Dupe

I think most officers don't understand the reality of the average elisted family. Most young familes in the Air Force have either both parents in the Air Force or one in the Air Force and another employed elsewhere. Since we have decided to pay our enlisted kids somewhere at or below the poverty level (hence the second working parent), providing some form of child care for working parents is mission required. The fact is that your bridge doesn't keep airplanes turning. Having an organization that supports young families does. Nobody is prying money out of your hands. Instead, we're taking the profits from the company store and applying it to the areas that would best improve the overall base quality of life. Could the store be better? Yes. Are the laws that govern military construction asinine? Absolutely. Is it wise that AAFES and DECA are legally seperated? Probably not. Is accessesable and affordable child care a mission requirement for a base? Definately.

I've got the ACCES to 3.5mm patch cord built. I think the easiest way to work the money and tracking orders is through EBay. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260847441884&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT $20 plus shipping. I'm working still working on a mask/helmet version...stand by for that. Also to come is a traditional patch cord like we all have buried in the bottom of our helmet bags and a version for civil airplanes. I do a fair bit if flying tinker-toy airplanes on the side, and I'm convinced they hurt my ears more than a pair of PW-229 does.

One PEP trend I've noticed: Every exchange RAF guy over here in the states purchases a two ton or greater pick-up truck.

You don't think having affordable and accesable child care on base has mission impact?

AAFES partially funds your FSS activities. Sure, the posters have pictures of money going to play-grounds in base-housing or new ski equipment at Outdoor Rec. The reality on most bases is that the bulk of the money goes into the Child Development Centers. I'm pretty sure that bases that said "Just go shop at WalMart. Child Development Center closes 1 Oct due to lack of funding." would be really crappy places to be for our troops with young kids. I'm not saying purchase every roll of TP and every tool at AAFES...I'm saying know where the money goes. I can handle paying $0.50 extra for a bag of dog food knowing that the profit goes to SSgt Snuffy's toddler vice to Bentonville.

I've got the first demo version of my ACCES - 3.5mm patch cord complete. I'll PM those interested when I'm ready to release to Ops. I've got to do a month or so of suitability testing first. The idea is that you can use my widget to wear in a new set of plugs or use your ACCES as the world's best passive headset when getting your Delta miles/rotator/C-17 time in. One note: aviation headsets are monophone in design (vice stereo), so your Boom Boom Pow isn't nearly as cool as with the iPhone earbuds.

The real problem is the lack of positive actual news stories about the Air Force. What should we push out to the world? "Tankers passed 100k of JP-8 to fighters orbiting over insurgency. Enemy was indistinguishable from local populace. No munitions were expended. The Air Force spent $2 Million in operations costs executing last night's ATO." We may laugh at the fluff pieces put out by AF/PA. They're better than nothing at all.

What gets me is that we find it more technically feasable to hack into an A-10 than it is modify a MQ-9 for the program. Data rights crushes us again....

Easy...it probably doesn't have a pitot system, thus calibrated airspeed measurments are N/A.

CH- The picture that was on your ticket is a virtually nearly impossible system to produce. Real radars (be they X-band fighter radars or K-band State Trooper speed radars) have a main beam that rolls off and possibly many side lobes. Attached is my crude beer-fueled drawing of your set-up:

I have a theory that sweeping uniform changes are a sign of hard times in the Air Force. HQ USAF has little control over our high dollar programs weapon systems programs, the AF's end strength, or where our troops are committed to globally. What HQ USAF does have control over is uniforms and PT tests. Look at the early / mid-1990s when the USAF had bases BRACed left and right. We'd gone from the pillar of the Persian Gulf War to settling into a never ending train of ONW/OSW deployments. What was the big issue at the time? That's right: a business-coat like service dress, service dress sleeve stripes and aircrew leather name-tags on BDUs. Now we're bitching about Friday shirts and morale patches. At the same time, the Air Force has dropped TA support from 100% tuition down to 75% and barely anybody noticed. Once upon a time, the DoD stood firm on the supportabiliy of 2 1/2 wars. Now, we're flumuxed by our couple of nation rebuilding efforts. Uniform changes are the AF's great chaff bundle. I liked my Friday shirt, but I've got much bigger issues to deal with.

Give me a couple of months. My guess is $25 - $30 to start, but that will go down once I can bulk order parts. The biggest cost is that damn ACCES connector. That thing is $8 when I buy them in small batches. I personally now get way more airline time than I want, but I'm too cheap to buy any high-prices noise cancelling stereo headsets. This is my cheap way out of that corner. I'll post back here once I have an ACCES - stero cable built with more than 40 hours of airline / treadmill time on it.

Thread revival here... I think most of the fighter world has now transitioned over to the ACCES ear inserts. Does anybody want a patch cord that would connect between the ACCES ear plugs and your helmet plug that would allow only you to hear iPod input (vice potentially broadcasting to the world like most patch cords / intercom boxes)? Secondly, is there a demand for an adapter that would connect your ACCES earplugs to a standart 3.5mm stereo jack? I'm working on some prototypes in my garage. PM me if these are things you'd be interested in. I may be willing to sell the first few at or below cost just to get the word out...

Have you used your post 9/11 GI bill or do you have concrete plans to save it for your kids? If not, that's law-school or a MBA waiting to happen. I know quite a few folks who are willing to let the wife earn the big pay check for a few years while they make E-5 BAH and work towards one of the high-value post-grad degrees.

As much as I'd like to see some form of TSP-matching rolled into our retirement scheme, I highly doubt there are 218 House members willing to dismantle the current military retirement system. The proposal may make sense from a board of patriotic Wall Streeters....its simply politically not realistic.

Oh holy mother of PME. What are we going to do in 8 weeks that we can't do in 5 weeks at SOS?

Boeing didn't lie...this is pretty much how fixed-price incentive contracts work. The thing is that Boeing is out of rope for overages in the EMD phase. Anything above $4.9B, and they have to pay (which the article implies that they will be).

True statement. A technical masters also helps when you apply. There is a pretty small number of us TPS-grad WSOs/CSOs/Navs...I'm happy to talk about that career path for anyone who will listen. We need more qualitiy applicants for the blue patch.

My guess is that the lease on the DA-20s is up for renewal, and the AF realized the dumbness of leased aircraft for full-time flight ops.

The other half of the story is that Congress must approve any of these theoretical pay cuts. I see this option as really unpalatable to Congress. It hits to the heart of the current military budget problem: Secretary Gates is strongly suggesting that cutting specific programs and funding lines will be better than simply hacking off X percent from the operations budget. At the same time, cutting the O&M budget by X% is much much easier to get through congress than targeting programs and people. My prediction is that it will be some combination of both strategies and that military pay will be preserved. There isn't a Congressman in the South who will vote to cut military pay or retirement. Can you imagine the smear ads in the next campaign cycle? I think Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen are just doing a bit of posturing. They're essentially saying "Look, Congress, our position is so bad that we are actually seriously considering cutting military pay and benefits. Approve the cuts we want so we don't have to go down that road."

Well...Apart from the tree-huggers, I can't see any other use for a system that could autonomously track living things through the desert to targeting-level accuracy....

...Sounds like somebody's deploying to Balad.

If it were me, I'd rather the entire world not know my identity. America may be damn proud, but there's alot of folks out there who may want to harm my family. ...There's something to be said for quiet professionalism. This shot makes me sad: There are slide-clickers even at the O-7 level.

There's a CSO Conference? I didn't know there was such a thing.

The Electronic Warfare Squadrons at Eglin update aircraft electronic warfare systems as new threat systems roll out and as new emitting systems get bolted on to US assets. Here's an example: In the F-15E, we're just now testing and developing a new AESA radar. That radar has a different waveform and frequency band as the currently fielded APG-70. As a result, our electronic warfare system has to change so that the radar doesn't blank out the warning reciever. Another example: Let's say the Ruskies just rolled out the new SA-69 missile. If we had the intell on that new threat's electronic waveforms and characteristics, we could then roll that into the threat libraries of all our aircraft. Finally, library space is finite on all our aircraft. There's no way that every threat could possibly fit on every aircraft. However, it'd be really smart to create a theater-based library and update those as threats change in particular theaters...that's one of the EWS roles. There are EWS squadrons at Eglin for many different platforms. If you're in the squadron that does F-22 electronic warfare, I wouldn't expect to fly too much. If you're supporting the F-16, there's a chance you could fly. Even then, you won't fly much. There are many engineers on Eglin with flight orders and not so many aircraft with back seats. If you really like your job and don't want to continue down the 62 career path (which will include a fun tour at a SPO and maybe some time as a lab manager), the skills you learn as an EW engineer would make you a highly prized Pilot/EWO/CSO in some platforms. I'd encourage you to apply to the flying board if that's where your heart lies. As for Test Pilot School, I know one guy who came directly from an EWS at Eglin and went as an engineer. The current commander of the 36 EWS is a Buff EWO and a TPS grad. For engineers, a Master's is virtually required to be competitive for TPS, and there's certainly no guessing which form of flight test engineering you'd be doing following TPS graduation. If you've got further questions about Eglin, being a 62, or any of the EWS work, feel free to PM me