guineapigfury

This is excellent financial advice, after UPT you can use your flight pay to cover the divorce.

Where's that Sgt who turns in people for FB posts when you need her?

This is sadly apropos.

A leper colony can want healthy people all day long, but the other islands will always ship their lepers first.

My anecdata is that I know a couple dozen 18Xers. Once you filter out prior enlisted folks and late rates, I know exactly one who wants to stay. I'm just trying to get out before they hit us with stop loss.

Retention is bad now, bad enough for the CSAF to publicly admit his shit is in the street. We will have a better picture on the problem by late 2018 when the 18Xers start hitting the end of their ADSCs in large numbers. The data point to watch for will be dudes with approximately 7 years service. These are your dudes who joined up to specifically fly RPAs. If Big Blue can't retain them, the RPA enterprise is officially fucked. Surveys indicate we should expect retention somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%. On the plus side, there should be lucrative opportunities for contractors for the foreseeable future. On the Active Duty side of the house I expect this problem will get worse before it gets even worse.

I put mine together earlier this year. There were rules on how many could go on which lines. To the best of my knowledge this was purely local guidance. If you're a dude like me with 1 amazing OPR with multiple strats, and several pedestrian OPRs this made things difficult.

I paid $400 for my mess dress, which works out to about $80 per use over the last 9 years. Buying used seems like a good technique. Similar story for the Service Dress, I've worn it twice since UPT graduation. OTOH, the PT shorts (unless you cut out the mesh) touch your junk, so I'd buy new if I were you.

You should be able to perfectly memorize the boldface & ops limits in 1-2 days. You'll be given this information when you get a stack of pubs and TOs when you begin. Fill out blank BF & OL until you could do so in your sleep. Once you've got that down start studying the for whatever academic test you've got next. You'll have plenty of time during the academics phase, you just have to make effective use of it. Before your class starts, enjoy the free time because you won't have much once you start.

The rules don't prohibit you from writing a Don't Promote Me Letter or a crappy PRF rough draft to hand into your supervisor. The rules just specify the consequences. Make your decision and live with it. This is not reneging on your contract. Big Blue will always use the AFIs to its advantage, turnabout is fair play.

I honestly feel pity and not disdain for these college kids. When they depart their "safe spaces" after graduation to enter the real world, life is going to fist them.

All Female PJ crew? I'm willing to take one for the team.

WTF. I lived in a tent on my first deployment and in a shipping container during my second.

I've had months where I got more than that.

"Sucks" is relative, they should be happy they're not going to MQ-9s.

That's my takeaway. He said he came to "thank us". I don't need a fucking thank you unless it takes the form of orders back to a real airplane.

Just left CSAF's talk at HMN. The "big news" we were told to expect remains undelivered. Apparently the plan is to add an at least one RPA wing somewhere that isn't Creech at some undetermined point in the future. No specifics.

Ugh. Welsh gets one thing right during his tenure as CSAF and these dudes manage to mess it up. I can't egress this clownshow fast enough. Even from 2000 miles away I can see the grubby fingerprints of underemployed E-9s all over this one.

Great, now all we need to do is triple RPA manning.

CSAF will be at Holloman next week, I'll update if he has any good news.

Buddy Spike is pointing you in the right direction. The shortest route to most destinations is proceeding direct.

I'll see if I can get my hands on the slides, but what I was trying to communicate was this: RPA crews have been compared to other aircraft crews (AWACS & C-17) in a scientifically valid way and have significantly worse health/life outcomes when controlling for all other variables (Age, Rank, O/E, Gender, Marital Status, etc).

I remember taking the survey and have seen the presentation put together based on the results of the follow up survey in 2014. TLDR: Overwork and shift work lead to lack of sleep. The new data used manned platforms as control variables and discovered that flying RPAs for the Air Force tends to result in declining physical and mental health, obesity, sleep deprivation, binge drinking, reliance on absurd amounts of caffeine to get through the work day (5+ energy drinks daily), reliance on OTC sleep aids, divorce, low morale, and depression. However, PTSD remains rare.

He'd been waiting a while, it may have been sent the previous fiscal year.