pawnman

Update to the story, a Serbian tourist apparently killed the shark in question during a drunken high-dive. https://www.geekologie.com/2010/12/drunk_man_kills_shark_by_jumpi.php And apparently Dragan is currently recovering from alcohol poisoning...I'm not surprised.

It's not easy to build those skills when the military is tasking you deploy 6 months out of every year, and the other six are taken up by OREs, ORIs, upgrades, and mandatory training days. If we had the schedule of the outside civilians, we could definitely compete. But with military schedules and deployments being what they are, flight hours are about all we can bring to the table. As a WSO, I don't know what I'll be qualified for on the outside...maybe I can get a defense contractor job.

If you read the comments, there are multiple teachers who say they've done just that, but it isn't considered proof enough by the administration of the school.

It's amazing how they are downsizing it, yet every BONE squadron is so short on WSOs we have to borrow bodies to make up a deployable squadron.

I think the bigger news here is that someone PCSd out of a UAV squadron.

If you've got kids and liked Shrek, Tangled is a good bet. I was entertained, but it's definitely a sappy Disney kid's movie. John Lassiter must be kicking himself for jumping ship at Pixar to go to work for Disney full-time. Out on DVD, Scott Pilgrm vs the World is a great movie. Again, full of ridiculous action sequences and more than a few non sequitors, but very funny and entertaining.

You could probably have a multiplier of some kind for deployment time. A different multiplier for "hazardous duty" time...so you earn more for more flight time, or being deployed to a dangerous location (as opposed to being "deployed" to Dover, for example)...other jobs would apply as well (JTACs, EOD, submarines, etc). Maybe instead of trying to quantify time spent, they could include the bonus pay in your retirement (so getting 50% of your total pay instead of base pay, for example).

It's not free. It's mandatory that you buy your own insurance, or you are subjected to fairly steep tax penalties for not having insurance. Which would make waiting for Tricare benefits that much more costly. Yes, nsplayr, I was wondering if they delay the pension portion of the retirement, if they would delay the other parts of your retirement.

If the benefits don't start until age 57/60/whatever, the real kicker will be, do you retain your health insurance benefits between retirement and age 57? Maybe that's the backdoor they're trying to save money on...healthcare. I suspect this is also the driving force behind the new PFT standards...get the unhealthy people failing PFTs, then you can force-shape your highest-cost individuals and retain the cheaper, healthy ones.

Where in SD? I'd be happy to buy you a beer in the squadron bar if you're on the western half of the state.

I'm not in the MAF world. With his level of experience, in order to maintain BMC, he only needs 2 flights a month or 4 flights in 3 months to meet lookback.

I can't say if it's only confined to your base, but I can tell you I've never seen it out of a B-1 WG/CC. Even the AUAB WG/CC often showed up to the chow hall an hour prior to the mission brief to eat with the rest of the crew. Often our WG and OG/CC are utilized as IPs and Evaluators, coming in on mission planning day (granted, they generally have alot of alibis so they don't get the full effect...but still), and they step with the rest of us, ride in the same van with the rest of us, and debrief with the rest of us. They certainly don't require crew bios or a mission brief three days in advance. Then again, both B-1 bases are home to relatively small operations groups, so the WG and OG/CC already know most of the people in the squadron on at least a "I've seen that guy around" basis.

It's not a go-no go. It'll be replaced during the next phase inspection.

My favorite part of the article was how, in typical USAF fashion, we couldn't make a damn decision. "Aim High...Fly, Fight, Win" is a combination of two ideas. So rather than take the winner and run with it, we had to make those who voted for the runner-up feel good by including them.

Bingo. This was not a case of a kid wandering the gym aimlessly, at risk of having a barbell dropped on them. This was a baby in a carseat, in a room specifically designed for parents to bring their kids and keep an eye on them while they work out, away from the rest of the gym equipment.

Apparently it was a rare, but not unheard of, incident.

Well, I signed him up for Publisher's Clearinghouse, including the diabetes medication ads.

What do you mean, never work? I am telling you that is the way we do things. I haven't seen a transpo troop since my last PCS.

We've certainly cut transpo from the equation. We make an FNG do it. And he's got a radio at the ops desk. Guess who is at the jet as soon as the ladder drops?

https://www.redstate.com/snarkandboobs/2010/10/13/tolerance-and-diversity-teaching-girls-that-misogyny-and-beatings-are-an-honor/ And beating your wife is honoring her.

Fair enough. Just realize that we've had several successful operations where there were no troops on the ground. You may say even this is supporting the ground troops by not requiring them to deploy to the fight. Keep in mind one of the reasons we became a separate service was the doctrine of strategic bombing, far forward of the front lines. If we're just going to be a support service for the guys on the ground, we may as well get rolled back into the Army.

Again, we support national policy. While strategic bombing may support the ground troops overall by diverting resources, you may as well say that any American who pays taxes is supporting the 18 year-old grunt on the ground by that logic. In the current fight, yes, our job is very much to give support to the guys on the ground. But in a large conflict with a peer? Not so much. We're going to be busy attacking objectives far out of reach of the ground troops.

Because it's the AIR Force, not the "Logistics" force or the "Support" force.

Really? I found I had less cooperation from the Navs at Randolph during EWO than I did from the guys at PCola...AF and Navy. If only our Chiefs of Staff could get along as well as the students from different branches did at PCola, maybe we wouldn't have the intersevice dick-measuring contests to get funding.

Well they aren't getting into Jango's chow hall, that's for damn sure.