Stoker

Agreed, your scores are more than good enough to not be the thing that doesn't get you hired, if that makes sense. Interview well, hang out with the squadron for a bit and be cool, and emphasize that your PPL will be done very shortly, and you'll do fine. People are getting interviewed by heavy squadrons with zero flight hours, so don't sweat it, really.

August 2015: Start seriously getting things together for applying to squadrons. December 2016: First visit to MEPS, interview with squadron, get word I'm hired. June 2017: Approved by AFRC board. July 2017: FC1 (approved exactly six weeks later). September '17: Swear in to DEP. December '17: Inprocessing at Randolph. Jan '18: OTS. I had about two months of MEPS paperwork delays, without those I'd probably have made it into one of the September OTS classes and been almost exactly one year from hire by the squadron to arriving at UPT.

But the first law school in the US didn't start teaching until 1780. Some were lawyers, but they were self-taught or apprenticed at best. And the concept of judicial review didn't come from the founding fathers, it came from the Supreme Court in 1803 (Marbury v. Madison).

The problem is that too many people have been convinced that the Constitution is something that can only be interpreted by a Federal judge, or at least by someone with a JD and a background in ConLaw. In reality, the Constitution was written by farmers and merchants, not one of whom went to law school, and it was meant to be a document for the people.

That case is a wonderful example of why the Supreme Court should not be treated as some sort of "legislature of last resort," because they generally lack technical knowledge and don't have the power to consider testimony by experts (because, theoretically they're an appellate court). In Miller, the Court decided it was OK to ban short-barreled shotguns, because they had no military use, despite the War Department issuing 40,000 of them just two decades prior for trench fighting. People who want gun bans need to start a movement to repeal the Second Amendment, not see it invalidated in court. But that would be horrifically unpopular, so they try to backdoor it through training requirements, "genuine need," lawsuits against gun manufacturers, etc.

The level of firearms proficiency required by police officers is pretty minimal, and is usually (always?) mandated by liability-insurance -driven departmental regulations rather than actual force of law. I don't believe the Constitution allows the government to mandate safety classes for firearms any more than it allows the government to mandate safety classes before you can print a newspaper or post on a blog. As far as legal ramifications of discharging a weapon in public, I guarantee you that a police officer is always going to be held to a lesser standard than the average citizen for firing a gun. Practically, if we allowed states and municipalities to require "common sense" training requirements, you'd have places like Chicago saying, "Sure, you can have/carry a pistol, you just need to hit three bullseyes on the target with a pistol, and the target is on the dark side of the moon." Warren v. District of Columbia said that the police have absolutely no duty to protect individuals. In the case in question, they were called repeatedly about an ongoing gang rape, showed up multiple times, and left with no resolution after knocking on the door and getting no response.

My thought is that Americans should be able to freely buy any weapon in use by their local / state police department. Police weapons are (theoretically) solely for self-defense, which means anything they're issued has a legitimate self-defense purpose. If California thinks that scary-looking semi-automatic rifles have no self-defense use and wants to ban them, they can explain that to their local police unions. Likewise, if New York thinks a seven-round magazine is perfectly acceptable for self-defense, then there's no reason the NYPD should have standard-capacity fifteen-round magazines in their service pistols (given NYPD's issues with shooting everyone and everything but the target they're aiming at, this would probably save quite a few innocent bystanders).

There's a big movement to restore felons' constitutional rights, at least as far as it relates to voting. And both voting and firearms are guaranteed by an amendment, but the voting one is a lot more strictly limited. The Second just says that the right "shall not be infringed."

In my case it was generally something they did before the in-person interview, after I had visited the squadron over a drill weekend. I agree, I strongly prefer to interview in person.

Did you swear in yet? Did the 340th mention anything about dates for inprocessing in for January class dates?

I had the almost exactly the same flight hours, PCSM, and pilot score, lower GPA, higher other AFOQT scores. I was able to get a couple phone interviews with ANG fighter squadrons, nothing more than that. My guess is that I was competitive enough that if I had meshed really well with the squadrons at the drill weekends I attended, I'd have had a shot, but who knows? I was hired by the first heavy squadron I interviewed with (and received multiple other calls to interview in the weeks after I was hired). Long story short, if you're 23 and have plenty of time to pursue fighters for a while (to the point of applying to / visiting your dream units over multiple boards), do that. If you just turned 28 and are about to require an age waiver if you don't get hired ASAP, then you should apply to heavy squadrons as you have a good chance there.

I had Lasik done five years before getting picked up for a rated slot. All I can suggest is don't just use the cheapest surgeon you can find on Groupon, because there's different kind of Lasik machines and the older ones aren't quite as good (hence the discount from surgeons who spent $400k on them and don't want to upgrade). Find a surgeon who does 20 or 30 a month and you'll be fine, statistically. They can tell you beforehand how you rank on complication risks. As far as getting the FC1 goes, I had more problems convincing MEPS that I still had eyeballs than I did getting my Lasik waiver done in Dayton. Like 3-4 extra tests, tops.

If you need Lasik to be qualified, then you're going to have to get it on your own dime before you apply. They won't accept an application from someone medically unqualified, or put you through OTS if you still require a successful surgery to pass an FC1.

I also had my LORs written generally and no one seemed to mind. I applied to like 20 units, I'm not going to bother my letter-writers a total of 60 times just to update the heading and re-sign.

For what it's worth, apparently during Reserve UPT selects' inprocessing week in San Antonio, you have an unscheduled day that you can use towards the pre-req CBTs. And I didn't think it took anywhere near 30 hours to knock them out.

Hey, Pakistan's had a whole one electoral transfer of power not get derailed, they're definitely up there with Athens and the Continental Congress in terms of democracy. Pay no attention to the fact that their intelligence agency is basically a terror organization.

Get a PPL and you're solid for the heavy unit of your choice, pretty much. Fighters might be tough with the age, I usually see the cutoff at 28.5 years.

Don't blame anything but US foreign policy to explain why the North Koreans are going full-tilt in their nuclear program, consequences be damned. Gaddafi ended his nuclear program at our behest and he ended up getting stabbed in the rear with a bayonet and summarily executed, with our blessing. You think we'd have bombed Libya and let it get overrun by militias if they had nukes? Ukraine got the other end of the stick, giving up their nukes post-independence in exchange for territorial guarantees from Russia, the US, and the UK. How's that working out? The last twenty years or so have just reinforced the fact that there are two kinds of countries, those that have nukes and those that don't. The Kim regime is completely rational in pursuing them. The best way for them to ensure their continued reign is a dozen nuclear-armed ICBMs. They can't use them unless they want to be annihilated, but they take the conventional regime change option 100% off the table. No one cares enough about North Korea to risk ten million dead civilians.

This is probably something that could be answered by using the site search feature, or Google, but I'll bite. OTS (basic training for officers, basically) is eight weeks. Technical school is on top of that. If you're trying to become a pilot (this is a pilot-centric website), expect ~18 months of training.

Seems like they're trying to get away from scheduling OTS classes in a way that requires a break. Which, with the program only eight weeks long versus the thirteen it was five years ago, should be a lot easier to do. People who got this September for a class date and are Guard/Reserve are getting to do SERE in early December instead.

http://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a1/publication/afi36-2205/afi36-2205.pdf Section 1.1.6.

No, the age requirement is that you must start UPT by your 30th birthday. The worst cases of waiting for class dates is like 18 months, you should be fine to just apply for pilot.

Anyone know what the turnaround time is lately? I'm at six weeks and still radio silence, with nothing but a Lasik waiver to complicate things. Edit: Just got the call from my recruiter an hour ago that I've been approved. So just under 6 full weeks turnaround time.

Yes, it's waiverable provided you don't have a history after age 13. See page 83: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/Portals/60/documents/711/usafsam/USAFSAM-Wavier-Guide-170601.pdf Don't self-disqualify yourself by assuming you're out of luck. Recruiters might try to tell you something different but keep pushing.

Good lord. You probably scored literally as high as possible without any flight hours.