sixpack

I'm a proponent of allowing members carry on base, with caveats. You should be allowed to conceal carry as long as there's a vetting process similar to the civilian sector. Do a background check... no LOR, UIF Art 15? Check. No restraining orders? Check. Passing PT test? I keed, i keed.... Point being we trust SF to protect us with weapons, aircrew regularly carry concealed and overt depending on the situation. If i want to have a CWP off base and carry on base as well it shouldn't be an issue. We're held to a higher standard than regular John Q. Public so give us rights commensurate to our standing in society. Do I think this would have changed the situation that happened at Lackland today? Who knows, but there's one more opportunity to protect yourself that you didn't have before. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

USAA has been going down the shitter lately. They use to have the best rates for everything. Over the past few years I've been doing better looking elsewhere for loans, insurance rates and credit cards. Only thing beneficial now is their checking where they refund your atm fees.

Just placed an order with Vortex and thier military discount is 40% off MSRP, well below what I can find in stores and online. Great people to work with and highly recommended. Saved a good amount for my viper pst, mount, quick throw lever and bubble level. They also have a pretty sweet referral program. You get a 5% credit from a referral's purchase. PM me if you're going to order from them. http://www.vortexoptics.com/content/military_le_program

Lets all just turn into a bunch of tree hugging hippies that accommodate to the lowest common denominator. We shall love and cherish one another and ensure everyone has a chance to be great at whatever they want to do. We shall pander to everyone's feelings regardless of the effort it will take to accomplish. No stone will be unturned to ensure everybody believes we are in a happy shiny loving Air Force community. The feelings of all of our employees is priority #1!!!! Forget that. We are in the military. We are here to kill people and break their shit. If you sign up with that realization then you should be able to tolerate some off color jokes and toilet humor. If not you picked the wrong career. Leadership needs to stop this downward spiral now before more people get out than what we can replace. It's coming sooner than they think.

Day Man, thanks for having the balls to come to an open forum and field questions about this incident. I think it's a sad state of affairs these days in the Air Force that if you make one mistake your career probably won't survive. Your situation I'm sure was more difficult than most could fathom and you all still landed safely with nobody ending up dead. It's crazy to know that the FEB recommended you stay but the AMC/CC decided to make an example of you and give you the boot. He also tried to end the careers of those involved in the airdrop incident. I personally seen how their careers were affected while the AMC/CC kept these good people in limbo for over a year while trying his best to screw them as much as he could. This type of shit leadership and lack of top cover these days will do nothing but degrade morale and increase the occurrence of lying to cover shit up. Gone are the days of admitting that you messed up, learning from the experience and teaching others, and getting on with your life. While I'm not thinking you guys were totally right with your actions that day I can see how that could have easily happened to me. The Pakistani controllers are all hard to understand and their comms equipment usually sucks balls. I remember on a trip to OPRN having to ask the controllers to repeat themselves several times cause neither I or the copilot could understand them. Also, the new WX radar in our plane is a great tool, but I think it very often overestimates the returns, making them seem worse than they are. I've personally been in day VMC what seemed to be ten thousand feet on top of the WX and have the screen surrounded in red (not hashed either) while the copilot and I scratch our heads as to why it's displaying that. I've also seen a light/moderate rain shower sitting on the ground lined up for takeoff at ETAR fill the screen with RED returns.. These experiences I had made me doubt the radar several times and if I were flying that night I could have second guessed the returns as well. I really think it's commendable that given the circumstances you all were able to land. Sure you all screwed up but the fact you and all your pax and crew are alive should be talked about. It's crazy that there's actual video of this incident and it's being buried never to see the light of day in AMC. Leadership has once again lost my respect for their actions handling this situation. If i didn't know any better I would consider the leadership more politician than actual leaders.

Full use??? Completely incorrect. When a pilot is lost to a job outside of their squadron their flying hours as a wag is about 20% of those in the squadron. The problem is many of these positions are required to have someone there at all times. Add that to all the pilots actually in the squadron that are training, OGV, execs, schedulers, DO, 10% on leave, SOS, PCO, IP school, etc. and you realistically have half of your stated strength numbers to hack the mission at any given time. There were months on end in 2010, 2011 that the squadron was literally a ghost town... no more than the commander and his secretary, an exec, a scheduler to be found on a routine basis... Now take that thought and ask yourself how OPRs were done, how we prepared for multiple inspections, preparing for the next deployment, and making sure everyones currency and training is up to snuff with a sky high ops tempo. Squadrons were just hanging on to keep up with everything that needed to be done, and if there were any less people than what we had it would have been damn near impossible to do. Now if that is considered overmanned I'd hate to see what manning is suppose to be given your thought process.

Chang: Thank you for reaffirming my thoughts that senior leadership does not have a clue as to what it will take to bolster morale and retention in the pilot community, more specifically for the Mobility, Helo, and UAS pilot types. The message is clear through this new pilot bonus this year that those of us who are not figher jockeys are looked at as being expendable. Yet another giant kick to the nuts after the VSP, RIF debacle that has happened in the previous years. To say that the mobility career field is overmanned is nothing short of utterly retarded thought. I dare you to walk into any C-17 squadron and sit them all down and tell it to their face. When your job has you on the road away from your family more than 6 months out of the year because we can't say no to shipping a container of dog shit to the AOR at the Army's request while quickly sending the majority of our first assignment pilots to MC-12's, ALO, UAVs is just silly. People have been working their asses off for the past several years, marriages have fallen apart, people are stressed out, and now you're basically telling us that we have you by the balls because you're still going to stay in because the economy sucks, nobody's hiring, the 10 year pilot committment, etc. This type of myopic thinking is what gets us in trouble in the first place, and is going to lead to lack of experience in these communities. One day, sometime in the next few years, pilots are going to get fed up to the point where they start walking and we'll be left with the new guys, a few "yes men" mid level officers, and the senior leaders. This will keep reinforcing crappy mentoring, crappy piloting, and a hesitant outlook on the future to these new officers. It's a vicious cycle that needs to be addressed today, not years down the road like every knee jerk reaction the Air Force has done the past decade. Being a prior E, I also despise the fact that now most of us will be ineligible for the bonus, thus reinforcing the fact that we are not wanted even with our unique experience of being able to relate to both sides of the Air Force. Once again you are losing a vast amount of good people with great knowledge because you think we're too old and are going to stick it out to 20 years anyways. What about us that want to stay in past 20 and try to make a go for making it to O-6 or beyond? One more point... i'd love to know who you were talking to at Grand Forks telling us that most people there volunteered for that assignment and are now living in the land of sunshine and lollipops. GMAFB! I know first hand that morale there is less than ideal from those that have been non-vol'd to the middle of nowhere, being treated like the redheaded stepchildren of the Air Force. I can tell you for every person that volunteered and is happy, there are four that are hating life, waiting for the day to be released from the unrelenting grip of UAVs to get to a manned aircraft again, or the end of their pilot commitment so they can punch. I'm done. Time for another beer.

Look, like BigBear said, I'm not going to buy into saving an extra 69# of gas per mission when we are flying empty I would guess at least 25% of the time. I've seen countless times flying from the states to some place in SWA with 18 pallets and 69,000 pounds of stuff, then going back with absolutely nothing when i know there is something within an hour or two that need to get back to the states. And don't get me started with the types of crap that we haul to these locations... last trip I was on we flew at least 12 light carts to this undisclosed location when I can almost guarantee they have more than enough of them there already, but since the ones there aren't for the unit that is deploying then we have to haul them out. From what i've seen from the MIF software so far is the same that we've been doing before in the C-17. Fly 2-4k below max altitude and M .74... slower if you have a tailwind and faster if you have a headwind.... got it... we had a checklist that told us the exact same thing in the past. We already have enough to do from alert to takeoff that this is just another hinderance. Instead of this program, we should have hired fedex to teach us to run like their shipping model. I guarantee we would save more fuel that way than this program. Just my .02.