Springer

Now that was impressive! I sent my bride a heart via FlightAware so she wouldn't complain about my $150+ fill ups:

Glad to see the lists are still out there Huggy. Hard to believe there are UAL scabs still flying. They had to be in early twenties when hired....scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Clay Lacy was a scab. The '85 strike at UAL was short lived and eventually the "570" were called back and their May 17, 1985 hire date restored. My commuter pad roommate at NWA and I got several telegrams from UAL to come back. We were in the middle of DC-10 FE school and it was so bad that we considered it. Thank god we didn't as UAL later went through some kind of failed pilot buyout and NWA was the only airline that preserved their Defined Benefit Plan when merged with the DAL Professional Pilots. Like everyone says, you never know if you made the right choice until you retire.

I was a UAL "570." May 17, 1985, Day of Infamy. Didn't cross and went elsewhere.

Great stories that I can relate, porn in the cockpit and an idiot going to max altitude in a 727. I thought you flew for FEDEX?

Hard to believe Huggy. Lots of "50th's" this year. Not to take away from the Eagle but it is also the 50th for Van's Aircraft. 11,114 built and flown! It's the 50th for me after soloing on Ford Island, Hawaii.

I'd love to know how many FO's there had my now retired bro-in-law on their list. He never knows when to STFU and wears me out every time wife makes me visit them.

A few that stuck around for 20 did get fighters as the Recce sqds were closing down. That one low level ride we received in the -38 turned me on to the RF-4C and made a career killing move taking it over the F-4. Only regret was not having a chance to fly the F-5E. LL is still in my blood as I flew a 1.5 hr "sortie" this morning and never got above 1000' agl.

No reflection on you but when I've relinquish ownership and sat in the back while mechanics do engine runs or taxied a plane you would think they were teenagers that had just gotten their license. We had one guy drive a A320 into the gate and terminal at LGA and almost took out the 757 sitting at the next gate. The 320 was out of commission at least 6 mths if it was ever repaired.

Same here. Served my time but AF would not release me. (Base had the highest DOS rate in the AF) Contacted congressman. Was in the middle of Maple Flag when I got the call. "When you land back at home base you are out."

Had an ATC hold one day passing through MEM. While waiting the CSA working my flight came down to chat and get away from the paxs at the gate. Long story short, I married her and got her the hell out of MEM.

I am assuming that was directed at me. You sir have no clue. Me? Hired by my #1 and #4 choice. #1 brothers went on strike. Refused to cross as a replacement...promptly fired. Went to #4. There we supported our striking brothers at Eastern and Continental by gladly paying monthly assessments for several years. Gladly paid assessments for our long retired pilots that had little benefits. Gladly paid two merger assessments. Stood side by side with my brothers on the picket line when we struck our airline. Suffered through 6 CEO's all of which left with millions; two of which parted with $200+ million each. Went through BK, pay dropped from $220/hr to $139/hr. Retired early so Prozac and others could move up a number and enjoy the "fruits" of our years of past struggles. Might want to thank that senior guy hired prior to '08 the next time you fly with him. In solidarity with my Continental brothers, carried a "No Lorenzo" sticker on my fuselage for 20 years:

That "independent contractor" may have gone through previous years of upheaval, pay cuts, mergers, and a BK. Those hired in the last 14 years have only experienced pay raises and bonus checks unheard of in the past.

It changed when airlines went from a Defined Benefit Plan to a Defined Contribution Plan.

I was offered one at 59 during the NWA/DAL BK/merger crisis and never looked back. It wasn't fun then and I can't imagine flying/layovers these last two years. Perhaps double/triple the pay I was making back then makes up for it.

Does the AF still have the EQ category?

This^^^^^! I flew in the worst of times. After 11 yrs AD, hired at 35, retired at 59 when pay was at its lowest. Still the best decision I ever made even with commuting the entire time. It appears that many are making airline choses based on upgrade time. It took me 13 years and it wasn't the end of the world especially now with FO's making in their 2nd year what I made on my last day as a CA at a major. NERD

Do what you want with it. I don't necessarily agree with the article. Found it interesting that I had just read it before Kaputt posted something about Gen Z.

Yours truly flying #381 in 1979 (leading a verboten formation landing in today's AF), the aircraft shot down by Dorsey. I flew in the same Med exercise against the same carrier, Saratoga, but was intercepted by a Navy F-4 albeit 10 years earlier. The A&P that annuals my private plane was on the Saratoga the day the recce F-4 was shot down. Small world.

Don't be too hard on Gen Z, they may save this country: ‘Right’ thinking Gen Z will save America: Devine (nypost.com) Remember when Jane Fonda, the octogenarian actress, triumphantly declared last year that ­COVID-19 is “God’s gift to the left,” because it would help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump and transform America into a socialist paradise? Well, be careful what you wish for, lefties. There are generational consequences for the repressive lockdowns, the vaccine and mask mandates, the disruption of school and college and the savage curtailing of the social lives of young people for a virus that basically doesn’t affect them. When old people in power scold children and young people for “selfishness” if they don’t get triple-vaxxed, or if they let their mask slip below their nose occasionally, or try to have some fun in the sun, it’s obvious who actually is being selfish. It’s not the generation that has pretty uncomplainingly borne the brunt of the pandemic emergency measures in order to keep older and obese people safe. Generation Z, aged 9 to 25, have a minuscule risk of death or hospitalization from COVID-19 but they have missed out on school and sports, and lost jobs and opportunities. At an age when socializing with their peers is crucial, they have suffered the isolation of curfews and closures that have taken a savage toll on their mental health. “We have been locked down for the best years of our life, and high school and college has been ­ruined,” says 16-year-old Tim Korshunov. Now they are rebelling against the liberal establishment that ­betrayed them. In what will be a great shock to the Boomers, Gen Z’ers are becoming conservative — or at least rejecting the woke cultural soup into which they were born. You can see the trends on their preferred social-media platform, TikTok. It was TikTokers who helped make the anti-establishment, anti-Biden “Let’s Go Brandon” chant at college games go ­viral. “It’s the slogan of our generation,” says Korshunov. “Let’s Go Brandon” has become a rallying cry for young conservatives calling out President Joe Biden’s socialist state. Getty Images The first generation not to know life before cellphones, last year they became the largest generation on Earth. And by 2024, Gen Z and millennials will be the largest voting bloc. But unlike millennials, many of whom have gullibly accepted the leftist indoctrination of their elders, Gen Z is skeptical and less trusting of authority. They verify reality with their own research, and they trust their peers on social media more than established sources of information. The top influencers on TikTok — youngsters who produce 10-to-15 second videos — are refreshingly scathing about the dishonest meta-narratives pumped out by establishment media, whether it is the lionizing of Marxist organization BLM or the false branding of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist. Tapping into the TikTok-influencer market is the future for the right, and so far, so good. The largest conservative network for young people on the platform is “Today is America,” which caters to 55 million users under the age of 33, with a network of 260 young “content creators” from all over the US, who make short videos on their phones with pro-America, pro-conservative, pro-capitalist themes, often delivered with wry humor. “We don’t care if you’re libertarian or conservative . . . or all forms of the ideological spectrum . . . as long as we are on the right side and we’re all promoting America,” says TIA co-founder Cam Rafizadeh, a 25-year-old entrepreneur. One of TIA’s TikTok videos, titled “Liberals after watching the mainstream media and blindly believing it,” features a CNBC freeze frame claiming double masking has “Efficiency: 75%” and “Triple Mask. Efficiency: 90%.” A young man stands in front of the screen and silently puts on multiple masks over his face and eyes. Another video begins with a young woman sipping a cup of coffee when the words “Since when did girls star preferring . . .” flashes onto the screen over images of boys in drag. The words “. . . to this” then appear, over images of Leo DiCaprio, Prince William, Tom Brady and assorted masculine types. Popular Manhattan influencer “thedebralea” promotes traditional family values. “Motherhood is the biggest blessing in life,” she says in one of her posts. Cam and younger brother Liam, 21, got into the ideas business by accident. The North Carolinians found themselves with time on their hands in the pandemic and launched an online store to sell Trump gear and patriotic merchandise. They used social-media influencers to market their T-shirts but, says Cam, “these people were brutally attacked, harassed and threatened.” One of their young TikTokers was sent a bloody box of animal guts to his family home. Others were doxxed, their families threatened, and they were bullied at school, including from teachers who didn’t approve of their conservative output. A lot of their creators decided to quit TikTok. “My brother and I thought it’s terrifying this is going on in our country,” says Cam. So they quit their jobs and turned from a merchandising company into a nonprofit pro-America community of Gen Z influencers, protecting them, helping them expand their brands and providing them with cameras to make more professional videos for YouTube or Rumble. “I felt a serious calling,” says Cam. “I felt this is it. If we don’t, we will lose our country.” The brothers recruited smart Gen Zers into the organization. Korshunov, for instance, has quit school and become TIA’s head of development. Their director of strategy, 25-year-old Ben Geller, was just elected a legislator in Dutchess County District 4. He points to the untapped electoral power of Gen Z, of whom the 70 percent who were eligible to vote last year stayed home. Geller says a lot of younger conservatives are “cautious or apprehensive about being judged or losing their jobs. They don’t talk on social media for fear of retribution from their employer or being lashed at by family members so they stayed home or stayed silent because of fear something would happen.” That’s where TIA comes in, helping make conservatism cool. Of course, their creators come in for the usual social-media censorship. Every day, someone is deleted or deplatformed. As many as three quarters are on their third or fourth accounts, but TikTok’s algorithms allow them to regain their audience within a week or two, says Cam. And he says the more suppression they face, the more Gen Z seeks out forbidden ideas. “I always tell people Gen Z will save America.” It will be up the Gen Z to rebuild the institutions and replenish the moral capital squandered by their forbears. Eat your heart out, Hanoi Jane!

I beg to differ but someone once told me any "fighter" that you can pee into the cockpit from outside isn't worth flying.

Most OA-37/OV-10 squadrons back then were made up of 1st assignment UPT grads with a guarantee of a fighter as their follow on. Not a bad deal. Hondurans went from F-86's to imported A-37's in '84.

The Most Anti-American Man in America By: Judd Garrett October 26, 2021 As we saw on display during his “town-hall” meeting on CNN this Thursday, Joe Biden is completely incapable as a President, and as a human being. If Joe Biden were not President, he would need 24/7 in-home care. He is incapable of taking care of the necessities of his own day-to-day life, much less running a country of 330 million, with the largest economy and the most powerful army. So, if he is not running the country, who is? It clearly is not Kamala Harris. She has been shipped to political Siberia. She is rarely seen and barely heard other than the grating echoes of her cackles. What we are witnessing on the big stage of American politics is “Weekend at Bernie’s” with a fluttering heartbeat. Joe Biden is making no decisions. He is doing nothing by himself. He is the stooge. This is not a defense of Biden for all the horrible decisions that “his” administration has made so far, but cognitively Biden is not capable of running this country. Someone behind the scenes is calling the shots. So, if it is not Joe Biden, who is running this country? Who decided to open the borders to millions of illegal immigrants? Who signed off on the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal? Who is bringing in tens of thousands of unvetted, non-ally Afghans into America? Who is printing so much money that we’re on the verge of “hyperinflation”? Who shut down so many parts of our energy sector that we are no longer energy independent, and are back to relying on OPEC for energy? Who is pushing this divisive racial agenda which is tearing our country apart? Who is labeling concerned parents domestic terrorists? Who has weaponized the FBI against everyday citizens based on their political beliefs? Who? The person orchestrating all of this owns a mansion in the shadows of the White House. He is a power-hungry narcissist who is only concerned with implementing the far-left agenda. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. He lives within walking distance of the White House, and the vast majority of Joe Biden’s staff were in his administration. Who do you think those people are listening to, someone who they think is the next coming of the messiah or a cognitively impaired elderly man who doesn’t know what day it is, and just wants to be left alone to have his ice cream cone? America is not supposed to have a shadow government. Transparency of its leaders is a core principle. But Obama does not believe that principle should apply to him. In an interview reflecting on his time in the White House, Obama said his ideal setup as President would be, a “third-term… where I had a stand-in, a frontman, or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff, and I could, sort of, deliver the lines, and someone else was doing all the talking, and the ceremony. I’d be fine with that.” Not only is that is a brief glimpse of what is happening in real-time, it exposed what an extreme narcissist he is, and how not only does he not understand the fundamental concept of our system of government, but he is hostile toward it. Obama’s vision of his ideal “third term” is him as an unaccountable king or a czar, someone who can’t be bothered to answer to the lowly people whose money he is spending, and whose lives he is controlling. He simply wants the people to shut up and comply with his dictates. Obama recently told Virginia voters who are concerned about teaching their kids Critical Race Theory, and the dangers of the radical gender ideology which caused a 14-year-old girl to be raped in Loudoun County, Virginia; “We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right-wing media pedals… we should be doing more to support people who are educating our kids and keeping our neighborhoods safe.” That is a perfect illustration of what Obama does. He pushes an agenda that harmed a young girl and then blamed the people who objected to his agenda. He sets the building on fire and then criticizes the firefighters for flooding the building to put out the fire he started. Obama said nothing about keeping our neighborhoods and kids safe during the 5 months of riots in our communities in 2020, or when Democrat lawmakers were defunding the police. He didn’t care about educating our kids when he repealed school choice legislation as President. Does anyone remember back in 2006 or even 2007, before Obama, when black and white people actually got along? The time before every white person was characterized as a “racist” for simply being born white, and every black person was labeled a victim when people were people regardless of their skin color? What our country is transforming into is directly aligned with Obama’s Marxist vision for the world. Obama’s father was a Marxist politician in Kenya, and in his book, Dreams of My Father, President Obama wrote, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout. I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists.” This is a very revealing passage about the man. Not only is he acknowledging his Marxist’s leanings, but he admitted that he embraced those radical ideologies, not on intellectual or rational grounds, but because he did not want to be viewed as a “sell-out”. His need to be accepted by other black people because of his father’s abandonment of him steered him to his radical Marxist ideology and is also the reason why he uses race and false accusations of racism into bullying people into compliance to the Marxist ideology because, as he admitted, that is what happened to him. And in alignment with his Marxist beliefs, Obama, when he was running for President, promised to “fundamentally transform” America. For someone who chooses his words as carefully and artfully as Obama, this was not a misstatement or an overstatement. It was exactly what he did while President, and is continuing to do in the shadows - “fundamentally transform” America. That should scare the hell out of every American. He didn’t say “restore America’s values” or “return America to its founding principles”. No, he said, “fundamentally transform.” He was not arguing that America lost its way over the last 200 years, and must rediscover the ideals of its founding; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, individual rights, constrained government. No, “fundamentally transform” was a direct assault on the fundamental values of America which are in direct opposition to Marxist ideology, and why Obama has to “fundamentally transform” America. What made Martin Luther King Jr so powerful, so effective, and so great for America is that he embraced the American founding principles, and used them as a mirror to show America where it had gone wrong. In many of his speeches, Dr. King repeated the words of our Constitution or Declaration of Independence back to his fellow Americans, to expose to America where we have failed to live up to our founding principles when it came to the black community. And he was absolutely right. He saw our founding principles as right and necessary for his cause of equal rights and freedom for black Americans. Dr. King believed the fact that we had failed to live up to those principles, meant it was the people, not the principles, who needed to change. Obama believes the exact opposite. He believes because America has failed to live up to its founding principles, it is the principles and the foundation of the country that must change. That is why these harmful policies that he has been orchestrating over the last 9 months are designed to tear America down to its studs, so he can “fundamentally transform” America, and rebuild it in his own image. Not only is Obama the most un-American man in America, but he may also be the most dangerous man on the planet. The record of history is very clear and very consistent. An unaccountable narcissist who controls the levers of power of one of the most powerful countries on the planet always ends up in major atrocities. And that is exactly what is going on behind the scenes at the White House.

Not sure about Delta but he and I were among the "570" that were hired by UAL in '85 to cross the picket line should (and did) the UAL pilots go on strike. No one cross and UAL eventually hired the 570 and I believe he was one of them. I went elsewhere, which in the long term was the correct decision for me. Don't get me wrong, Kit and his previous partner, Louis Smith, are the good guys that were at the fore front in helping all of us be better prepared for the airline hiring process. Louis Smith - Chairman and President of FAPA.aero | FAPA.aero | Meet the Team What Huggy described in so few words, is what so many of us went through: furloughs, pay cuts, reduced or no pension (no defined contribution plans back then), mergers and BK's. 2008 seems to have been the turning point for the airlines.

You really limit your options with SWA vs DAL. I tried international for 2 years, ie 4 ocean crossings in 6 days with no augmentation (old days) and could never get enough sleep. Others loved it and I probably would have too if I got a 2 hr rest break. As for narrow body pay, how hard do want to work? I have stated it elsewhere, my bro-in-law retired last Jan from DAL as a 320CA and worked the system (green slips). In his last 3 yrs made $500K, $500K, $602K.

Gees, I see Kit Darby's name in the line up. He's been in that business since '78 I believe when he founded FAPA (Future Airline Pilot Association).