FLEA

To be honest, I'm not really sure why to any of this. A gym isn't necessary to pass the PT test or to eat less. Of all the hills the bobs let get run over, I am utterly shocked it was actually this one they let go.

The alternate list has been exhausted the last 3 years. I wonder how that is going to look this year with COVID-19 and people deciding to stay in longer than they initially intended.

My last PT test was Sept of 19 and I recently found out I dont need another one until Sept of 21. I'm in shock and awe that the Air Force isn't going to overnight fall apart when dozens of individuals go non-current for their test. I don't understand how we are going to continue to fight the war on terror!?!?! But my biggest sadness, is for my Senior Rater, who isn't sure how he is going to rack and stack thousands of Airman without a concrete and arbitrary number that poorly estimates their physical fitness. Its the end times for sure.

That was what was posted on the MAF assignment page.

I'll agree its not the experts fault. I think where the animosity comes from is how expertise translates to policy. If you are a governor and you are overseeing a crisis like this, obviously you are going to fill your staff with doctors to advise you. The problem is, doctors, by their nature, want to save lives. Their value on life and life saving medicine supersedes any other requirement for society because that is their job and their hippocratic oath. And we should be glad they are like that. Its what keeps them 16 hours in an emergency room exhausting every possible solution and experimental treatment necessary to save some lives. But it doesn't translate to policy well. So if you let your doctors run away with the decision making of course they are going to say "we must completely lock down everyone and barricade their homes to save every last single life possible and no-one must die!" Then you have to top that off with the public's demand for information. I think people with a minimal verse in science know these models are hard to read and are not designed to do what we are using them for. But when the governor gets on TV people don't like to hear "i think" and "it seems like". They want to hear "yeah, we are definitely going to be open again in 3 weeks, that will be the peak."

https://www.foxnews.com/us/air-force-pilot-vietnam-honored-texas-high-school-student-tribute Pretty feel good story.

Just read the AF times article. I had the stat backwards. 40% were unqualified without a waiver.

I just stole it from that Lt Col on FB I mentioned. So I can't justify it's accuracy. But she was working this issue on staff so I'm dangerously assuming she has some sort of accurate data to work from. I do have at least one female friend who was denied entry to pilot training for height and she never seemed that short to me. Maybe 5'4"? It also sounds like a lot of people were not approved waivers that should have been but that's speculation on my part.

Women only came to the forefront because there is a Lt Col on facebook right now trying to collect statistics on women who were denied entry into flight training since 2002 based on height restrictions. Did not know that only 40% of women actually fit into the height profile required, making it extremely narrow for them. But it makes sense if you think about it. Most of the ergonomics for these things were designed prior to women flying and were probably built around male proportions. Do you know if the height restriction works both ways? Because I believe you could also be denied for being too tall as well.

This is great news, especially for women. Is there something pushing this, as I've seen several Facebook postings touching this topic as well. (caveat before I get mowed down for being a SJW - which I am not, yes I'm aware of the risk associated with not being physiologically proportional for the design of many cockpits)

Another active shooting at a Navy flying training base. This time Corpus Christi. https://www.foxnews.com/us/naval-air-station-corpus-christi-lockdown-active-shooter

Yuck..... Sounds like trying to make a square peg fit a round hole.

A lot of it is our civilian leadership expectation of what we can accomplish. They can't take no for an answer and culturally, Americans are poor at setting priorities. We will list our priorities but then we just decide to find a way to do everything anyway. Regarding joint and the Army, they simply don't understand the cultural differences of the Air Force. There is no shortage of manpower on the Army side and when they have a problem their solution is to just throw people at it until it's solved. Institutionally, Army GOs are not aware that Air Force personnel are niche trained in highly technical fields and we are overall a smaller force. So when the Army says "we are going to go to 24 hour ops and move this massive force from X to Y" they can't understand why the AF can't just do the same thing.

Dangerous and stupid, and I'm not discrediting the wrecklessness of the drone operator, but I'll be honest, it produced a pretty cool shot. (From the drone) He probably needs to do a little bit of jail though. This is like aircraft lasing. A significant sample of examples need to be set until people can't be disciplined enough to a abide by some rules.

I believe it to an extent, there were certainly other options but personnel cost make up almost 50% of the annual budget. People are the most expensive weapon system we own.

Well. I'm embarrassed. I thought he was legit asking about just another UPT flight. Had no idea of the differences going on in UPT today though. This thread was very insightful so thanks to all who contributed.

Awesome story and share. The documentary is still on YouTube. Fantastic piece.

Correct but primarily for specific units where guys aren't getting seat time in their actual RPA as much. There are reasons that is happening but that's best not discussed here.

Going to be completely honest here. There was a great oppurtunity for this in RPAs but most people only gave that prospect a single glance. Regardless, I don't see that coming back and I don't see AFSOC opening pipelines for the MAF to inflow in Mass like that. They have their own culture and community to worry about. I also don't think the MAF has it that bad. Try C2ISR if you want to find a community of absolutey complacent military aviators. Sad to me because we are in the CAF and should care about that stuff more. Took me a tour in RPAs to appreciate it myself.

100% agree with everything you said. That said, I think the -9 provides an excellent fusion platform for the light attack aircraft if the LAAF is capable of tapping it's sensors.

So I'll admit I asked your opinion and got exactly that. That's fair. But I was hoping for something more empirical. Two of my best friends are JTACs I worked with in Al Tabqah and Manbij and their opinions are exactly opposite yours. So you'll have to pardon me when I don't weigh "guy on the internet" as highly. I'm personally impressed by what we've asked the RPA enterprise to do and what they've accomplished. I do think there is value in investing in their enterprise. Specifically training, which for the last 15 years has been made a third tier priority because of the ground forces. Much of your complaints would be absolved if the community was allowed to train.

I'm certainly not naieve in those respects which is 100% why I disagree with you. Yes, there are weapon system priority list but those are often built on mission requirements. Your evidence is anecdotal at best which is why it exactly is what you say it isn't, "bro talk." Being padlocked a building almost definitely doesn't mean you are in timeout. Regardless, noone records "how many times someone was put in timeout corner." But there are numbers out there on what asset employed the most munitions in the summer of 2016, what an asett's first run attack success rate is, how many vbieds, which was the #1 threat to ground forces at the time, were destroyed, etc... Ive seen all of those answers before and they might surprise you. U-28s are great when they can nail their CDE comm procedures for a given AOR. Gunships are also awesome when they can correlate a target correctly. You're using a few instances/expereince you saw and youre coloring your whole perception on that. You saw a few robots fuck up and had a conversation with some JTACs about it. Cool I've seen a lot of manned aircraft fuck up and did the same. Most of what you elude to is shit that has more to do with crew training, expereince and familiarity with the CAS environment though. And out of the above communities which one has the shortest training pipeline, gives a weapons release card to the youngest members and does not afford CT. This to me indicates that it's not the platform that's incapable but the crews, which is easily solvable on the enterprise level. Nothing of what you point to though has anything specific to do with the fact that the weapon system is unmanned. For whatever it's worth, I already said that I don't believe the MQ-9 is equipped for a light attack role. I just don't think that had Sanything to do with JTACs perceptions of the pink squishy component. The MQ-9 does what it was engineered to do incredibly well. Occasionally it has been asked to do things it wasn't engineered to do with mixed success. If you engineer a light attack platform it would presumably do that incredibly well also. If that design included the ommission of a pilot, it would still presumably perform the same, so long as it was engineered to do so and the crew was appropriately trained.

I don't find any truth to this statement. It might be anecdotal but I've never seen an aircraft removed to the penalty box although I have heard rumors of it. Every aircraft has bad players though. Off my head, I can think of an F-16 that busted altitude and almost killed me, a B-52 that couldn't take an LSST after 40 minutes, and an F-15E two ship that struck the wrong building. Yes, RPAs have had problems as well. I remember getting a phone call about a guard MQ-1 that was fucking comm flow left and right. But most of the time these are training issues and have nothing to do with the platform. Your arguments sound like stuff you hear from your buddies or things that may have came out of the Enterprise 9-10 years ago when the community was expereincing growing pains. However, having seen the metrics out of the AOC and JOC circa summer 2016 (the height against ISIS), I don't get the impression that those utilizing them had a low degree of confidence in their ability to perform.

Just curious, can you articulate why you think this or why? I've been in CAS stacks manned and unmanned, albeit without weapons manned. Also worked in several MPCs for major SOF air operations. Regardless, I never felt the JTACs cared so much as long as the people there did their jobs. I'm not buying the "skin in the game" argument because it's weightless.

I'm of the opinion SOF dudes probably don't care. But RPAs have serious limits in regards to SATCOM. Bandwidth is extraordinarily expensive even for SOCOM, and sometimes it plane just cant be bought. In addition to that, the spectrum quickly becomes crowded limiting your ability to create mass and there are some technical considerations specific to deploying RPAs that make them hard to get into some AORs, making them not exactly world wide operable, which is an essential need for SOF. That said, I don't think the neccessity for RPAs regarding loiter time and IPOE will go away. I'm starting to see Goldfeins point in this regard. You solution is likely an Enterprise, not a specific platform.