Hacker

Huggy's orange flight suit is f*cking boss.

As Ernie Gann wrote back in the 60s: “All airline pilots are subject to the high cock-o-lorum of seniority, whether they like it or not. The system was established to banish favoritism and to provide some basis for assignment of bases, routes, flights, and pay. Its great fault, as in any seniority system, is the absolutely necessary premise that all men are equal in ability. The dullard and the genius must both live with the ostrich philosophy that one man can fly as skillfully as another. No one, of course, maintains this to be a truth. But the seniority system must ever persist if only because it is a protection of the weak, who are everywhere in the greatest number.”

How can it be that nobody's yet posted the clip of Baseops' @Steve Davies vs @HuggyU2 battling for ultimate domination of YouTube? https://youtu.be/ZgR3wzOioks

What's sad is that UPT used to be a filter in and of itself. It was a mistake to push that responsibility off on IFF so that UPT Wing Commanders could get themselves promoted based on their percentage of successful student graduation. Thus IFF became both a choke point and a single point of failure...and it sounds like IFF has succumbed to a similar cancer as UPT. Someone has to hold the line at some point. If they don't, then we're going to have smoking holes and flag-draped caskets. Oh, surprise, surprise.

Most pointy-nosed guys I take out for an hour in this thing find it one of the most humbling (and most fun!) stick-and-rudder experiences of their flying career.

Just think of all the fellas you and I fly with who have *never* been upside-down in an aircraft. When I fly with someone who is in that category, I usually encourage them to go buy an hour or two of aerobatic instruction for their own airmanship development. I have been surprised to hear many folks respond with either, "...if I needed to know that, the company would train me to do it." or "...being upside-down in a Pitts doesn't teach me anything about what to do if it happens in a 767." So, literally, these individuals are not concerned about their first time being inverted in an airplane being in a transport-category aircraft and it occurring at an unplanned/unexpected time. SMH.

Yeah, you have proved my point precisely. You said, " you can't say fire in a crowded movie theater," and that quote clearly shows that you can. In order for it to not be protected speech, 1) It has to be "false" 2) It has to cause a panic 3) It has to cause a clear and present danger. So, can I "say fire in a crowded movie theater" if it is actually on fire? Yep. Can I "say fire in a crowded movie theater" if it neither creates a panic, or creates a clear and present danger? Yep. You may call it semantics, but if you're going to make an argument like that, being specific matters.

Actually you *can* do that. Saying the word is not illegal or prohibited.

Unfortunately that's fleet dependent. I've been actively fishing for AVA, Volunteer, Draft, vacation buyback, etc, for the last 3 months on the A300 and haven't gotten a single credit hour of 1.5 pay.

Don't forget, Hitler also breathed air, drank water, and even slept at night.

I just broke out a pair of new-old-stock Addisons that I've been hoarding for like 15 years so I can get out of the "warbird-pilot-athletic-shoes-and-flight-suit" club.

Got it, I didn't get the full picture of what you were saying with respect to the retired dudes being management pilots at the airlines.

For what reason? Maybe I had a different experience, but since retiring my attitude is: What's there to hate on bros about? Hell, I don't even really hate on Navy pilots anymore either, despite their known shortcomings as both men and aviators.

Card counting is quite a skill. Is that supposed to be a strike against him?

No, actually, it isn't supposed to be part of the Executive Branch's powers....it is Congress relinquishing powers it is supposed to have. "Rule making" is supposed to be performed by the "Legislative Branch"....hence, y'know, the name.

Government only has the powers that they're given by the people, and everything else they don't have the authority to do. So where's that part in the Constitution about the Government having the power to tell you what to wear?

If you can't actually argue the points with logic, it is perfectly valid to just go ad-hominem instead.

I can almost read the nametag....General Liquid.

This is the most terrible justification in the entire philosophical pantheon.

I had a short relationship with a Cherokee 235, as well as getting my private in a Cherokee 160. I chose it over a Bonanza or a Comanche, mostly for market price and what I needed in a "family cruiser" at the time. It was a very enjoyable airplane with a relatively good amount of useful load (1500-ish pounds, depending on gas, etc) and easy to find someone to maintain. It is not particularly expensive to maintain, although mine had its original 70s-era panel and no upgrades, and was going to cost a fortune to update with certified avionics if I wanted to keep playing IFR games with it. The 540 is a reliable engine in my experience too. Don't have much to say about them overall; less expensive than a 182 with comparable performance, can actually haul 4 people (although the back seats are better with kids) and some bags, and typical GA maintenance costs. I sold it rather quickly for PCS reasons, and if my family and mission circumstances were the same, I might own one again....but they aren't. EDIT: Since this is a thread about costs, I'm adding that my costs of ownership probably aren't relevant today as it was 20-ish years ago. I could afford it as a dual-incone-no-kids 1Lt/Capt at the time, though.

I'm still perplexed as to why people suddenly believe that formation landings are this massive risk. Compared to the number of times they are performed (with regularity) incident-free (also with regularity, even with student pilots at the helm), the rate of incident/accident is phenomenally low. By definition, based on that data, they're not "risky". Yes, there is a small margin of error (just like a vast many things in high performance military aviation), and the consequences of some modes of error can be severe and/or fatal (just like that same vast number of things in high performance military aviation)...so what makes formation landing now some kind of exception?

To be fair, the PIT enterprise at RND produces a flying instructor that is orders of magnitude better than what the FAA's CFI-creation process is. I went to PIT as a salty O-4 who already had more than one IPUG program under my belt, and as @BashiChuni mentioned the "Instructor Fundamentals" academic course taught by the blue-suiters was the first time in my career that the AF had actually made an attempt to teach me how to instruct. It was probably one of the most useful academic courses in my entire AF career. It wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it actually codified processes to both platform instruct in the briefing room, as well as gave specific tools on finding root causes and instructional fixes to in-flight performance. It actually explained and put names on a bunch of tools that numerous Patch-wearers and IPs had been trying to explain (but were not actually teaching me) in the process of mashing my balls to mush in hour 13 of the DCA IPUG debrief. That course at PIT could have actually used a healthy dash of improvement with some of the WIC processes that were vogue out in the ops world at the time (the "perception-decision-execution" method of root cause analysis, for example), but it was good. It is something that *all* new instructors at every level of the training pipeline could really use.

There's no decision that's too conservative for the risk-averse faction of AF management.

Those are "solo numbers".

Zero, you're still one of my favorite military/aviation cartoonists. You always reminded me of the great Bob Stevens (whose most famous collection of aviation cartoons is "If You Read Me, Rock The Tower"), whom I read a lot of growing up in a mil aviation family. Hope life is treating you well.