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I have been dropping my schedule to zero (I'm LGA based) for about 2 years now. I've been here for three. Like all airlines, the more time you are willing to invest into learning the system and the contract, the better able you are to make it work for you. I can't even count how many guys I've explained my system to, guys who claim they want to be able to drop more of their schedule, and after walking them through it they tell me it sounds like too much work. And it's true, it's certainly more work than just filling out your preferences for the month, and getting a schedule to fly. But as I said, on an okay month I fly 50 hours and get paid for 90. To do that I spend about 20 minutes on my monthly bid, and about 15 minutes a day from the 18th to the 28th working the trading systems to dump my schedule. Then let's say 10 minutes a day during the month keeping an eye out for trips to fit. I'm no mathematician, but I think I'm still ahead doing that. There's a joke here, American Airlines pilots only hate two things. The wAAy things have always been, and change. The airline is never going to make it easy for guys to have an empty schedule. In their mind that's exactly what reserve is for, and the trade-off is that you don't get to pick what you fly. Ultimately I'm glad that more people aren't willing to take the time to learn to do what I do. Most of them are much more senior than me if they were all running the same hustle, I wouldn't be able to. There's no right or wrong answer on commuting, but it is a simple discussion. You don't get to do any of the things I'm talking about as a commuter. The best you can hope for is to drop your schedule to zero at your assigned base, and pick up regular trips at the base you live closer to. That's an improvement, but it's still a grind. Often it seems like the conversation comes down to a military spouse wanting to live by his or her family after a decade or two of following the member around the world. I try to explain that they're making a choice between who they're going to see more, their family or their spouse. I guess if you're only going to do it for 11 or so years before you have to retire maybe the numbers balance out. It's often hard to convey to someone just how different the job is between commuting and not commuting. It's way more than just driving to work. It's more nights at home. Less stress. Exponentially more opportunities for easy money. Flexibility for how you balance work and family life. I was always able to conceptually understand that before I was a commuter, but after even just a year of finishing a trip and immediately transitioning into "how the hell am I going to get home" mode, hoping someone else didn't have the jump seat, hoping that a passenger wouldn't show up, watching my commuter flights get canceled due to weather, it wears on you. But anyways, yes it's possible, and no it's not a pandemic thing.

The World Famous Bayou Militia is tentatively planning an inexperienced hiring board on Sunday, 11 July 2021 at NAS JRB New Orleans, LA. Obviously COVID will play a part in this, so be prepared to flex. Applicants should have a current PCSM, resume, transcripts, and letters of recommendation ready to submit prior to any visit. Please direct all questions to 122fspilothiring@gmail.com. I won’t respond to DMs, inquiries, etc. on this platform. Nuke Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

https://www.vulture.com/2021/02/gina-carano-fired-from-the-mandalorian-lucasfilm-star-wars.html#:~:text=12%2C 2021-,Gina Carano Fired From The,'Abhorrent' Social-Media Posts&text=The Mandalorian actress and MMA,went viral on social media. I've been following this story in my feed and honestly, the biggest hypocrisy here, is by attempting to silence Gina Carano for her relatively benign post, they actually upheld the core point of her post. While I'm not a fan of the "compare everything to Hitler" cliche, nothing in her post attempts to glorify Hitler, or deflect blame onto Hitler's victims. In fact, she ends the post with a pretty honest question, "explain to me how this is different?" And rather than offering a rational explanation, people decided to silence her. Whats further infuriating, is it somehow became socially acceptable in the last decade for democrats to call Republicans Hitler, but pointing out that this division is what Hitler would have wanted is somehow wrong.

I can't agree with this point entirely... because we simply don't have the renewable technology to handle a majority, much less 100%, of our energy needs. Not to mention, our continued technological breakthroughs in oil/gas technology are the exact reason the US beat all other nations in reducing CO2 in 2019 and 2020. Coal is the greatest CO2 emitter, bar none. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, we're shutting down our coal-fired plants at a record pace, and are able to deliver a much cleaner energy product to the end customer. So in a really ironic way, we need to continue to develop oil/coal infrastructure to make them less impactful on the environment. Fair point on the economics of the pipeline, but don't cite the NRDC. They're left of the Sierra Club in their environmental activism (near Greenpeace), and are hardly impartial on the topic. Fun fact, I had to deal with them protesting outside of a power plant that was switching from coal to natural gas. What were they protesting for, you ask? They wanted the entire thing shut down. The only power plant next to a metro area. Genius. Electric cars just shift the energy need to something else... and in this case its the US power grid. You seriously think our power grid is prepared for an all-electric car surge in usage? For an electric car to go 100 miles, it needs around the same amount of electricity as a "average American home." So we're adding ~200 million homes to the grid by 2030... but without fracking to provide cheap (clean-ish) natural gas power? Hello poverty, or rolling blackouts. At the end of the day, someone has to pay the piper. All this plan does is shift the polluting burden from the end consumer (me and you) to energy companies, who are going to be running their power plants ragged just trying to keep up with more demand. I think we're on a good path, actually. Electric cars are naturally finding their spot in the market, primarily for folks who are doing short-distance commuting in cities. Gas cars are becoming more efficient (but way more turbo-laggy, another topic for another thread). Power plants are switching to cheaper and cleaner forms of energy, and the US is looking at installing offshore wind. On the future front, US companies are actually close to mass-producing biofuels that could power planes, and Lockheed continues to claim they're getting closer to a fusion reactor. Couple that with the steady increase in energy efficiency among US homes and our electronic devices... and we're not looking too shabby. Despite what one might read elsewhere. End point: I'm sorry, but all of these "green new deal" plans, and electric car mandates read like an economic suicide pact in the pursuit of some sort of moral panacea. Rather than pushing for "zero emissions" (an impossibility), we should look to foster a market that can reach "lower emissions" (reality). Which is what we're doing.

I haven't posted in a while, but this thread got my attention. Define "many", please. I can't think of a single current sitting CC in the AD Herk community that didn't do residence IDE. I know of enough in other MAF communities to be able to confidently say that a vast majority of sitting CCs completed IDE in residence. I don't mean to call you out, but I think we owe it to the OP and anyone reading now and in the future to keep the conversation based on fact.

Uh, are you serious? Any time a mayor decries an officer in her district, that would be the same as the President calling you a disgrace before your command finished their investigation.

I honestly wish I had something to reference to you. But I dont. I had special insight because I was married to a cop. I spent a lot of time at her place of work, doing ride-alongs, hanging out with her friends etc... On the risk, its completely incomparable. There are so many moving parts. For example, the fact that LE accepts risk daily for years without reprieve and military only accepts it in short duration for deployments. LE doesn't choose the time and place of their encounters but the US military doctrinally only operates with initiative. LE normally works autonomous as a single unit where as in the military the minimum maneuver unit is 3 in the USMC and 4 in the USA, and operations outside the wire are always supported by a robust network of ISR, air support and logistics. Doctrinely the US military strives for a 3-to-1 force ratio, LE hopes to have 2-to-1. Etc... LE routinely accepts "unknown" risk, doctrinally the US DoD does not do that. The biggest evidence though that discredits the comparison is the very recognition by the US DoD that apprehending a target is a much higher risk than killing them, hence we prefer to drone strike targets if at all possible because its lower risk. As far as obligations: LE officers are not like military. They are civilians first and foremost and they can quit their job any time they want. They do not have robust survivor benefits and they don't fall under any special laws. They therefore can quit at any moment and they can't be ordered to assume a risk with a known detriment, like entering an active shooter situation in a grade school, alone. However, it is completely legal for me to order 20 enlisted to take a hill even if I have good reason to believe that 15 of them will die doing so. If anyone of them refuses that order, they are now deserters and are criminally liable. To compensate that we have robust survivor benefits for their dependents and family. I suggest reading some of the classical ethics behind UOF. Double-effect doctrine is something all officers should be familiar with in the military and it outlines how Western society justifies homicide in any instance. (Whether its a police involved shooting, war, self-defense, whatever have you.)

Very interested in this. I’m not an expert, and from the cheap seats it is definitely striking that the standard in court as I understand Graham (not an expert or lawyer) is narrowly constrained to the moment force was used. There seems to be lots of room for failures leading up to that moment, which is troubling when we’re talking about American citizens. What do you recommend I read? What insight would you be willing to share? I’m not willing to go as far as to say that an officer must be right IN FACT when using deadly force, else face murder charges, but as [I understand] it stands right now they can be very very wrong and not pay for their mistake in the same way that an armed citizen would. Help me understand what I don’t know.

Well true, there are hustles to be had everywhere...but I'm speaking strictly QOL without having to "hustle," especially for commuters. There is a reason guys get on a WB and don't upgrade until they can move to the left seat. Same reason we see guys bid off NB Capt back to WB FO. It's truly like working for an entirely different airline, and it's also a great place for commuters. Even reserve (at DAL anyway), is a great deal...so much so that often times even the plug gets (sometimes forced into) a line because so many senior guys bid reserve. Even on short call on a WB, I'd go fly my cub around...can still get cell signal at 500 ft lol. But since you brought it up, on months I bid a line, I'd do the same thing. I'd drop my entire schedule to zero, then pick up more efficient trips. Generally for me that meant a 4-day trip that was actually 3 days of work due to being able to deviate DH on the front or back end. Most months I'd just do 9 days of actual work, while being paid for an additional 4 days (~63 hours total). I'm more of a days off type of guy...63 hours is more than enough for me. At DAL, due to staffing, it's generally MUCH harder to drop your entire schedule on a NB fleet.

Careful, last time I called him out he went and found my last 18 posts and down voted all of them, lol.

This is a pretty accurate breakdown of the process. What cannot be overstated is the impact individual personalities have on this process. My experience has been that hiring authorities will very, very rarely directly tell a prospective CC that they are in their plan. CC selection remains one of the least transparent processes in an officer's development. Based on the daynightindicator's comment above, this appears to be a substantial difference between MAF and CAF. Furthermore, even if you're told one-on-one by a hiring authority that you're "in the plan", that is almost exclusively followed with a caveat of "but things can change." These changes can be anything from the hiring authority changing his/her mind, to having a ranking officer implant a hire into a wing's game plan. Edit to add: like most things, timing is everything. You have a 50% chance of finding yourself in a situation where the wing commander/hiring authority that's in the seat when PE nominations are due will not be the person that does the actual hiring after he/she leaves command in a typically two-year summer PCS cycle... yet another impact of individual personalities.

It's certainly a complicated issue, Clark. The only definitive conclusion I've been able to come up with is that every single congressman and senator that votes for war, war spending, or any form of military intervention should be obligated to send one of their family members into the fray. It's easy to ship someone else's kid to the front line when yours is doing coke at a frat house at an Ivy League school; a little skin in the game would go a long way.

De-escalation training should be mandatory for all cities to obtain insurance. It protects all parties involved and when force is applied it can be reasonably assumed to have been the last resort. LEOs encounter way too much risk everyday to do otherwise.

Malley is a contrarian, who defaults to engagement-with-adversaries worldview As a Middle East specialist, that’s where he executes this approach. He also supported negotiations with North Korea, essentially agreeing with Trump. https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/08/07/how-trump-s-iran-threats-could-backfire-in-north-korea-pub-72751 He isn’t specifically or uniquely sympathetic to Iran. However, Iran sees itself as a major power broker and wants to be treated as such. Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer, supports a similar approach. I don’t necessarily agree with this position, but it could be a viable approach. Nothing else seems to be working.

On the subject of the draft / conscription, this podcast was worth the listen: ‎Angry Planet: Service Without a Smile: A History of the Draft on Apple Podcasts Question for the forum: Is the draft not just a tool for military manpower? Could it be used to build a shared national experience in a segment(s) of the younger generations (17-25 year olds)? The draft gets beat up pretty bad in the podcast, not hard to do as the professor interviewed lays out the major problems with it particularly recently in the Vietnam era but maybe it is what (overall) we need in our society among other programs to foster a connection(s) between the different racial, socio-economic, geographically separated, etc... groups in our country.

So how's the last couple weeks been going for everyone else? You know, since Thursday?

That's how my boss and senior rater (O-6, 1-star) both described the process to me, with a few caveats. The ops community requires people who want to command to apply to the command board: everyone (for ops) is a volunteer (no automatically making the command list, though as an IDE grad you're very competitive, if not a shoe-in). Some other non rated communities are "all in" (everyone in the career field at a certain rank is considered for command, no choice to opt out) AETC prefers to hire off it's list (required, but with caveats), but other MAJCOMs have bargained with AETC for a limited number of extra command spots. Usually a trade for AETC command spots in exchange for MAJCOM commitment to send IPs to fly the line. AMC specifically got command slots in UPT wings because it argued it was providing the bulk of IPs (more than it's fair share), there should be at least some MAF-selected leadership there to mentor it's people. I'm sure ACC has something similar to get 11F guys with no AETC experience into an AETC command spot. But if you want to command in AETC, you significantly increase your chances by being on the AETC list (need to have completed an AETC tour to apply for the AETC list) or both lists. My bosses both said the AF has gotten a lot better from what they've seen in the last few years about taking personal factors (join spouse, family considerations, etc) into consideration for assignments, including for command. Their view has been that Wg/CCs and AFPC seem to be more willing to work with individuals recently, versus when they got hired where it was "here's what you got." But the bar napkin still is there, so having a good network still helps significantly. The process sounded similar to how the myvector process works for regular assignments now, with bids from commanders and individuals, and AFPC review before the assignment is finalized. From what I understand, you can't really say "flying squadron only", but you can decline an offered position if you don't want it. If you decline, you won't get another opportunity to compete on that command board anymore. But supposedly the AF won't be vindictive anymore against your career if you decline command (at least if you decline before public release/announcement finalized), you just go back into the normal assignments pool.

Oct 2019 from what I found in a .69 sec google search. My general thought (not directed at Pawnman): Police do need to be held accountable, but they should be helped with better/more consistent training and their leadership needs to have their backs. I don’t mean cover up crimes, but stop throwing them under the bus the second some zero-context video hits the news. Let’s gather the facts before demonizing an officer; stop letting the media get away with ramming unchecked narratives down the public’s throats. To this specific incident: The video sure doesn’t look good, but what’s the context, what happened in the preceding minutes or hours to this situation? Had the guy been getting in the police’s faces, touching them, ignoring commands for a long time? Had he threatened them verbally? Had they given him numerous warnings to disperse/get back? Many of us have been in numerous situations killing people where some fucking dipshit who wasn’t there starts their virtuous armchair quarterbacking - how about said dipshit has the full picture before questioning or accusing those present in the moment. Again, the 10 sec clip doesn’t look great, but I will not judge this officer or any others until the full picture is determined. I wasn’t there, we’re any of you spear chuckers?

Just an update, ASAM no longer falls under the EOS, it reports direct to the Vice. And the AMC rated from the current class all outplaced to Scott, minus a HAF and a 365.

I did a stint at CPZ, too, after I retired non-current and had a great time yanking gear and hanging out with the 20-something Capts and FAs as an ol' 40-something dude. I enjoyed every day except payday; made under $17,000 my first year. Most importantly, learned a ton about 121 operations that made the leap to the majors much easier than it would have been directly from Big Blue's loving arms.

That old guy probably figured using his age as and excuse he could disobey orders, start touching the police (you libtards would be screaming assault if tables were turned). Police didn’t use excessive force...he couldn’t handle a small shove and it’s plausible he over acted and self-injured himself in the process. Stay at home old man!! Didn’t his leftist friends tell him if the police weren’t going to get him, the virus would. Root cause....stupidity. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

You too! It might be worth sending an email to the POC or submission email address to confirm they got it. With them hopefully hiring a primary/alternate to two squadrons I’m looking forward to four of us getting picked up!

I love this dudes channel. His use of whiteboards makes me wonder if he went to some weird engineering nerd WIC or something.

Engineering Explained on YouTube addresses this question. BL: not as impossible to convert as you’d think over the next 20 years. https://youtu.be/7dfyG6FXsUU

It’s short sighted. You can push the timeline back indefinitely and say that the science isn’t good enough or we need more research. When is science good enough? I don’t believe that’s a policy. We have already likely caused irreversible grievous harm to the long term climate. We likely had by 1990. How much more do we accept before we start doing something? What is your stance when you realize that virtually all scientists agree that renewables will never be more economically feasible than fossil fuels? No amount of science can come up with a perfect solution for the problem that we’re faced with, so I don’t believe waiting for science to magically come up with a perfect solution is a strategy. We have solutions that are ready to be developed and implemented now. Put another way, we can marginally improve our short term 5 year capabilities against China by upgrading our F-16s. That will keep us flying F-16s until 2050 at the cost of diverting funds from other research. The bad news is we’ll be f*cked in 10 years as we neglected the long term outlook. The truth is maybe we need to cancel those F-16 AESAs today, accept a short term capability loss, while diverting time and energy to future capes like NGAD. Also, the random side bar about how world leaders have to take jets to meetings is a distraction from the point of the conversation and not in line with the argument. No shit, leaders fly in airplanes to get places safely and quickly. I never saw you complaining about Trump taking Air Force One when he could have flown commercial.

Well you're right man, it's a good problem to have; and while optimism for the airlines is great, I think IDE offers you more security and promotion potential. Just reading your post, I feel like you already know what you want to do. Don't follow the crowd man. Make your own path.

Oh man. It's a shame those airline interviews treat your baseops.net reputation as important as your flying hours. You need at least 1500 likes I hear to even get in the door. 😂

He’s probably more interested in whether you like dog shit fake syrup or not...says a lot about a man’s character!

stop posting your trolling Shazaam shit in irrelevant threads?

We're representing minorities by removing minorities. Just like when Land O' Lakes repeated history by keeping the land and removing the Indian.

Nothing really gets stone walled-Texas can enact whatever programs it wants for Texans pretty much on its own if it was important enough to them. And Texas has the resources to do so if it wanted to. States don't have to wait for federal funding or laws, especially the bigger states whose economies rival other nations. For example, if universal healthcare was so important to Californians, they could implement it without federal funding. It would likely raise their state taxes, but there's nothing federally that bans them from implementing it. If it's a good idea, other states will do so, and maybe eventually other states will get on board and vote at the national level. And California has done things like that in the past (like for car emissions standards). Smaller states will have trouble doing things unilaterally; they likely have a much smaller economy, so it's harder to implement government programs if they want to; they have to lobby for outside help from other states. Without the Senate, big states can screw over small states, as well as the people within those states. For example, federal funding for programs (from federal taxes levied on individuals and businesses) could be diverted from small states into big states, and the small states would have no recourse due to their small population. Or big states could decide "nuclear power is great, let's do it, but where should we put the waste?" and vote to put it in say South Dakota, because SD wouldn't have enough representatives to block that vote. You do see this issue within states as well, with the conflict between urban centers and rural areas. So the even dividing down to states isn't perfect. But it helps protect minorities (not just race/ethnicity in this context, but rural vs urban, big vs small businesses, industrialization vs environmentalism, etc) within the population. Otherwise, democracies (both direct and representative) can devolve into mob rule or a significant consolidation of power once a majority realizes it can vote for things that only benefits then.

@Steve Davies Red Eagles got a mention today on Joe Rogan Podcast with Thunderbirds driver/MMA Ref

I've not seen many cops thrown under the bus. Usually the opposite.