Smokin

I'm starting to think that not only will we lose the next big war, but that we'll deserve to lose it...

While you're right that they look great and go with everything, especially a tucked in shirt and braided leather belt slung low to support the beer belly, I wouldn't wear them because I'd hate for someone to think that I'm pretending to be a captain when I'm really just a lowly flip switching FO.

I've never seen a flight attendant after the shuttle dropping us off. I think it is intentional that the FAs usually stay in different hotels in my airline. Domestically, I had dinner or a beer with the captain probably 2/3 of the trips. Eating healthy is very do-able. As has been said, the first day or two you can bring food from home. Other days I have walked to grocery stores and bought food for the next day. The biggest problem with eating healthy is not necessarily the food you eat, but the volume. You go out to dinner three nights in a row. Almost every dinner I've ordered has been far more food than I would have eaten for dinner at home. Chances are you won't be hungry later if you only eat half the burger and fries at the local pub. I am very deliberate when eating on trips and didn't gain a pound the first year. I also always packed running shoes and any layover >12 hours I used a run to explore the local area.

I've been keeping up my disability insurance just in case something happened that would prevent me from passing an FAA physical. Fairly expensive, but airline pilot income for life in the event I get in a car accident or something seems worth it to me.

Exactly. In a just society, she would not only be impeached but also actually spend time behind bars. Her words will likely get people killed. First Amendment doesn't cover this kind of incitement to violence.

Not as important as getting a line number. I was advised by airline guys when I was leaving AD to get a line number ASAP and the 20 years would figure itself out. I thought I was smarter than them and waited until I was over 14 years TAFMs to hit submit on my apps. Turns out I should have listened. With the COVID stuff and exempt orders, I could be on mil leave for 8 years straight, so I could have gotten out right at 12, hired on terminal, and still hit my 20. Be ready to interview with your availability date as the earliest realistic you could show for training on terminal leave.

If you have a job lined up, have built a job transition money buffer, and are otherwise ready, six months is plenty. If you just want out and are pulling the handle while hoping for the best, six months is pretty short if you have a family to feed.

It's ok, just identify as both a male and a female when you fill out your app. Now you're in on both sides of the 50% quota. Actual race and sex discrimination in an attempt to fix perceived race and sex discrimination...

Just another sign of the path our country is on, the Harris administration just filed a friend of the court brief in favor of warrant-less search and seizure. It blows my mind that anyone could read our Constitution and even remotely recognize our current government as being derived from it other than the most basic structure. https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-considers-police-leeway-without-warrant-11616620768?page=1

That is awesome! How long did the rebuild take you? '66?

I thought the exact same thing when I read that article. I was told the same thing as him. In UPT I was "cocky and talked too much" and in MQT "I wasn't confident enough and never talked". It is amazing that until I read his story, I never realized that my instructors were not providing me valuable feedback to find the middle ground but were, in fact, just being racist.

Do tell... Can't just drop a bomb like this and walk away like nothing happened...

But can they grow their way out of the mishap problem? An aggressive bonus could keep experienced guys around to help train younger pilots which would help prevent some mishaps. Instead, they're going to save their budget dust and produce more pilots with that money to replace those apparently acceptable losses.

"Less than 1 in 100" includes less than 5 in 10000 and also includes zero. Zero is roughly the chance that I think I have of dying of COVID in the next decade. I will eventually get the vaccine for the same reason I get the flu vaccine, which I also think that I currently have a roughly zero percent chance of dying from. The flu and COVID both suck, but I'm way more likely to die from a car accident than either virus, so we need to reasonably evaluate the risks. For the military population, the chance of death from COVID is virtually zero, which makes me think that there is something more going on here. Speaking of which... I cannot think of a public health issue in the history of the world that has been more politicized that this, which is why you see a substantial distrust in the system that developed it. Remember the VP debates when now VP Harris said 'if Donald Trump tells me I should get the vaccine, I won't get the vaccine" and now she is actively advocating that exact same vaccine simply because she is now in power? Zoom out just a little and I think you'll find reluctance to get an experimental vaccine that is being pushed by substantial political motivations for a virus is relatively non-threatening to the military population to be relatively reasonable. The vast majority of deaths have been >65 years old. If this is really not politically motivated, why was a healthy guy like me <40 years old offered the vaccine six weeks prior to my >65 year old parents? Politics in the military sucks worse than COVID; it is reasonable to push back against purely political decisions being forced on the military.

I never thought I'd say the Army is doing something better than the AF, but my Army friends are quarantining in their house before and after the deployment. Why the AF thinks its a good idea to put 18 year old airmen in solitary confinement for two weeks is beyond me.

Plus the guidance that you'll still be expected to quarantine if you are exposed even after the vaccine. And they're still quarantining troops prior to deployments, even with 100% vaccination AND the virus already established at the destination. Tough to think of a better example of the brass doing something that actively hurts the military members and the mission simply so they can say 'look! we're doing something'.

If COVID is so deadly, shouldn't we be giving the vaccine to people that will actually die if they get the virus instead of a group of people that are all generally health and generally cannot have co-morbidity issues? It seems to me that it is extremely irresponsible, to the point of being borderline criminal, to give the vaccine to the military before the general population.

Gas stations may be out, but with anytime there's a chance for bad weather my truck tank gets filled. On a full tank, I'm good for 500 miles, plus the additional many miles I could get if I really needed to by siphoning the gas out of my boat, mower, etc. When I can do that with an electric truck, count me in. Until then, I'll stick to burning dinosaurs.

One thing to think about if the airlines are your primary retirement plan is your aircraft currency. If you are currently flying and have the potential to stay flying without IDE, that would set you up best for the airlines. If you accept IDE and get a non-flying staff job, your recency in any aircraft will be pretty limited. Obviously if you get a flying command or a flying staff, that's another thing entirely. Most of the majors want to see current aircraft hours, so if there is a potential that the IDE could take you out of the jet for the rest of your career (or even the last year of your career), that could significantly affect your airline plans. I know that United has a filter on their apps where they won't even see your app if you have less than 100 hours in the past year. You could be the perfect applicant other than recency and you'll never get the invite. Not trying to talk you out of staying in, just wanted to make sure you were thinking about how your app will look in 4 years if the airlines is your plan. On the other hand, your IDE and potential staff tour could open up some non-airline retirement jobs as well.

I would bet that as Clark said, this is a self-protection insurance measure from the future admin. That way the SecAF can immediately say "Ma'am, we're already on it, I have the fun police scouring the AF as we speak." In general, if you're going to get a punishment, better to be from your immediate commander than from his boss's boss.

Doesn't this belong in the WTF thread? Just in case they ever thought they were in danger of possibly, someday down the road, ever being considered a remote auxiliary to the US military, they go and call themselves "guardians". And the Coast Guard dudes are all jumping up and down; "Yes! Finally a branch of the military that is less military than us!"

I'm assuming the Eagle still has the old-school ADI? I was shocked how much better the electronic ADI is in the Viper with the CDU than the old T-38A junk we had, particularly in at lower light levels like night or in IMC when you really want the ADI. I have no doubt that had the old ADI been replaced with the electronic version as soon as it was available, there would be multiple pilots alive today that didn't make it out of an unusual attitude and it sounds like Kage may be one more.

I get your point on over analyzing a single kick, but back to my first point, you can't tell me this was anything but a publicity stunt. At the entire university, there wasn't a single guy who kicked in high school, but either wasn't good enough to kick in college or just didn't want to play for a team that lost as much as Vanderbilt? I don't buy that for a minute. Google says their student body is more than 12,000 students. I'd bet there are more than two dozen previous high school kickers that could have stepped in. So instead finding a student that already had experience kicking a football in an actual game, or finding a male soccer player, they went and trained up a female soccer player. No way was their intent anything but playing a girl for the sake of playing a girl either for the publicity or to make a statement. If I made a deliberate decision as public and as dumb as that, I would have no grounds to complain about others analyzing my decision.

If your football team can't sell tickets by winning games, maybe they'll sell tickets with absurd PR stunts. The sad part is this doesn't play into the advancement of women's equality as they think it does. I have no doubt the school used her simply because she is female. In my mind, that is the opposite of equality. If a guy just uses a girl, that guy is judged by women to be a bad person, but if a school uses a girl, apparently that's laudable and hailed as an achievement. I wonder if it was actually called as a squib kick (prior to the kick). If you're going to set a milestone by having the first woman kick a football in a D1 school, you know that it is going to make headlines, ESPN, and other highlight reels, and you would want it to look good. A squib kick to the 35 does not look good. A 15 year old JV kicker could do that.

The real question is not if there was illegal voting and vote manipulation (I doubt if any sizable election has ever been 100% accurate and correct since the days of the Athenian democracy) but was on a scale that could have affected the outcome. Since so many states were so close, it is a worthwhile discussion to have. I voted for Trump and I am obviously not happy that he lost. I have seen enough evidence to convince me that there was some voter fraud (see first comment and a Fox News article that listed multiple voters that were listed as having voted by name that died prior to 2018) , but so far no evidence that it was on the scale that some have accused. As is normal in our republic, especially lately, it is necessary to tune out both extremes. Was there a massive liberal corporate conspiracy to steal the election? Probably not. Was every single vote that was counted legal and legit? Certainly not. So the left should stop claiming that voters are being disenfranchised by the millions by looking into voter fraud. Similarly, the right should stop claiming that millions of votes were changed by some computer program unless they have some real tangible evidence.