noxnatio

Wait, they turned in stuff to OSI and JAG? I thought nobody was getting in trouble?

Showed up to work today (upt base) and they were having dudes take any patches off the walls that could be considered offensive. A lot of the decorated ceiling tiles were being taken down as well.

XL 38's got C-17 x2 C-130 MC-12 T-38 FAIP A-10 F-15E F-5 x2 (Kenyan) Don't remember the T-1 side unfortunately

XL 12-14 38 drop: A-10 B-52 F-16 F-15E MC-12 T-6 F-22 T-1 drop was equally glorious. I think they got a gunship. Didn't even know that was possible..

I have a hard time being against anything that encourages public front boob

Don't bother learning any of the local flying procedures or IFS specific stuff since what you'll find will probably be outdated, and it'll probably change again by the time you get there. You can get ahead on studying GA type stuff. Learn basic aerodynamic principles, learn about airspace stuff, airfield markings and the like. That sort of GK isn't specific to IFS and doesn't necessarily change from place to place so you can learn it and be reasonably sure that you'll be able to apply it and won't have to unlearn it. You might be able to look at the DA-20 systems as well and take a look at how those work.

I regards to the 5th, the amendment makes a special consideration for "when in actual service in time of War or public danger." I might be skeptical about using the war as a scapegoat to shoot people in the face but I think this reasonably falls under the public danger clause.

We have a dude in our class who lives off base as a married student. I don't know if he's the exception or what his circumstances are, but it shows that it's possible and at least one stud lives off base. Don't do it. It's a 15 or so minute drive, plus traffic and depending on when you have to be in the line at the gate could be ridiculous. That commuter time is time you can spend sleeping, studying, or with your family if you are in base housing. Our guy didn't do the best traffic calculations one day, got in 30 seconds late and got some one-on-one time with our instructor that day. Not something I'd want to gamble on for 50 weeks. Plus, living on base makes it easier to study / socialize with the rest of your class, since most folks live in the dorms or base housing as well.

I don't think I would mind seeing some ppt slides about that

https://admissions.usafa.edu/rrs/afrotc_hms_info.htm ROTC got about 20 slots to send dudes to the Academy for the 2016 class (starts next Fall.) The link should hopefully tell you what you need to do. I don't know how you'll be treated. I suspect it'll be like just about anybody else they figure out has prior experience - CAP, Young Marines, JROTC, etc..

In terms of competing for the pilot slot it won't matter much. The non-tech guys will sometimes get a slight advantage because the tech majors have to work harder for the same GPA (not knocking the non-tech majors, just from my experience a lot of people struggle more with engineering.) Where that will come in to play though is getting a Field Training slot, which is a step you have to take before you can compete for any rated assignment. There, your major can definitely come into play. I saw the numbers for this year's selectees, and it was something like 70% for the tech majors and around 50% or so for the non-techs (don't quote me, it's been a while.) So I think, in that regard, having the tech major might give you a slight nod for the Field Training slot, so long as you can keep up your GPA. If doing a tech major is going to get you a 2.X GPA and a non-tech somewhere around 3.8, then I would switch over.

You'll get paychecks like normal if you're set up by your home base's finance. In terms of travel expenses, it depends. If you have the CSA you should fill all that stuff out to get money on it before you leave, and that will take care of expenses. In terms of travel, I think you get reimbursed when you get back and turn in all of your travel stuff, but don't quote me on that because I flew commercially and didn't drive. Don't worry too much about bills while you're up there. You can get by with literally no expenses if you want to, although you might go crazy.

I thought it was interesting. The Chief prefaced his answer with a statement that "If you're getting so much morale from a t-shirt that you're getting upset over the color of your shirt, then there's probably bigger problems at hand." I would agree with that. To be honest I felt like they didn't quite know how to answer the question so they sidestepped it and tried to trivialize the matter. They said the color of your t-shirt didn't matter so it was a non-issue, but that begs the question of why, if such a thing was trivial, we wasted brainmatter on writing a reg to get rid of it. I felt like they dodged the issue entirely. It might seem stupid for folks to see guys arguing about their shirt colors, but the fact that so many people are upset about it demonstrates that there is an issue here that needs to be addressed, and rather than looking at that issue, the response I got felt like it was a "you-guys-are-crying-about-not-having-colored-shirts-suck-it-up" deal. One of the Chiefs mentioned that it was important for us to be standardized and following the regs because, if we didn't, Airman Snuffy would see us breaking the rules with our colored shirts and think that if rules didn't apply to officers, they would emulate that in their own place. Which I found weird, because the colored shirts were never against the rules until they made them against the rules, so it didn't quite answer the question of why it was necessary to write them out of the regs. Someone brought it up as a heritage issue and they mentioned that heritage wasn't about the shirt color but it was an attitude and about history. When someone mentioned that morale shirts dated back to Vietnam (dunno how accurate his statements were since I don't know much about it yet) it was dismissed as not really heritage because heritage was something intangible we got from patriotism and work ethic. While I'm not knocking the idea that there are intangible character traits as part of Air Force heritage, I think there are definitely physical ones too that are being crushed. tl;dr version: I don't think they could answer that question honestly since they didn't know, so they defaulted to what the standard reason was, which is sort of feeding back into the strange rationalization for it and somehow making it seem acceptable, since it's almost a confirmation that getting rid of all this stuff is a good thing. I think they ended by suggesting that if we wanted the tangible stuff to be heritage we should donate to a base museum so it can be preserved for future generations. Which made me sad.

Memorize as much of it as you can. A lot of that stuff you'll be using anyways (Vy speeds, Stall speeds, power plant stuff) so if you know it that will help. I didn't have it for my check ride, but RUMINT going around was that some of the check IPs would ask questions about the non-red items on the list (CG numbers, even heard knowing your tire pressures was a good idea.) Start with the red stuff and then go through the important stuff, and get to the little things when you can.