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It's been a few years since I instructed in the T-38 but the guys with flying experience, including WSOs (usually #1 in their class) but not Navs, did better than those with no flying experience. More flying hours in anything is better than no hours. No matter whatever you end up doing, once you get to UPT, how you did things that one time in band camp is irrelevant and annoying. Listen more, talk less.

Two WSO's in my class finished #1 & #2. #1, Roger Locher, had 3 Mig kills as a WSO. Couple classes after me DeBellevue, the WSO MIG Ace after washing out of UPT initially, came back to UPT and ended up flying fighters. After flying LL missions with any extra fuel I usually gave the stick to the WSO. On a 10 hr deployment from TX to Germany my WSO flew at least a quarter of the flight.

Who are you again?

Gents and Ladies Today was submission day. Good luck to everyone and looking forward to results!!

“Hey Vlad check out my Raptors… they don’t have drywall screws in their wings.” There was more 5th generation air power on that Ramp and in the Air over that exchange than in Putin’s entire Air Force and he knows it. This was a reminder that not every NATO entity is full of smoke, maybe rethink the way you looking at Latvia and Estonia. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

VID_20250816_072939.mp4

Absolutely bad ass, look at Putin flinch! Can you imagine Kamala attempting this? Power move.

And that WIC is done...Not sure when they will crank up for the EX.

…and a tear came to my eye…..OBTW, IT WASN'T MY SQUADRON!

Thanks gramps

Obviously you and @ClearedHot have let your imaginations run away to the extreme with my musings. That subject is a full blown, separate discussion, and I was trying to minimize the thread derail. Obviously there’d have to be carve outs for those groups (and more). The main point is if you’re a lazy ass bag who has no reason to not work, but chooses to produce zero for society while freeloading off taxpayers/your parents, you shouldn’t have a say. You need to have some skin in the game before you get a say (excluding carve out groups). More nuanced than that, but that’s the gist.

That’s a video game recreation.

Ewww, but also fuck yea 🇺🇸 like every interaction with RW 😂

Lol, what, do they give you dinner where you vote? The pearl clutching in this thread is getting out of control.

That gave me a 1/4 chub.

Yeah but here's the thing, no one gives a shit what you think it's time for. Or what I think it's time for. The simple reality is that people do not use social media that way. And the busier the person is, the more likely they are to repost something that they only watched or read 5% of. I don't have to like it, I just have to be intelligent enough to realize it. Or conversely, you can spend all day thinking that you're superior to everyone in power simply because no one deemed you worthy of the amount of attention or responsibility our leaders have. You of all people should be grateful that our internet lives are not the exclusive basis by which we are judged. I sure am.

Gender differences ≠ Racial differences. So let's just skip that diversion. We already discriminate based on gender in the military. And we should. The extent to which we do so is a valid debate. Also, reposting something does not equal endorsing every word of an interview. As I said, I wish our leaders wouldn't post/repost/share anything, but they do. If Hegseth says he believes women should not serve, then you have a point. Hell, if he refuses to answer, even then you have a point. Right now you do not. Call it lunacy all you want. We will *never* have a functional government by this standard. I think it's lunacy to believe that gay people will go to hell. I also think it's lunacy to believe that gay parents are a drop-in substitute for straight parents. Every belief is absurd to someone. But he did not voice an opinion about women serving or not serving. *You* think it's wrong. Which is worse? Saying women shouldn't serve, or promoting seizing the means of production? What about hate speech laws? Affirmative action? How many people would die if we "turn the clock back 77 years" and ban women from military service versus legalizing all drugs? Is a discriminatory belief less acceptable than a fatal belief? It's just hypothetical, since PetSouth has never said that women should be banned from serving. Overturning RvW was the constitutional answer. Period. So now that's a step on the slippery slope? Also, could you elaborate on the gay marriage to Jews continuum? Not going to lie, watching you lump disparate issues together like this is making you sound more like Sotomayor then Alito. If we shouldn't have a Secretary of defense that would roll back women serving in the military, do you also suggest that we shouldn't have supreme Court justices that would (did) roll back Roe v Wade? Do we appoint a new Arbiter of Acceptable Opinions, or do we just rely on the first amendment and let the voters to decide? I already told you I agreed with you on Signal (that it is a fire-able offense, not that he *should* be fired), but we are talking specifically about this Twitter post. I won't make so broad a statement, but again, if Pete Hegseth actually advocates for banning women from the military, then I will agree that he is the wrong person to run the DoD. But he hasn't done that, regardless of how much I disagree with him retweeting a ridiculous interview.

Completely unsat. The Signal crap should have been enough but this is WAY over the line. And before my fellow GOPers get your panties in a wad, we wanted Swalwell to resign after falling into the Fang Fang honey trap. And, recall the statements the right made when Obama associated with Reverend Wright and all of his nonsense. If we say everyone should be held to the same standard, lets do it. Hegseth should resign.

Truth. I gave an I-ride to a crew chief, briefed him exactly what we were going to do and he was gung ho and normal as shit for the whole experience........ Riiiiiiiiiight up to about 5 seconds after brake release. Full AB and off the ground shortly after that, 5-bills at the end of the runway and into the vertical. He's hyperventilating for the acceleration which didn't seem that abnormal. At the start of the pull up he starts "ohhhhhhhhh" and then as we're vertical he says, "Sir, I want to go back." I level off at 10K and offered to just be an airliner and we could do some sight seeing and take it easy. He just kept repeating that he wanted to go back in a scary, panicked way. I started to get pretty concerned he was going to do something crazy, so I told him to put his hands under his thighs, don't touch anything and I'll have us back on the ground in 5 minutes. Should have done a straight-in but I wanted to get down fast. He almost lost it when it put some G on the aircraft in the pitch out. I figured out he no likey the Gs. Not an experience I'd care to repeat. Absolutely no fun having a panicked human trapped in your back seat with access to some fairly "reactive" handles and actuators. 0.1 KPAM-KPAM 🙃

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that anyone in senior leadership is concerned with actual skillsets or experience. What is happening is very simple: We can't maintain the jets we have and we can't acquire new ones in a reasonable timeframe. At the same time we must keep the slides green at all costs. The only answer left (short of offloading the entire operation to the civilian world) is to retcon what a UPT grad is. It costs AETC nothing to churn out crap and dump it into b-courses across the other MAJCOMs. B-course instructors will still wash out the weak swimmers, but at that point finding them a new home is an ACC/AMC/AFSOC/AFGSC problem. AETC's hands are clean (on paper) and the brass at Randolph have figured this out. They can even pitch the UPT cuts as #innovation and cost saving to keep the (even more out of touch) GOs in the Pentagon happy.

I honestly don’t understand the implication here. “Power move?” How so? Trump: “Hey look, we have B-2’s and F-35s.” Putin: “yeah, I know. Cool.” Is the implication supposed to be “watch out, cause we just might use these against Russia?” Putin knows there’s zero chance of that happening. Besides, I think he’s probably much more worried about drone swarm attacks, like the kind that took out most of his bomber fleet, than he is about fat Amy. This is classic Trump. Using the military as a symbol of strength to try to mask his weakness and ineffectuality. Putin is going to get Ukrainian territory out of this, and Trump is pressuring Zelensky to surrender it to him asap. But yeah, cool air show. “Vlad, look at these static display F-22’s. Badass, huh? …..Now, go enjoy the Donbas.”