zachbar

Moving away from all this 11F talk, here’s what UPT is like now. Looks like the demand for quality training by the students exceeds the supply the Air Force is willing to give...

Real question and not sarcasm, but didn’t the C-17 community shed a ton of pilots to UPT a few years ago right after upgrading them to AC? Was that because of squadrons closing down?

Part of it too is that the Air Force doesn’t value white jet IP experience, but it should. I was an AMC IP before I got to UPT, and being an IP here is way more demanding. I think the consequences of failure are higher and more immediate in AMC (more expensive plane with more people on it, cargo doesn’t get delivered), but the chance of something going wrong is more likely when the enemy is sitting in the front cockpit every time you go fly. I’ll put it this way, I was more certain of making it home every night in AMC than I am now.

👆This. Not an isolated experience. Edit: I think we as an Air Force started speeding with good intentions of alleviating the pilot shortage. Fortunately I actually feel like some of the trends are being reversed at the lower levels because the IPs are being heard

I totally agree it’s depressing, but it was nice to see someone who was realistic enough to admit how bad things really are. I don’t think he was speaking in terms of giving up, but blind optimism that we can out climb this issue isn’t going to help either. At some point we need to figure what commitments need to start dropping off. Pilot bonuses haven’t fixed the problem. Reducing the pilot training timeline hasn’t either. Granted, one solution won’t solve everything, but at the end of the day you can only shove so many people through the pipeline and only prevent so many pilots from leaving. Are we going to carry on with business as usual with the smaller number of pilots left between those bookends, or will the Air Force (and DOD as a whole) accept that it can’t do what it could 17 years ago?

Totally unrelated to this topic, but I had the misfortune of being the records manager for a year at my last squadron. I just made sure to be TDY for every inspection and then put in MICT that I was TDY for the inspection. Never did a thing for it and never got called out. Success! More on topic, full disclosure I have not read this entire massive thread, so I’m sorry if this has already been said. Also full disclosure this is focused on the pilot manning issues the Air Force is facing, but I did hear one undisclosed officer speaking at an undisclosed lecture (non-attributional, took place in the south, lots of CGOs present, sound familiar?) say something I have never heard from any other officer, and it was refreshing. He said the same thing happened when the civilian flying was good in the 90s, and there was nothing reactionary the Air Force could do back then either. He said just as much effort needs to be put into mitigating the problem as the Air Force is putting into trying to fix it, because they aren’t gonna fix it until something happens to make the civilian side less appealing. There’s no way to compete with triple the pay for pilots, better family life, and more predictable scheduling. He basically called the government out for over-committing the military around the world and the military for saying yes every time.

I’ve been in AETC purgatory now for over a year, but I submitted and read ASAP reports all the time in AMC. It was one of my favorite planning tools when going into an unfamiliar airfield. Is the culture moving away from that now?

If you enjoy watching other people talk about their planes from your €400 a night hotel room on a bed of per diem, the 709th at Dover is hurting for good dudes to fly the C-5. It’s all glass, modern (by Air Force standards) avionics, flys like a dream (I’m not making that up. It was nicer to hand fly than my current ride, the T-6.), and you have a flight engineer. Any pilot who hates on engineers must have had bad engineers, because all the ones I flew with had been working the C-5 for decades and were a huge source of knowledge anytime the plane shit the bed, which it does. It’s nice being able to just fly the airplane while someone else competent and qualified dealt with why the gear didn’t come down. Bottom line, it’s not tactical at all and is about as close to airline flying as the Air Force gets, but if that appeals to you, you enjoy a large flying crew, and you want to fly a celebrity everywhere and host mini air shows at every ramp you park on, do it!

Having to pee really bad is technically a physiological issue.

We received a briefing this morning on this, and I think it did a lot to dispel some of the complaints voiced in this thread. For the last month, an OT&E team has been flying sorties breathing ambient air and undergoing endless medical analysis before and after each flight, NASA has been involved sampling cockpit and mask air quality, and maintenance has been tearing down OBOGS to try and find a source of the issue. Below are some of the highlights from that briefing. 1) Only TCTO compliant aircraft will be flown with OBOGS operational as normal. Breathing cockpit air was not approved by AETC nor recommended by the OT&E team. To answer those who wondered why this was such a big deal when other aircraft fly unpressurized without oxygen, it is an FAA airworthiness certificate issue. Without the OBOGS, the T-6 would not be considered airworthy by the FAA without an amendment. 2) The TCTOs are a "millimeter by millimeter" (their words) inspection of the OBOGS from the engine air inlet all the way to the mask. It replaces parts to make the system as close to factory new as possible. 3) This is not the end. No causal factor was found, but the OT&E unanimously agreed that returning the OBOGS to a factory new state made them comfortable flying the jet. Flying is still volunteer only at PIT. 4) The top six of the T-6 SPO were fired due to mismanagement of the program and a fly-to-fail mentality. The zeolite bed maintenance interval has been aggressively reduced from 4,500 to 700 hours, and the new SPO is re-evaluating other fly-to-fail parts on the T-6 to possibly set replacement intervals. 19 AF is also using this debacle to highlight the ISS and EFIS issues. 5) The future: The team considers this only the beginning and are still trying to drill down to a single cause. From what the briefer said though, the OBOGS on all of the jets inspected were absolutely horrendous (kinked lines, valves stuck in the open position, evidence of water in the lines, general dirt and gunk, etc), and 79% failed the inspection, so there might not be one silver bullet. The incident T-6s are all still impounded, but an Edwards AFB test team will begin inspecting those independently and in parallel so the two teams can compare notes. Honestly, I was pretty impressed with what the team has been doing this last month. There were a lot of really smart people helping with this, to include a NASA test engineer who has made a career out of OBOGS issues. It also received visibility all the way up to the VPOTUS. My biggest misgiving is that they never found a single causal factor, but I am not surprised given the fact that the entire system was basically never inspected since the plane left the factory. I think the 19 AF initially fumbled at the beginning of this grounding a month ago, but since then a lot of good things have happened to make up for it.

Got briefed on this today. I'm airspeed and altitude zero in the T-6 still, but from a pilot's perspective this seems insane. I appreciate the fact that the T-6 is the Air Force's only primary trainer, but when there are already outstanding TCTOs for EFIS displays catching on fire and faulty ISS, and now OBOGS issues as severe as the most recent one we were briefed on, is the Air Force leaning too far forward? I never imagined I would be expected to fly an airplane with this many outstanding safety of flight issues, and I came from the C-5. I don't know if the most recent event is under an active safety investigation and therefore don't want to get too far into it, but suffice to say that if the affected pilot had been solo, he would be dead. Every time a base stands down, it tells me that they felt they crossed some sort of line, and when AETC releases a new FCIF or terribly written boldface, all they are doing is redrawing the line a little bit further. I honestly feel that with the FCIF allowing flight with dropped masks in light if the most recent event, you can't move that line much farther. It upsets me because it tells me that now the line is death. The Air Force won't call knock it off unless one of us gets killed. Am I crazy? Is there anyone else with the same sort of ideas running around their head? Also, any Navy guys here have experience with the T-45? How did the Navy handle its OBOGS issues? UPDATE: http://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article/1429270/19th-air-fo/ Maj Gen Doherty orders an ops pause.

Aero sucks big time, and anything COTS is better. That being said, I had both a ForeFlight and Jepp Pro account for a year, Jeppesen through AMC and ForeFlight as a huge favor from the vendor at ATA. I actually much preferred Jeppesen to ForeFlight. The user interface was more intuitive and streamlined. ForeFlight felt a bit bloated, and most of its features weren’t useful for C-5 flying. My biggest problem with ForeFlight is it freezes up if you load too many waypoints, like from Rota to the Gulf for example. It’s just not designed for that. Biggest benefit of Jeppesen I think is the access to airways manuals, although those might be available on ForeFlight now that the two are partnered. I don’t know since my account just expired. The Area Planning pubs are woefully outdated, and there were times going into big international airports that reading the Jeppesen manuals at the least made us fit in better with the traffic and at the most saved us from being downright procedurally wrong.

Late to the party, but C-5M meat servo here. 1. Ops Tempo/Deployment We don’t deploy as an airframe, but do expect at least one, probably two non-flying deployments in your first ten years out of UPT (granted, I have only been graduated for 4 years, so I’m just basing that estimate off of what I’ve seen). There are some good deals out there, and the “bad deals” are generally six months in the CAOC. Ops tempo is very high currently, about 180-250 days a year TDY depending on how chained to the desk you are. Some guys prefer breaking up their time away from family into chunks, others wish they had a deployment schedule. Regardless, the irregularity and last minute nature is tough. As a scheduler, I once had to call a guy at 10PM on a Saturday and get him an Uber home from a bar so he could enter 12 hours of crew rest before a 5 day mission. Me personally, I am single and love being away from home. The per diem and tax free are fantastic...not that it’s all about money. 2. Lifestyle/ Family Stability As I said earlier, no deployments, but the trade off is being gone often and irregularly. I’m not married and don’t have good perspective on this. Community lifestyle-wise it’s great. Having an FE is honestly one of the best parts about the airplane, and contrary to what I read earlier in this post, all of them are brutally honest and are good about ignoring rank in the cockpit. Don’t pick the C-5 if you want a tactical experience. Nothing happens fast in the C-5, crew resting in Europe with a crew of 15 young Es and Lieutenants is like herding alcoholic cats, and the most tactical you will get is a steep approach into Bagram or Al Asad. That being said, if you want comfort instead of speed, you can’t beat the C-5. 3. Community morale It really is awesome. Every pilot in my squadron truly loves flying the C-5, and most PCS away kicking and screaming. The community is very small, only 36 jets between the two active units, and our functional only handles us and the two KC-10 units. What that means is the douche canoes don’t make it back into the C-5 community. On the flip side, I flew a mission as a brand new Lt with two O-5s who started their careers together at Dover. It was awesome that they were still in the cockpit together, and I didn’t pay for drinks for a week. People certainly get burnt out on the ops tempo like in any community, but I haven’t hit that point yet. 4. Advancements & Future of the airframe For better or worse, there is no replacement on the horizon and no other airframe that has the cargo volume of the C-5, so it’s around for a long time. If you’re high speed, you can easily make he hours to upgrade to IP in your first assignment. The average pilot will upgrade enroute if they go to C-5s for a second assignment or after getting back from a white jet tour. Of course there are also all the other non-flying assignments any mobility pilot can apply or get voluntold for. 5. Preferred PCS locations Haven’t been to Travis yet, but I’ve heard C-5s are the bastard stepchildren there. Dover isn’t as sexy of a place to live, but the flying is awesome, and so far the Wing leadership has had our backs. Overall, I think my enthusiasm for the C-5 as both an airplane and community is apparent. Definitely take everything I say with a grain of salt, and realize that most pilots love what they fly whatever it is. Still, it’s freaking awesome, and if you are a laid back and easygoing personality and want a mission that matches, the C-5 is it.