Right Seat Driver

I ground tested in UPT in 2007. The ground testing documentation is still in my med records.

Well, that escalated quickly. Just getting back from being TDY and seeing two extra pages to this thread discussing tanker TDYs. The "training" piece of my post wasn't implying dudes were doing shady shit. Going on a Block 40 OST and want to drop into Travis for an off-station trainer? Sure, go ahead. Working east coast business efforts and bringing back lobster from Pease? Go right ahead. Dudes were not walking into the DO office looking to fly into their hometown to bang their ex-girlfriend from high school. This was a time when dudes were still going downrange before they enforced the DAV code policy (2006-2011ish). It was the only way dudes were going to get more experience other than flying the Malak at OTBH.

How solid is this data? Something similar happened a few years back in which a number of fighter Patches declined and punched for greener pastures.

Hell, the dudes that were flying the line in the 2007-08 timeframe have some pretty crazy stories. We had guys in the -135 go to the DO and validate a two week off-station sorties to knock out "training." VFR tours of San Francisco and pallets of wine, sorties to Hawaii to log an OCONUS sortie, and these were AMC dudes. Mildenhall had some great TDYs and the Kadena guys had crazier stories involving Thailand and Guam. QUALS: 135 IP.

Copy, thanks for the clarification.

Isn't there a reason why the senior rater is not supposed to know who are the takers and the non-takers? This statement brings me back to the old-heads who talked about being kicked to the side for not taking the bonus in the 90s because they "showed their cards."

Well, shit.

100% agree on this point. I always kept my distance from Flight Med with the exceptions of my annual physical just like every other pilot. And then I deployed in a unit that had a flight doc who shared our work space on a daily basis due to the way the clinic was arranged. I never realized how much flight docs actually fight to keep dudes in the jet. It was very impressive and all of us were better for seeing the doc working tirelessly to keep bros in the air.

The problem is for longer range platforms. A FENCE check won't be effective in they pick up your jet from 500 NM away. The ADS-B discussion is going to get complicated the closer we get to execution/integration with other airspace systems.

It has been a rough day in England. Godspeed . F/A-18 Down in England

$15k seems more realistic. But I have seen both AMC and USAFE use $6k as a pure cost per hour. That may just be in calculating FHPs. I don't even want to know how much AOR hours cost.

You might be able to pull that off for some airframes like a C-21 or a MC-12 in basic stick and rudder skills. However, guys that graduate UPT and the 135 FTU are still a long way from being safe. Taking UPT hours away from Phase III and throwing an equivalent amount of training time would be a lot more expensive than Toner hours. The KC-135 is around $6k per flight hour.

Not entirely sold. Overall, I think the Tone does a relatively good job in training guys for heavy aircraft. Also, the "fifth-gen" avionics piece is a bit of a stretch. A lot of guys would be regressing in avionics if going from a fifth-gen cockpit to the cockpit of most heavies in the MAF. Going from a T-1 avionics to a GATM KC-135 was the least of my worries as a co-pilot. Avionics are simple, employing the jet is different. One of my first TDYs as a co-pilot was RED FLAG with 3 4-ships of F-16s looking for gas as we were in and out of IMC with my AC laughing at me. IMHO, Big Blue needs to focus on a T-38 replacement and look at the Tone replacement after that.

A toast. Godspeed.

Checks.

Unfortunately, I think it will play out the same way. Political success is much more important than temporary mission degradation, particularly in today's fiscal environment.

Land of the free...home of the brave.

At least the paint job is fresh...

DFRESH, Thanks for taking this on. But, I will probably forget about the upgrade in a scotch fueled forum visit. Look forward to the improvement.

Well, what else is there to do in Montgomery after the first week of SOS?

History has not been kind on LeMay, but he was the right guy at the right time. I also recommend the book, read it a couple of times on deployments while orbiting as the reliability tanker.

Great story, thanks for posting! It is amazing what Boeing engineers did in the day with slides rules.

There is a tremendous training deficiency in the tanker community regarding air to air comms, threat calls, etc. The malaise is starting to go away with the younger dudes, but some of the older guys are all about turning on the auto-pilot and going to sleep. Tanker dudes always went back and said "Well this isn't how it is downrange in OEF/OIF, blah, blah, blah." But we won't always operate in such a passive environment. Starting around 2012, tankers started to get targeted in RF-A vuls, and the results were not surprising. "Losing" 1-2 tankers per vul was standard. The HVAA protection plans just weren't robust enough, or even part of the plan. It seems things may be improving. The problem we face now with emerging threats is the threat rings are getting bigger and how do you balance risk vs. getting dudes their gas with a jet that is reliant on so many outside sources? Losing a tanker is a huge loss of capability, but what good is a tanker if a dude bingos out of a fight?

I thought this program was winding down. We had a guy get tagged for this last year as it was in his DT vector.

Affirm. They had an issue with the rudder. There seemed to be a lot of RUMINT about an electrical issue/fire.