Gazmo
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Posts posted by Gazmo
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No. Nothing that had anything to do with the autopilot so why all of a sudden now? There could very well be an issue with our hardware, but VVM and the understanding of the way the systems work should definitely be an SII.I flew on B45 in 2015 in its infancy. Was there a software update that made it start being crazy? -
1,000 days? And we can't get days for continuation sim training...
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I have never had an issue with B45, however, I can say that in typical AMC fasion, its implementation, training and SOP's have been pretty terrible. There is a very good chance these issues are crew error due to aforementioned reasons.
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Yes, when I looked into a Cat-E job, the CC told me to come as an O-5 already.2 years ago I was looking into CAT E. If you do the bare minimum, you won't make enough points for a good year. Likewise, the promotion rate from O-4 to O-5 was about 50% among rated O's (alot less than TRs). The big takeaway was, you still need to work (a little) to make O-5. -
So IMA's are not subject to any sort of mobilization? I thought that was the whole point.Different IMA billets have different “minimums”. Some have higher minimum IDT amounts (48 vs 24 is typical). Two IDTs would make up an 8 hour day so it sort of works out to 24 vs 12 “days” of IDTs. You can very much work only half days, or work an afternoon on day 1 of a string of IDTs and a morning on day X to allow for a commute in and out. There’s officially zero travel pay for IDTs, but there’s also an annual critical AFSCs list that allows for some travel pay with your IDTs. Otherwise you’re on your own. Getting paid, for either the travel pay or the IDT itself, is typical AF incompetence. Archaic, non-functioning systems supported by lazy, brain-dead civilians/enlisted folks. Yet I’m supposed to believe we’re gonna actually go to war with the near-peer bogeyman… but I digress.
The 14 days of Annual Tour is sort of set up to be: commute out day 1, work days 2-13, commute home day 14. There are ways to split up the AT, and/or combine it with IDTs. AT is 1/30th AD pay/benefits/etc more or less. Travel is always paid for AT. Doesn’t mean the archaic systems are gonna get you paid on time, though. I’d rather telecommute and never step foot on a mil installation again.
A lot of this stuff is unit dependent as to what they expect and how flexible they are. There are certainly MPA opportunities if you want to exceed your AT/IDTs. Some people volunteer for those Korea AOC exercises or COCOM duty officer shift work things in addition to their IMA gig… I have no idea if those are good deals or not. Probably not during this COVID insanity.
Did I mention the best part of being an IMA- never deploying again? -
Have you heard of them funding more AT or MPA days for IMA's?IMAs don’t drill like traditional reservists. You get attached to active duty units and work out a schedule with them on when they want you to come support. An IDT is kind of like a drill day though in that 4 hours of work equals 1 IDT. So a CAT A IMA usually works 24 actual days to fulfill that requirement since the active unit is almost certainly going to want you there for an 8 hour day. Just like all other reservists though you still need to do your “two weeks active duty”, so that’s what the 14 day AT requirement is.
The beauty is you can basically schedule it however you want as long as your active unit agrees. I recently transitioned to an IMA role but haven’t finalized my schedule yet. However a former unit I worked in had a CAT A IMA and she would only be in the office twice a year. For like 2-3 weeks max at a time. -
+1 for the IMA route if you don't mind hanging up the military flying. ARC is getting more and more like AD, at least in the tanker world. I thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel pre-COVID with the talks of pulling out of Afghanistan, but due to COVID, there were no swapouts out of CENTCOM this year, so everyone did 60's. Guess what. Next year, PACOM is 60 days with no swaps. Show them (AMC) you can do it once and it's hard to go back. I remember when PACOM was a "business effort" with 15-day rotations. Now it's 60-days with staff. The stuff's getting old. I am going into my 19th year and have already been promoted to O-5. If I could find an IMA job to sit in for the next 3-4 years, I'd jump on it in a heart beat. Remember; there are different IMA's (A & B; and I believe there is a C, but I could be wrong). A's give you 48 IDT and 14 AT; B's are 24 IDT and 24 AT. Both will allow you to use TRS for healthcare.
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Attend your Cockpit Working Group (CWG) and bitch about what you need in your airplane.As much as I don’t want to underestimate the power of a ambitious captain to “accelerate change.” What we really need is the MAF to get on board to give us the tools to actually participate in the high end fight. You know what the next C-17 block adds to the jet? Better VNAV to help comply with STARs, a HUD whose primary addition is to make those ILSs even easier, a software improvement to eek out a little more efficiency in the autothrottles. You know what it doesn’t have? the ability to build a threat ring on the glass with less than 36 keystrokes, the ability to display the jets bullseye location without mental gymnastics. RWR? Pleaze. Any datalink? Forget about it. So I have to tell our enterprising young copilots that training to fight near peer adversary means improving techniques to mark up their crappy bullseye chart. I can understand why some get skeptical and want to primarily train in the jets core competency that AMC actually invests in. -
Went to FL on vacation a few weeks ago and we traveled to on a Wednesday. Overhearing conversation around us, there were quite a few people sitting near us on business trips. Definitely not an official sign that business travel is coming back, but there are definitely people traveling for work. I'd imagine some business travel may never come back, but I really don't think the technology we have is reliable enough to replace the majority of business travel and will definitely not replace the importance of human interaction/collaboration during business meets.
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If we reduce the tanker demand in CENTCOM, that might free up time to train for the near peer fight. But that's on big AF to sell to the COCOMs; reducing sorry for operations now to prepare for the high end fight in the future.
The challenge with tankers and strat lift is that the mission never ends, there's always someone somewhere in the world who needs gas operationally (to include coronets), or cargo moved. The demand is there, and it's insatiable.
Let us not forget our PACOM footprint and last, but not least, our no-fail nuke mission. -
There is also some evidence out there that recent MMR and Tdap vaccines provide some protection against COVID. Google it.
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Yep... did that on the 190 at AA the whole time I was on that jet. I miss that thing. My record was 23 days with being called. Been out for a while on mil leave, but we shall see if I have the same luck on the 320.
What happened in that category is a one in a career, fleeting opportunity. The true winners are the professional reserve bidders. Some of those dude put up some serious numbers, wrt longest time between putting on a uniform. Let's call it pay per day putting on a uniform
. Those are the guys you'll want to break out the notepad and take notes from! Being able to sit SC from your house/boat/hangar is a beautiful thing! -
Probably (and arguably) the highest hourly rate of 99% of other careers fields on the planet (when it comes to income per actual WORK performed)... I think.I knew one that made just shy of 700k that year. He showed me his profit sharing, which was impressive.
My personal assessment was dudes were adding in profit sharing. And excess cash from when they passed the 415 limit, which they all did.
I do know guys were hitting 100k a month at the beginning of that year, how long they kept that up I've no idea.
Personally I doubt anyone made a million without including PS, and excess, if then. But man, what a great conversation, eh?
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From a KC-10 perspective:
Because simply being admin gas sucks and is mostly a waste of our time.
Because TACC doesn’t have the tail availability to do a flag and other TRANSCOM-validated things.
Because CENTCOM has too many of our jets.
Because we don’t have a weapons school to speak the same language and properly integrate into a planning team.
Because we don’t have anything to be on the net (yet).
Are they all excuses? Yes. But every time I’ve been involved in a flag, my job has been to sit fat, dumb, and happy in an anchor that is either off the range or outside the engagement area. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone…we don’t get valuable training (except boom fighter contacts) so we don’t value it so we stay admin gas because we don’t have the ability/care to integrate.
Pretty much this.... and although the -135 community does have a weapons school, the rest of the afformentioned reasons still apply.
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Yes... this circus act is what lead to tankers having to add MB52Y to our list of training events when we already had MB50 (or the old M050 for those that knew that). I remember being at the RTRB years ago when they talked about MG and how multiple aircraft got "shot down" by SAM's thus driving the need for MB52Y. I raised my hands and asked if any tankers were shot down during the exercise and got the deer in the head lights look like, "We have tankers in AMC?".
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Seeing flight attendants on a layover is incredibly rare, though I am told SWA and AA party like rockstars with their FA's.
Not sure who is telling you that. 8 times out of 10, the pilots and FA's at AAL stay at different hotels. We have different hotel contracts. Can't speak for SWA. -
Priority - the airline that has a base where you want to live (within ~2 hrs to enable short call...for when you have to do that. Closer the better just for general drive time to work).
Shack. I can't begin to tell you how beautiful it is to be less than 40 minutes from both my base and my guard unit. I bid reserve on purpose; sometimes long/most of the time short. There are days I get 3-4 hrs notice. Sometimes (rarely) it's a 4-day trip. A lot of times it's a 2-day or a day turn and I am back in my bed that night. I've gotten the call while I was mowing the lawn or working on the car and I was able to wrap things up and take a shower and pack and get out the door with time to spare. If you have the opportunity to live near a very junior base you can move up in the ranks on reserve pretty fast because a lot of Pilots are looking to get the hell out of there and move somewhere else so they don't have to commute more. I've flown with Captains that run off the airplane and asked me to shut her down because they're trying to make it to the next terminal so they can get home that night. Some have to stay in a hotel that night because they had no way to get back home and they're flying home on their off days. I couldn't imagine living that way.
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Yeah my thought was that I'd try the no-PME route the first round and then get my $hit together for the second one if I got passed over. Then again, I was pretty OK with retiring as an O-4 at the time. Of course this mentality was all pre-COVID so I'm glad things worked out. I was all about pushing the button right at 20, but thinking about sticking it out another 2-3 years to get more seniority under my belt to weather the next crisis.
Chida, how many years of service did you use for your calculations above?
I'm not one who thinks PME should be a determining factor for a PV, but most states require it. I have witnessed a lot of non-flyers get promoted multiple times in min time because they did PME, but were pretty darn average everywhere else. There's one particular person in my unit whom I always use as my example who I knew as an O-1 when I was an O-3 and promoted to O-5 over a year before me. Why? This person did PME and PV'd to O-4 and O-5 in min time.
I would love to get paid as an O-5 and wear O-4 rank.... forever. -
ANG tankers. I have definitely seen a few get passed over for O-5 on ROPMA boards in the past 5 years or so. All of them were DSG types with no PME and weak OPR's.
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I suppose if you are chasing every last dollar and you know your unit will give you a DP on a PV, it may be worth it. I can tell you that if you are an AC (heavy world) with weak OPRs, you may get passed over. If you are an IP/EP with some significant bullets/strats in your OPRs, you should be fine. I was a shop chief, was involved with many Sq functions/additonal duties and was a deployed DO during my time as an O-4 and of course that was all on my previous OPR's leading up to my O-5 ROPMA board.
Like anything else, what is your time worth to you? Do you have the time to do PME? It's not the old program it used to be and requires some significant time, which just can't be knocked out all in one deployment like before. Are you an airline guy on 2-3rd year pay? You can make more cash at your company picking up extra trips vs. Getting promoted 3 years early any day of the week. -
Late to the convo here but...most states require it for a PV, but if you have strong OPR's and competitive qualifications, you shouldn't need ACSC. I recently promoted ROPMA without it. I did the math a while back and it wasn't worth it for me knowing that I probably wouldn't have an issue getting promoted without it. I was an ART for many years as a pretty busy shop chief and then left the fulltime world for the airlines. I wasn't willing to make time for PME. My unit was also notorious for not PV'ing people anyway (unless you one of the "chosen ones"). I had showed my airline card several years before I finally actually got hired so I wasn't going to bite off on that carrot.
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Going to a regional basically allows a legacy carrier to verify you can make it through a 121 training program and get through OE.
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Riiiiiight.... and how will they recruit this 50%?Best figure in your "transitioning" time to your USAF bailout equation...
https://onemileatatime.com/united-airlines-diversity-goal-pilots/ -
I followed your original divorce saga with empathy. Life works in mysterious ways. Sometimes for worse or if you can wait long enough without making a more dumber mistake, sometimes for better. Glad it worked out for you. There are many, many men out there who've gone through or are going through the same thing who may never be as fortunate. It is nice that both of you had similar experiences as it will enable you to appreciate the normalcy you never had with your ex.
+1 for crazy nurses.-
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KC-135 Tanker Q&A
in General Discussion
Posted