-masters-gold/ ATIS

Make it say "doesn't want to leave, won't quit" and that describes 69% of the GS workforce. The AF gets a shit product for way too much money with these useless individuals. Theyll get the same shit product for way to much money with an indentured pilot force who stops giving zero fucks at year 10 of 20.

None of this matters. As stated in earlier thread by Danger Raptor-5000 is self aware and will self correct for shitty UPT product.

Interesting. I guess by that you mean something like having the gov't say Insurance couldn't deny people with pre-existing conditions is "further regulation." And fuck poor people right? How stupid of them to get poor in the first place! Like my dumb father-in-law who was a PhD in Chemistry. He was working for Exxon, and got HIV through a blood transfusion in the 80's and died on social assistance while raising 3 kids living on his Sis-in-laws farm for free. Like my stupid brother who put himself through mechanic school and graduated in 2008...then couldn't find a job for 3 years to pay off that technical training. So he flipped burgers for that time, then put himself through web-development school a few years ago. Your denigration of other human beings as a "cost center" is rather misplaced. The fact that you produce more "value," and think that relates directly to your worth as a human being is a gross misjudgement of what people on this very board say matters - QoL, family, etc. It's the thinking that plunged this county into the 2008 recession. A bunch of disturbingly rich people thinking they were of more value, hence their enormous paychecks, just trying to get richer no matter what the cost to society. Military members live in a very insular bubble with generally supremely healthy people all around them. We shit on coworkers who get into medical issues and "can't deploy because they're malingering." I've had 2 back surgeries paid for by the AF, the first when I was 20. If I wasn't AD, I'd be the exact person you're talking about being "more valuable" than. I hate socialism and communism as well as the son of a Cold War vet can (doubly so after reading the Gulag Archipelago), but I'm not convinced capitalism is the lens through which we need to view chronic health problems and treatment.

You bite your commie mouth there Stalin.

So knowing this, is it advisable to send FAIPs to IFF to at least try to minimize what they don’t know? Does the recency of IFF experience correlate to B-course performance?

Unfortunately, in order for someone to learn how to be a good wingman, their teacher needs to have some idea of what that means. That's not about talent, that's about experience.

IF you haven't looked at 12 years of emails to this point, you never would have.

Yeah but let’s not forget the generation gap. Face it, a lot of young guys are millennial p-ssies. I had a young guy telling me how bad life as a new guy for some addt’l work he was assigned, I had to explain to him that having to talk to retired pilots about new aircraft technology that took up his xbox free time wasn’t the same as constant deploying then TDY plus the myriad of other crap that jaded my generation. Bottom line, I crush young guys when they complain because they are too inexperienced and stupid to know any better.

I can apply for retirement this Christmas. I ordered name tapes yesterday, and tried a set on for purchase on Monday. I know you pajama wearers don't care, but all the rest of the folk I've personally talked to are super hyped. I can't frigging wait to get out of this gray abortion of a uniform. It never fit right, wore right and the shoes were starting to get them pressed and cleaned. I went through OTS Mar-Jun in the old heavy weight ABU's and hated life for how rough they were to do anything in. OCPs seem to fit the same as BDU's, which is fantastic. Plus...PATCHES MOTHER FUCKERS! Finally some unit pride and options for morale/friday patches.

Really? That went away with nose art, squadron bars, and O clubs. We're way past heritage into the realm of corporate blob.

My perspective is clearly different. Having witnessed the un-brainwashing of a couple T-38 guys who got banished to the dreaded C-130J (where they loved it and did great things in combat while getting shot at), I can only assume that T-38 guys still scoff at things like KC-x to Kadena or Travis (sweet locations), U-28 and C-130J (where they'll get more real world missions than any other airframes around), or anything that's not an F-22 or F-35. Got it. I was bi-polar on my track and drop-nights too. Cannon certainly isn't appealing, as with the Offutt assignments...but wow, perspective boys. There's a preponderance of good locations for the heavies, on top of the fact that the pilot shortage makes a heavy-fighter crossflow much more likely right now. I recall seeing T-38 drops that had a total of 1 ops fighter and dudes being stoked to be FAIPing and not stuck in Minot or Barksdale. Open the aperture. If you call it good, it becomes good. Call it bad, it becomes bad. It's all perspective.

For whatever reason, I never hear the proposal of increasing the pilot commitment. Let's say we move it to 15 years or even 20. Of course a number of people will say hell no but I wouldn't be surprised if the AF reached their SUPT recruiting goals. In the 1950s, it was 3 yrs and a degree wasn't a requirement. Then in the 60s, a degree requirement was established and 4 yrs for SUPT. In 70s to 5yrs then to 6yrs. 80s went to 8yrs and in the 90s to 10 years. The AF NEVER has a problem of recruiting pilots. Keeping them in during an airline hiring boom is the primary issue. One other major problem in keeping pilots is that most are single when joining and marry during their commitment. The spouse becomes a key player in their decision making, and the family comes in second place during his/her military career development unfortunately. In addition to a number of changes in the near future in helping retention, they need to seriously consider increasing the pilot commitment even to 20 years. You can't logically compete with the airline industry in quality of life and income for pilots. If the USAF wants to meet their pilot numbers, increase the commitment. Enough young people will bite on the increased SUPT commitment especially after viewing Top Gun 2 Maverick.