MCO

Luckily promotion percentages to Major are in everyone’s favor, but you’ll have a tough time. Flight commander and instructor will help, as well as letting leadership know it’s what you want. This tells them to keep pushing to get your records across the line or force them to have the conversation with you that they don’t think you’re a future FGO. If you want major though it’s not an insurmountable hill even where you are at.

I don’t think Ukraine is losing that badly. Russia is getting it pretty bad as well. Yes Russia is very slowly moving the line, but at a cost.

If everything’s an SII, is anything an SII?

Yes, but most of the stories are anecdotal “new pilots suck!” Which everyone has said since forever. The change in how the slicks do business is actual change in how we operate as a result of new pilots sucking after pilot training.

We can argue about the right way to teach assault landings. My point was things were mostly fine until UPT started changing, then the rash of hard landings followed by limitations placed on our new pilots. I feel like the quality of FP is linked to the UPT issues, and it’s showing in a lot of ways. This was the most obvious example I’ve seen so far.

We did it fine before without issues. And the C-130 is a tactical airlifter, it sucks st strat. We fly 2 tac locals a week to get good at it because we really exist for the front line resupply efforts to get as close as possible to the action within reason. if you are going to make us an airland only C-17, then why do we exist? Just get rid of us. Save some money. Landing a C-130 isn’t hard. Landing a C-130 with half the pilot training time, a nine month wait on the flight line at the school house, then a multi month wait at your first unit as a new Lt is hard. And now you’ll barely do it as a copilot, get upgraded to AC and then have to do it for real with limited reps and a copilot that’s never done it.

Lots of rumors on coming changes but right now just no assault landings for copilots unless they are with an instructor due to a rash of hard landings. There was some discussion on if that was the right way forward but the AMC A3 2 star directed that this is the way and released a fleet wide FCIF. We absolutely can fly cargo around with pilots that aren’t as good and are given significantly less time to train. We are just going to bend more metal in peace time, and in wartime the new expectation needs to be the MAF won’t be anywhere near the front line if we want to preserve the fleet. People gotta figure out their cargo another way.

C-130J community is starting to limit what copilots are allowed to do.

As long as the mission isn’t moving why would congress care? The money saved is in the base, if anything more students is more housing and more money in the economy. The sub quality pilot training product is becoming apparent on the flightline.

The real progress made is people have successfully made the talking point it’s ok to invade another country and take their land if you don’t like their government, even if they don’t pose a direct threat to you.

I don’t understand how we lecture Ukraine. Hey, Russia invaded your land and took a third of your territory. You want to keep fighting? Sorry, we don’t like that you have the will to fight for your land. We have decided it’s not worth your people’s lives so we have also decided that we will give the Russians everything they want. Imagine France told us in 1778 too bad, we won’t fund your war because the British are killing too many of you. Go ahead and sue for peace and just be British puppets again because we don’t like other people’s war or the idea of you dying. Your people hate it and just want to be British rather than have a war so let them. There is a valid argument over money spent which I think is separate to supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself. I personally think it’s money well spent. Let a malign foreign actor who wants to bully those around him and affect our internal politics get stuck in a war they made against an enemy willing to fight them with little risk to us. Seems like a win/win to me, way better than other crap we’ve spent way more money on. Obviously the opinions on that are all over the place. The die hard support of all things Trump amazes me. You can be a fan of his and support him as President without just justifying everything he does. It seems like no one has their own views anymore. Trump was a dick to Zelensky because he correctly pointed out you can’t trust Putin, which could hinder a negotiation. Trump just wants to say he made peace at any cost, repercussions to Ukraine be damned. It’s like Afghanistan, he started that shit show pull out because he “made a deal” with the Taliban that they were never going to uphold, Biden just didn’t change course. Trump doesn’t care if his deals are held up, he just wants to say he made one. There are lots of things happening now in the country I like. I’m not a rabid anti Trumper. This just isn’t one of them.

If he’s UK based I assume he is talking about their service requested which is like their version of VFR/IFR. How much ATC is helping or responsible to the traffic. So IFR, VFR, VFR flight following would be most likely what he means. Depends if he was applying UK logic to US or if he just slipped up on his words.

Career badges are impossible to decipher. Give rated wings, kill all the other badges and give them basic tabs not broken out but broad. CE, WX, SF, ATC, etc. don’t make 10 different identifiers for each career field. Gives people pride and makes it easy to see what they do. Pilots do it with flight suits, let everyone else have a little morale and pride as well, within reason.

Both are problems. Yes you need to focus on creating lethal pilots, but the FGOs are the ones setting the rules and working to make the space to create those pilots. Shitty QOL, development, and leadership leads to people getting out. Everyone left becomes the shitty leadership because there is no one left to choose from for a quality cut. These shitty leaders/pilots make decisions destroying QOL and good pilot development driving out the younger pilots and continuing the cycle.