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Detroit was technically too be to fail too. Been there recently? Given communist rule, ANY city is fully capable of collapsing and consuming itself.

I think this about the 5th cycle of colored shirts and name tags in my career. Thankfully I’ve been able to mostly ignore all of the knee jerk decisions and keep doing the right thing: morale shirts and call sign name tags (and no hat/sunglasses on head), as God intended.

Currently fly this bird, this all tracks perfectly. Hard to land well, but feels good when you do. The power pulls are wild too, especially a 30 flap. Something unsettling about pulling power at 200-250 feet.

just awesome, it's like we're all in a race to find the bottom

Russia made a robot. It's a perfect copy of a drunk Ruskie.

Leave the kids alone. If the boomers hadn't raped every institution and convention for their own advantage, all the while incinerating the housing market, suppressing interest rates, saddling every 22 year old with crippling debt, and inventing "too big to fail," maybe the younger generation wouldn't look toward something different. The American Dream was raped by the generation that cried out for free-love and no war until they got in power to give us a corporatist government and endless wars. Now they don't like that their kids are skeptical of their promises. No small wonder. Socialism is a nightmare, but you have to be blind to think this is just about lazy young adults. 😂

It feels like a pipe dream, but I hope there is a successful movement on the “near” left (e.g. the mid 90s Dem mindset citizens) to establish a new party and send the Dems the way of the Green Party. AOC, etc. can enjoy their irrelevancy on ballots and in the public square. We don’t want everyone to be in lock step with one party - we need rational debate and different ideas, as well as shifting leadership over time (e.g. not having one party dominate for decades). But we also do not want a socialist shit show party who hates everything about America and wants to completely reinvent it into an abomination.

easiest problem to solve and a no brainer.

Good news, good times are here again! Our biggest problem as a service has been solved. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-callsigns-nametags-morale-t-shirts/

i totally agree that UPT cuts are seriously degrading the quality of the product. But don't conflate the UPT syllabus cuts with a need to create a new ACE program: even with a robust UPT syllabus like I went through many moons ago, the ACE Program was extremely beneficial for the new co-pilots. Story time: I remember back in the 2005-2006 time frame, there was a Langley F-22 at Hill AFB whose crew chief lost control of the landing gear pin during ground ops, and the pin got sucked down an engine. IIRC $6.8M in damage. That year, at Beale, our T-38 CT Program was run on a budget of around $6M for ~3700 hours of flying time. Think about that. That's around 3,000 SORTIES in a T-38... for $800,000 less than the cost of a single Raptor FOD incident. My experience in the Beale T-38 CT Program has made me such a better U-2 pilot and overall aviator than I would ever be without it. A magnitude better. There is so much that could be done to make our USAF aviators "that much better"... but the AF leadership will simply not invest the pennies... and I do mean "pennies"... to make it happen. It's no longer a priority. I hope I am proved wrong on my last statement.

Had I remarried earlier in life I would have done the airpark thing. Big regret after owning an RV-4 for 20 years and an RV-8 for 10. Lot of wasted $$$ on hangars. Thousands of landings w/o a ground loop BUT when it comes to tail draggers, gotta know your limits. Here I am at Red Wing AP, WI waiting out the x-winds at my home airport in MN:

UPDATE (6 Nov 25 / 1230 CST): Since I haven't heard from lilyelliott4, and his profile is suspect (IP addresses), Ihe's been banned. ADMIN NOTE: Thanks, I wasn't tracking until you mentioned it; then I looked at his posts and all followed the same style. I admit I use AI to grab info, but all of his responses look like they are completely AI generated. lilyelliott4, your account is locked. PM me if you aren't a bot and I will consider unlocking it. Otherwise, it'll be deleted shortly. p.s., I also removed the Thai fitness webpage link. Sorry guys, but there wasn't anything interesting on there! I had to check for the good of BaseOps! 😁😁

I learned in a Supercub that had a 135HP Lycoming...it was a beast and I thought normal ops for a Cub. There is NOTHING like slipping a Cub (or other taildragger), over the tree to a greaser one wheel landing on the grass....best if done at Sunset. I am currently shopping airpark runway options. I looked at a 5280' grass strip on 80 acres two weeks ago. Looking at 361 acres this week.