hindsight2020

don't forget points-only Cat-E for the real min run warrior.

Lol The Milton of the airline world.

Absolutely. It's called self-deprecating humor. 😄 One man's trash brahdah! 🤙

"You too can be the best of what's left!" 😄 Painfully apropos these days....

*airline hires in spite of rona* big blue right now.... 😄

And then when one of our wise azz a-word pilots brings up 'PBN' during T-38 IRC.... 😄

Well, the RUMINT I got was the financial duress angle got to the shooter, based on a ratings demotion during American occupation compared to his salary position during Taliban rule. I'm inclined to believe this theory, Occam's Razor and all that jazz.

Nylander was my flight SRO in OTS. Soft spoken and a real good dude, and a true believer in the Air Force and our foreign policy writ large (something I'm categorically not, in part due to the circumstances behind his untimely death in that FUBAR so-called nation building effort). Died a hero. Complete waste of human capital, that entire clusterf*ck of a perennial war we got going on over there, while private interests all get rich off the carnage. Indefensible mess that should have been nuked from orbit and left to glaze 5 decades ago. I'm also still disgusted at the potshots of cowardice levied towards these casualties by US senior investigating leadership. RIP Nathan.

Just like my student on his I-NAV cat check.... 😄

got a link to her insta? Asking for a friend... 😄

womp womp. Guess neoliberalism wasn't such a hot idea after all. Baby should have been allowed to drown in 2008.

Great personal tourer/gentleman acro machine, I'm in the process of getting one (trike version) myself to eventually replace my AD-laden cErTiFied airplane. But, they're frankly even less of a contender for a DOD companion trainer than the cirrus: The DOD would never put an experimental on the fleet, and a good % of the USAF crews would have trouble fitting side by side. They're cramped. Many won't fit without control interference. The RV-14 would be the only one that would have a chance imo. Their useful loads (6 and 7) are paltry, and they need to be built light to live up to the specs. A commercially procured RV will be piggy, it wouldn't survive a DOD capitalization process. The regulatory bloat placed by USAF management programs would negate the capital savings of going FAA non-TC in the first place. The Cirrus lineup is automotive in ergonomics, which allows for all sorts of dimensions to be workable. It's one of the reasons they outsold Mooney and Beech in the waning days of the step up piston (no longer a relevant dynamic, as I've suggested in my prior post). At any rate, this is all mindless fapping. Having experienced first hand the dynamics and politics of standing up an aero club in the post commercial-IFT days, I'm willing to bet next month's BAH that the DOD is never going to procure a piston companion trainer to augment flying hours for the "poors" within the pilot community.

Heck... it's actually better than AD right now in AFRC (>2 yr gets the full treinta y cinco). It's a basically a play by play of the Office Space scene where Peter (AFRC) tells Michael (RegAF) he's getting fired, and the Bobs got him (Peter) a promotion.... 😬 P.S. Damn, that movie just keeps delivering for me 22 years later. "What?!!" Kills me every time. 🤣

Sure thing, I'll try to speak more simply. Airplanes are expensive, middle class inflation adjusted (and I mean housing healthcare and education inflation money, not that joke of a shifting goalpost CPI metric) wages are flat since we went into the neoliberal era. People in my income quintile could afford new piston in 1965, i can't afford the same in absolute terms today, by at least a factor of 3. This rank asset inflation combined with dwindling absolute demand, has made it so that the gap between turbo props/single pilot turbofan, and new piston, is no longer an opportunity cost of consequence for the remaining winners of the hunger games. So the market bifurcated straight into recreational turbine, leaving a gaping hole in the step up piston (historically crowded by the piston twin, now solely carried by the SR-22/22T). Much to the chagrin of Cirrus owners, their numbers are still paltry compared to the highs of the late 60s production. This obviously presents a problem for us imprudent poors, who are stuck attempting to maintain a dwindling supply of fully depreciated (but still overpriced) airworthiness directive laden clap traps against the headwind of purposefully declining OEM (see Textron case study on their beech 35 ruddervators and their Cessna single retract anything parts support) and uneconomic third party support willingness by fleet attrition proxy. The former want these cans mothballed right yesterday, the latter can't be blamed for exiting the market in light of loss of fleet volume. Hope that clarifies. Cheers.

As a sole-owner of one of the aforementioned clapped out PA-28s, a big '2' to your commentary on recreational piston. It's one hell of an elitist hobby, good bad or indifferent. And that just doesn't help the optics when it comes to pleading the case our segment of the hobby is middle-earning working stiffs trying to enjoy an activity that's much maligned and co-opted by class warfare, much as a life ain't fair type of thing as it may be. At any rate, new production piston numbers have plummeted in the last 2 decades, which continues to demonstrate the K-shape bifurcation of the economy writ large. But more relevant to the topic, the gentrification of the hobby into turbine GA and away from pistons outright is also evident in the production numbers, on a historical comparative basis. Heck, I argue absent the churn of the American flight training complex (cheap by world standards, which is why the US is the flight training suite du jour), the whole thing would go the way of European piston GA. We recreationals basically ride remora on the legacy support infrastructure and third party vendor sales availability primarily supported by the rental beater fleets the part 61 and 141 puppy mills turn and burn. Otherwise, we'd be up the creek already on the rec side. Experimentals offer the only refuge left going forward for people like me who will never have the capital, nor the principled willingness, to spend more for a toy than my need for basic housing for my dependents. And as one who wishes to continue to fly recreationally even after I've stopped doing it for money.

I'm as bearish as they come when it comes to finances, but even I acknowledge the airlines will resume dod-retention germane hiring in way less than five fiscal years. I'm not saying blue is pulling anything surprising by taking advantage of covid to cajole people into a de facto 20 year ADSC, but I think they overplayed their hand by telegraphing for posterity what we all privately knew: the DOD does NOT care about experience retention, get it through your thick Stockholm syndrome skulls already. Any rhetoric to the contrary from senior leadership is rank gaslighting at this point.

and it's a doozy. Ouch.

what do you mean T-1? You're too young to have seen it. (UPT 2.5 joke, too soon?) 😄

At AA? I may be misunderstanding what they mean, but speaking with my AA "associates" at the sqdrn, coverage rules at American are supposedly horrible (the whole red/redder thing), which would make that airline a terrible one to be a low-credit/trip-dropper guy. I remember asking that specifically as someone who'd be in the trip dropper category as a junior guy without the MLOA crutch non-retirees still have at their disposal. Your anecdote runs completely counter to everything I've been told about the schedule-germane work rules at AA. I'm completely open to stand corrected since you work there of course, but is this a 'Rona specific nuance? At any rate, agreed driving to work is the cat's meow, but like everything in life, everyone has different flex/priorities/circumstances. No right/wrong answer on that one.

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. I thought you were implying one couldn't gainfully retire as an FGO without the need for a full-time occupation; premise which of course I vehemently disagree with. To bring it back on topic of the airline talk, as someone who will be circa 46-49 with a check in hand, a kid out the house, and a working spouse, I'm going to be wanting to prioritize time-off over pay, full stop. I've debated a lot what potential avenues I'd be willing to take at that time (GS stamp licking job, FW EMS, part 135/91, sim jobs, even expat .mil contracting), and so far have come up fairly empty-handed for one reason or another. The only construct I've been able to research that remotely touches on the kind of work-life allowance I seek in a post-mil pursuit, is some airline outfits. But a place where I can't readily drop trips/schedules as a **perma-junior guy and still eek out 70-80K, is just not worth the trouble for me. (**not working past 60, so less than 11 years longevity from .mil to when I quit all work life full stop) -break break Congrats on AD retirement btw! I have two things I rather be doing right now as a young man that my work impositions are getting in the way of: (1) The hobby and (2) more time back home. Suffice to say, the wife is tripping over herself to partake in both, which is probably why she's my second wife and not my first one. 😮 And I digress. Cheers! 🍺

I'm sorry, I missed the punchline. What do you mean by that?

You're missing the point. Airline training baby. Turns out .mil flying is so simple you can just tabletop it. What's a 'little' handflying atrophy here and there. And yeah some folks may die, but well within Big Blue's ALR on this one. Innovation! *wet fart* /s Oh, we're still not hitting the production targets, 4 years since they began this pseudo-intellectual word salad affair. At the rate we're going, they're just gonna contract out undergraduate training to part 141 and the unvetted cholate mess they get out of that one can go direct to FTU MAF cockpits (aka CPW reductio ad absurdum).

lol yeah I saw that too.

Would love to hear more about these avenues, as someone who has made a career in the T11Kxx world with little interest or incentive (less than 10 years to self-imposed full retirement after .mil retirement) to dabble in the airline thing post .mil. Are we talking GS jobs? contractor? OEM employer? flying, non-flying? PM if you don't want to divulge specifics. How did Stan/Eval affiliation helped you? Cheers.

Correct. TERA program of fy 14 and 15. Lot of eligible folks took the 15 year retirement and hit the airlines at a great time. It was high cotton for a couple years. And you're also correct on the reprisal accusation wrt the signature strike extrajudicial killing of a us citizen, he prevailed on that one. The one that got him more notoriety was the uvalde exchanges with the CBP during his days at DLF, complete with the accompanying youtube fame. Argument could be made he was the first baseops influencer before it became fashionable to have "I love me" channels lol.