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Where do you think 460 hours as a captain would fall within the current Army aggregate of experience? I got news for everybody, the days of 1000 hours in a deployment have been over for a decade. Her hours are completely in line with the average for her year group as well as the wider seen average across the combined Warrant/RLO company pilot population. There was nothing abnormal about this crew mix and as you said it was entirely procedural produced risk we had learned to live within and normalize. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

All those are problems that should be fixed, but let's not forget that they were within 100' of their assigned altitude while hand flying at night on NVGs and crossing bridges. Anyone that's flown low level at night on NVGs and always been exactly on altitude, raise your hand..... yeah, that's what I thought. Zero people, ever. Yes, they should have been at their assigned altitude, but the real problem here was the FAA allowing helos to fly directly under landing aircraft. No reasonable person should have looked at that procedure for five seconds and thought that was ok. Maybe that's not what the procedure was designed for, but that is apparently how it was used. Procedures need to be developed with a buffer under the assumption that aircraft will be a little off airspeed/altitude/position without causing a safety of flight issue.

It is a Tanker that the Saudis bought along with their own E-3's, it has the same airframe as the E-3, 707-320 but a -135 boom and drogues on the wingtips with CFM-56-2 engines. Built along side with the Navy E-6's and RAF and French E-3's. The last 707's built.

In my new hire airline class, I was next to oldest with about 4400 hours total. There were a number of young guys in their mid-20s who commented that my total time was pretty low for such an old coot (44 at the time). I just smiled and passed on the question but I would have liked to explain to them that there is a difference between experience and repetition. Flying boxes and checks from point A to B isn't quite the same as a 35 minute air-to-air sortie in a F-104 where 5 minutes in taxi time was included or an F-4 range sortie with 3 strafe, 6 bomb, and 3 more rocket events.

No, that's very true. In the tanker it would take far more hours to be experienced. 8 hours where 75% of it is reading a magazine obviously doesn't compare to 1.5 hours in a Viper. But part of this is what we consider experienced. I don't think of a guy with one assignment on the line as experienced. There's "Mission Ready" and then there's "experienced." Another element is time. You can shove 10,000 hours into one year (if that was possible) and it wouldn't make you experienced necessarily. Some things just take time for the brain to process and for you personally go through enough scenarios and enough experiences to be, experienced. I've got about 2,500 hours in 7 years at the airlines and I think I'm realistically just now starting to be experienced. I don't fly much so it took me a bit longer than it might take someone else, but we have lots of captains now with 2 years at AA. They are qualified, but they are not experienced. Anyways, still agree with busdriver and others who blame DCA as the root cause:

Mayorkas should rot in a federal hard-core pound-in-the-butt prison (in gen pop) with the murderers and rapist for what he did to our nation. That’s not weaponizing the DoJ, that’s being just and punishing him for his treason.

Yeah, this. The question of using the autopen is just one of many threads to start pulling. The real questions I'd hope to get insight on would be the reality of Joe Biden's mental state throughout his presidency, who exactly was making decisions on his behalf, and the extent of those decisions.

Preemptive pardons are a novelty. So is a shadow governor using an autopen. It'll all probably go to SCOTUS, and perhaps for good reason.

Trump says he ended weaponization of Fed Govt. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-the-weaponization-of-the-federal-government/ Now he says Biden pardons (which I didn't agree with) are void and now he will go after them. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-biden-pardons-now-113131037.html Isn't that, going after political enemies, the definition of a weaponized DOJ? Hypocrite.

Agreed 100% with your last few posts, I think some folks aren’t understanding what you’re saying WRT “experience” and the implications to AF decisions recently. Hours is a poor metric to judge “experienced” but it’s a good metric to judge “inexperienced” because there’s no training that can take effect below a certain threshold and I assert that principle applies across communities. That said, not sure experience of the MP plays into this since the procedure design was so bad and controller so complacent. There’s an over-emphasis on altitude deviation when it appears the entire RW crew had zero SA on actual CRJ location they were instructed to follow. It’s a shit procedure and they flew it poorly (including the IP). I get it, I’ve made a lot of mistakes but holy shit the risk acceptance of DCA with RW training flights flying under you is totally unacceptable.

Depends on the community. I can’t speak for Army RW, but a 1000 hr IP in a fighter is fairly experienced. Flight hours cannot necessarily be compared across communities to determine comparable experience/capability levels.

I’ll check when I go back to work and see if I still have it. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

It is. But the implication I was disagreeing with (while agreeing with the rest of the post) was this: In media she's being described as experienced. She's not. That matters in a discussion about what went wrong and what to do to fix DC. 1,000% Way back in the beginning of the thread I said this was the fault of the FAA for allowing the dumpster fire of DC to persist. But a secondary causal factor is the military continually reducing the experience of its pilots. Partly because you're going to be off altitude more often when you are inexperienced, and partly because you're absolutely not going to know when to refuse a procedure that, even if permitted, is retarded.

Agreed, except for the hours part. Sorry, but we shouldn't pretend like just because the Army does something as a lazy habit, that it somehow imparts upon them a superhuman ability to attain proficiency faster than the rest of us mortals. 460 hours is dog shit. Doesn't matter if you're flying helicopters, Jets, or learning to crochet. That is a tiny number of hours for someone operating aircraft that requires high levels of proficiency and a safety emphasis. Obviously we are dealing with the same problem in the Air Force. When I got out we were sending guys to IP School after their first assignment and all they knew was flights out of the Died. But that's more of the same "normalization of deviance" that created the DC problem in the first place. I'm not going to comment on her as a person because I know nothing else about her. But as a pilot she was, by definition, inexperienced if all she had was ~469 hours. Doesn't matter if it's "normal." No one should be assuming her motives, because she's dead and it's a courtesy to the family, but we also shouldn't lie about her experience level in an attempt to lionize the fallen.

Stop. You don't know anything about the Army or what an RLO's primary duties are. You don't know what a "normal" amount of flight hours for an Army officer are in right now. You don't know anything about this person. You are pulling your un-informed, vapid internet opinions out of your ass.

If you are basing your assessment on two months of the stock market, have not made hedges and actually made money off these events...then you are most certainly a sheeple.

Well I agree with the premise, I don't suspect it's very realistic. There aren't a ton of civilian schools out there with fast Jets ready to take on the volume of students that the Air Force requires. That's not to say that there's an Armada of seaplane training schools either, but there are more. Probably just a function of how much cheaper a Cessna with pontoons is. As to the simulators, I have to disagree. If you're a fighter guy then you have much less experience in advanced simulators than I do, and at this point I've done military simulators, airline simulators, and civilian type rating School farmed out by the military (MC-12). If you're an airline guy then you already know this: You are never going to get realistic training in a simulator outside of the raw mechanics of flight. For takeoffs and landings, for aerodynamic complications, stalls, all that type of stuff, the simulator is incredible. But once you start talking about simulating complex operating environments, radio calls, and all of the "real world" stuff, it's just not going to happen. It could, in theory, but it won't. There's just no way to get the students and instructors to take simulator training seriously enough to adequately simulate the experience you get at a real airport with real people and real planes doing real things. This is the hardest part of the conversation. We both know what to do to make good pilots. The question is, how do you make good military pilots in an environment where those things aren't funded/supported/allowed?

Fair enough. My contention is I don't think the time/money that would be invested in additional non-standard civilian quals is going to adequately increase the airmanship enough to decrease the number of dudes "crashing at the end of the day." If the goal is to prevent guys from killing themselves in admin phases of flight, then I'd recommend adding a lot more night flights, more robust unusual attitude training, and more complex EPs. Also, I think some simulator based training with a lot of radio chatter forcing studs to pick out key information that could kill them (like clearing civ traffic to land on the same RWY you're inside the FAF on) to increase SA on comms would help a lot. We've probably all seen a lot of close calls like this that were saved because an experienced dude was in the formation/flt deck. Listening/processing comm is something I don't think we do a good job training to. To this end, my personal opinion is speed is the great equalizer. Fast airplanes force proper task prioritizarion at an expedited rate. If we can get kids thinking fast early on they'll benefit whether they go fighters or heavies. Which is why I'd rather see IPT put some kids in high performance aircraft instead of seaplane/STOL aircraft. Last point. Hope is not a valid tactic. I don't want to spend tax payer money on civilian training we hope will increase airmanship. We've got 60+ years of fast jets in UPT. We know if you can think ahead of the jet in a task saturated environment then your airmanship is better than someone who can't. Thus my proposal to put them in some high performance civ aircraft instead of a seaplane.

2025 114th Fighter Squadron UPT Hiring Board https://app.milrecruiter.com/SquadronPage/613a553d60631a2cee9c520a ALL applications are to be submitted via MilRecruiter. Do not send applications to POC email. Application window opens March 14, 2025. Applications are due NLT April 16, 2025. Notifications for interviews will be sent out NLT May 2, 2025. Interviews will be held on May 16, 2025. The 114th Fighter Squadron will not be hosting a rush event prior to interviews. If selected, a social will be organized TBD during the interview weekend. The 114th Fighter Squadron is the F-15C Formal Training Unit and is transitioning to the F-35A in the next few years. We are hiring for an F-35 DSG position. Selected candidates can expect to go to OTS (if necessary), UPT, IFF and return for F-35A B-Course at Kingsley Field. Upon completion of the B-course, they can expect to be sent to another, non-FTU F-35 base for 3+ years in order to develop the proficiency necessary to become an Instructor. This is a very non-standard flow and candidates must be aware of the expectations. The 114th FS UPT Selection Board selects highly qualified applicants for interviews. Not all applicants will get an interview. Kingsley Field is located in beautiful Southern Oregon with 300+ VFR days per year, however we are a relatively remote base and community.

All the T-6As at UCT are Air Force.

Does anyone need an AIM-9L Guitar? Let me know I now have a person. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

RIP Mr. Betts.

Earlier in this disaster, when it came out the MP was a White House Mil Social aide, I had the hunch this was a junior officer that was too enamored with the shiny opportunities in D.C. (and elsewhere) to the detriment of her primary duties. Add to that, MP's whopping 450hrs of flight time in almost six years of service--the majority likely from her time at Rucker... Add to that, the medical school she applied to gave her honorary, posthumous acceptance. https://www.instagram.com/icahnmountsinai/p/DGv2jegpcB8/ I am beginning to think my hunch is fairly accurate.

Nah, just pointing out that you and other progressives didn’t have a problem with tariffs before January 20th, as well as the other taxes/fees that raise prices on goods/services that are also considered “regressive”.