Lord Ratner

You have reached the rank and position where all but your brashest subordinates will give you honest feedback about your policies and leadership. It is not as simple as asking; most will apply the safest translation (for their career) to anything you say. The only way you can convince them (assuming you are being honest with your intentions) is through action, over and over. Each time you don't act in accordance with your word will have 10 times the effect of each time you do.

It's an allowance, so it should have no effect.

I bet if you have $60K+ to send their way, they have a .25"x.25" silhouette of a herk.

Yeah, we have a few named people at EGUN. On the less surprising side, when our copilot exec let us know we were having a "roll call" on Friday afternoon, a boom sarcastically asked if someone would be taking actual roll... Because no one would be dumb enough to think you actually call out roll at the start of a roll call... Oh how they laughed and laughed.

What about watches that get the time signal from one of the atomic clocks? I bet there are a fair number of those.

Oh geez, isn't liquid from herbie? I bet the inappropriate relationship was with rusty...

I'm guessing General Order 1 in Europe will be his legacy. I met him a couple months ago. Awesome guy, definitely someone you'd enjoy having a beer with.

I am also not trying to start a pissing contest, and I will caveat this by saying I am a heavy pilot now, but the people who needed 8-10 rides before the IQ check in a T-6 were not the guys/gals coming from fighters. It was the people who had spent the last 3-10 years in planes that don't require trimming, or making radio calls while flying, or spinning your own bugs, or keeping your hands on the controls for the entire flight. I racked up 600ish hours in one year in the T-6, but after a year off for the MC-12 gig, It took me a couple rides to get my hands back. I imagine a break of 6+ years without 600 hours of previous experience to fall back on would have required more than a couple rides. I fully intend to go back to the T-6 one day, and I suspect by the time I do, I will have a new appreciation for the heavy pilots who spent all of PIT on CAP. Especially if they upgrade the tanker to a modern autopilot while I'm in it.

I disagree. It was probably a bit much for a FAIP, only because we had just finished flying the plane, but the MWS guys in my class for the most part wanted more, not fewer rides. The FAIPS who did T-38s seemed to need even fewer rides than the FAIPs like myself who had done T-1s. My fear, as someone who worked on the line and in check flight (where we do a good percentage of the TI/Fam/MQT/whatever-they're-called-now rides) is that moving it to UPT will sideline the instructor candidates. At PIT you are the only priority, and at least in my class you got all the instruction you needed/wanted. It was a lot harder to dedicate that much time to the TI guys when you had student rides, snapshots, additional duties, and all the other BS everyone in the AF has to deal with when they aren't TDY. I'm not saying it's impossible, I just think it will be very easy to put the new guys on the back burner. But I suppose money is the only consideration these days, and probably should be for the next few years. Edit to add: PIT in no way prepared me for the types of crazy mistakes students would make. Most (not all) of the IPs there were too afraid of something happening, some carryover from tweets, some who didn't even think we should do low levels because of the single engine. So in that aspect, I thought PIT failed. But the many rides repeating the maneuvers over and over while being forced to verbally instruct were highly valuable. Since they're keeping that at PIT, maybe it'll work out just fine.

I agree with everything you said, minus which is key. I don't think either is key, really, though obviously I would rather recognize it before and avoid having to recover at all. The Castle example is why I think knowing how to recover is so important, still. Sure, they should have seen it coming, but as someone who has never been in a major EP scenario yet, I won't armchair quarterback it. You are correct though, feeling the impending stall would have saved them. Proficiency in TP stalls would have too. I think we're nit-picking at this point. Stall recognition and recovery should be taught together. And agree 110% on UPT studs flying stalls like they fly loops. I hooked a kid on his check ride for TP stalls because after recovering the aircraft, he continued to pull up to around 30 degrees nose high, let the airspeed drop off about 40 knots, then right before entering an unintentional power-on stall, called "maneuver complete" and dumped the nose out of the shaker. I asked him to reaccomplish the stall, and he pulled the nose even higher on round two. I started teaching stalls very differently after that.

You've been in AETC long enough to know that putting something in the syllabus does not ensure it is taught, let alone sufficiently. I'm not trying to make a point about tankers, just using them as an example of a larger issue. Stall recoveries are mindless, as long as you have more than a thousand feet below you. But looking at some of the recent aviation mishaps, clearly people aren't working on the basics enough. Colgan 3407, Air France 447, the MC-12 crash. We can all get defensive about how our communities are doing just fine with training stalls once a year, or twice in PTX, or fill-in-the-blank, but clearly something is wrong. And this mishap wasn't a one-off either, it was just the first one to cost lives.

Background: FAIP, MC-12 deployment, tankers now. The training for the MC-12 was terrible, probably because it was new, had few permanent pilots, and many of the people flowing through didn't give a . For me, that masked a lot of the issues that are perhaps more AF-wide. I haven't been in the tanker long at all, but other than a very brief demo in the sim, I have not seen, heard, or discussed stalls, spins, vertical S's, cross checks, etc. I know as a prior FAIP my whole world was stalls and falls for years, and I didn't expect anything close to the same level of emphasis in the MWS world, but zero emphasis is lower than I expected. I can't speak for all the other airframes out there, since I haven't flown them, but the basics seem to be left at the UPT bases. EPs are another weak area.

Is that an average? Guys we talked to out there were getting 750 a day deployed, and half that back in the states if they had a job, 0 if they only did the deployed part.

Actually, that didn't help much at all. Other stuff has. But I have no intention of scaring away one of the best things to happen to BODN in a while by "outing" him. Suffice it to say he's the real deal. Either that, or its a very elaborate ruse by someone who researched his past and has way more troll skills than the rest of us will ever understand. Doubt it though.

Cake compared to the (new?) Risk Management Fundamentals. Took over an hour, and that was while max performing the left mouse button.

That "culture" already exists within certain bases/squadrons. It's tragic.

What aircraft? Not trying to identify her, just trying to get a better sense of which community this story relates to. Not all flying squadrons are even remotely alike.

Was anyone in AETC when the T-1 came online? Seems like a way for the AF to save money by lowering the standard for passing UPT and thus wasting less money on wash-outs. What was the party-line back then? Disclaimer: I went through T-1s.

Poorly, poor, bare bones, none, don't know. In the tanker, you have one app for looking at pubs, and one for looking at approach plates. The pubs app is tolerable (pretty sure its a commercial app), and the FLIP app is garbage (made specifically for the govt). Everything else is completely locked down. The iPad itself is terrible for FLIP in my opinion. Too big, too heavy, and too bright. A kindle with the integrated light (or any e-ink type display) would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to read on final.

As a FAIP who just moved into the AMC (really USAFE, but same difference) heavy world: go to and enjoy every single one of those squadron events. If you ever find yourself thinking about sitting one out, slap your self and tell the POC you'll be there. It does not exist in any way, shape or form out here, and like you, I got the same feedback from the MWS guys. If your UPT squadron was anything like mine (or is the same one), you aren't going to find that anywhere else. Enjoy the hell out of it.

Everything you said, which I mostly disagreed with but still respected as valid, was undone right here. When's the last time you were around a group of maintainers? I've heard more horribly inappropriate shit come from maintainers, some even female, than any other group in the AF (except perhaps EOD). Whatever metric is being used to measure the problem, it's ######ed if someone actually believes the OGs have a bigger (rather than more visible) problem with SA/SH. Here's the other side to the coin: Never in human history has the military operated this way. That doesn't mean it won't work, hell, I'd bet it will. But to me it's like the uniform battle. Every time an E-9 goes on a rant about pilots with their zippers down or maintainers with dirty boots or personnelists with jackets on indoors, they fall back on the "history" that the uniform represents and the "heritage" we are shitting on by wearing it "disrespectfully." Yet every picture I see of WWI and WWII looks like a competition for who can wear their hat funnier, or not at all. Vietnam vets could be seen wearing more than the required pieces of flair, if any uniform items at all. It's made up. They're using a fictional history to justify the new direction. Just like our current battle with SA/SH in the workplace. There's no historical precedent for a non-sexualized military, so instead of attacking how fighter pilots (or whoever) have been doing it wrong all this time and we just "finally have a senior leader with the balls to confront it," be honest about it. Times have changed, and we have to change with them. The Captains and Majors complaining about having to change aren't to blame any more than the Colonels and Generals (now the ones telling them how stupid and offensive they are) are for doing it when they were captains and majors. But if you think our culture is worse than others, I challenge you to spend some time with an army unit living next door in Bagram. It may calibrate your expectations. Sir.

Bitter? I loved every second of that job. I'd go back without hesitation. Save your crap FAIP generalizations. Why do you have such a hard time conceptualizing it? Or are you unable to see past the caricature of an angry FAIP you've built in your mind? Do you imagine it to be a non-stop parade of profanity? A 1.3 where I simply imitate a car alarm? I yelled at the students who needed to be yelled at. Students like me, and others not like me. Others I simply took the aircraft and redemo'd the maneuver. I didn't do it because it was fun (even though it was), I did it because the ones I yelled at told me the same thing I told my "bitter FAIP" after phase two: Thanks for getting me to pull my head out of my ass and be better. Believe it or not, pilot training attracts some rather over-confident assertive personalities that occasionally need to be taken down a notch. C4103 was my first of several come-to-jesus moments. Or maybe you're right, and all students are the same and just need to be gently reminded of their downgrades. As I said before, UPT needs all types of IPs. Un###### their heads? It's stand-up, not the trenches of WWI. Anyways, I'm done pissing all over this kid's thread. My advice stands. Learn those three things before the dollar ride, and you won't have to worry about your IP being concerned about your emotional growth opportunities. The horror.

I mean, we did literally survive.

Got it, you were weak in UPT, and the injustices of the world have made you a crusader for the new generation of students with no hands. Good. UPT needs instructors like you too. But don't assume that FAIPs just lack perspective. Experience with copilots in two MWS have only made me regret letting some of them slide when they should have gone to that third 89. Every student is different. Some, perhaps like you, didn't respond to yelling. In fact the worse the student, the less you can yell (generally). But it may surprise you to learn the better students often need a sharp kick in the ass to do better than just good enough. Airline pilots (50%ish), some prior-e flightcrew, and the ones who just lucked into being shit-hot fall into this category. They don't tremble like a leaf in the wind when you hook them for a bullshit checklist step (yes, we know its a bullshit hook), they hit the books harder and refocus on improvement. From your post, it seems like your only experience with UPT is from the perspective of a student, and even the nicest, they'll-fix-him-in-phase-3, E's-for-everyone Santa Claus will tell you a students perspective is worthless. T6 I flew great, T-1 i was so-so, MC-12 was a piece of cake, and in the tanker I'm survivable at best, but striving for mediocre.

...Continue to Challenge!...