GovernmentMan

Only if they have a fuse and are filled with hydrogen (so they can blow up). It would be funny, if slightly counter-productive.

I guess. It's not much of an excuse, though. T-1s usually fly around with empty cabins, but the crew would be no less stupid to completely space the difference in TOLD during that one day where they actually have something in the back.

Mine field? Are you sure they weren't just a bunch of tuna cans?

Shutup. Your retarded. Also, yeah. Whine about it as needed, but accept the fact that it's one of many data points that the senior rater and his crew rely on when stratting.

Really hard to say. I'll have about 19.5 years TIS when I complete my 10 year commitment, so obviously I'll do the other 6 months to get 20. Beyond that, who knows...will depend on things that are impossible to know right now.

Nah. If somebody used the exact same method of "peaceful protest" on public land in front of his church shithead brainwashing center, I would defy any judge to come up with a plausible legal reason as to why such turnabout is not fair play.

Alternately... OH LOOK! The new carpet arrived. OH LOOK! Somebody left the bathroom door open.

I have to agree, and that kind of bullshit kills me. On the flipside, every C-17 pilot knows how to fill out a travel voucher. If the guy processing said voucher doesn't even know what a C-17 is, he can choke himself.

Yeah, one time I went to DM for Blue Flag...ended up going to the clinic and had to stand in line behind 3 singers who were run over by taxiing Hawgs. Overall...I kind of wanted to like the video, but it tried a little too hard and ended up being preachy.

I'm curious about the supposed quality of these Iraqi pilots. Leading up to Gulf War I, the brass kept warning us that the Iraqi pilots were badasses and how they had whooped up on Iranians for the past 10 years, etc. Obviously, our hardware, TTPs and overall training kicked their asses once Desert Storm kicked off. But still...if they (these "old regime" dudes you referred to) were considered pretty good in their time, what has changed to make them suck these days?

XL 10-10 Drop (all T-1s): C-17: Dover* Charleston, McChord KC-135: McConnell, Milwaukee*, McDill*, Seymour Johnson, Selfridge(?)* T-1: FAIP RPA: Creech x2 (according to the narrator, one of them specifically wanted it) C-5: Dover KC-10: McGuire * = other than AD

About tie fighters... Why would you want one? They stopped making replacement parts in the 70s, their TTPs were written by borderline-retarded clones, and their actual combat record is terrible.

Of course, there are a lot of ACC and other people who qualify as the exception to that "most people" statement, but otherwise...

The company line about follow-on assignments...where to begin? Some of the IPs here prefer to walk the line between parroting the muckey-mucks' claims about follow-on bliss, versus calling the leadership a bunch of liars. That is, yes the official story is that RPA guys will get a manned aircraft assignment after doing their time in the metal container. However, the IPs (if asked) will sometimes point out the fact that they've never met a person who has benefited from those supposed opportunities. The term RPA and its history is a topic for another thread altogether, but the short answer to me is because it implies an actual person manipulating the controls for an air-breathing aircraft. This is different from satellites (which could somehow be lumped into the UAS concept) or some kind of fictional "fully autonomous self-aware Terminator flying thing of death" (which is what clueless people might think, based on the term UAV).

I wouldn't say he was being "ridiculously unprofessional" but it seemed like it was embarrassing for everybody involved.

After the drop, the one RPA guy was hanging out at the bar with his buddies and the other one stormed off to go pout behind the Club. Some of his friends eventually found him and tried to cheer him up. A couple IPs tried to set him straight, but the dude wasn't really listening to anybody. Some other dude went off on him, something about preds keeping people alive and how he shouldn't be so selfish about things. I have no idea how it ended. This isn't rumor, it's what I saw first-hand (which is why it probably sounds pretty incomplete).

Dunno about the USAFA or ROTC, but at OTS you could probably go the whole 3 months without anybody seeing/noticing. Same for MFS, IFS and ASBC...there are plenty of chances for you to go topless if you WANT to, but I can't remember any being mandatory.

At XL yesterday: 1x C-17 to McChord 2x T-6 FAIP to Laughlin 2x RPA to Creech 3x KC-10s to McGuire and Travis 1x C-130 to Pope ~4x KC-135s to McConnell, Scott and other places I'm doing this from memory, so this list probably isn't 100% accurate.

A couple shots from ISAF IX & X (late 2006 to early 2007), mostly in the RC-S and RC-E provinces... Dutch F-16 taking off at Kandahar. These were all taken by a Dutch soldier named Richard Frigge...as you can see, he did some really amazing work and I'm glad I had the chance to work with him. He took this one a couple months earlier, and it ended up on the cover of TIME or some such publication. I have a lot of his other stuff, too...Apaches, hand-launched UAVs, artillery, dismounted patrols, etc. A limited cross section of his work can be found via Google.

Yeah, forcing a dude to chose (on the spot) between loyalty to spouse or loyalty to bros is kind of a d-bag move. Not a good technique, if you ask me.

That opinionatedwife post was funny then, and it's funny now. At Laughlin all of the APTs are given a faux BOLD FACE card about how to not suck: 1. YOU ARE AN OFFICER FIRST AND ALWAYS 2. FLY A GOOD JET - WE'LL TEACH YOU 3. BE A GOOD WINGMAN 4. DO YOUR JOB 5. DON'T DOCUMENT YOUR OWN STUPIDITY 6. DON'T BE A LIMFAC Yeah, it's sad but apparently necessary. Anyways, step 5 sounds like good advice. For pilots, spouses, babysitters or whatever the hell is living in the attic. DELETE POST as required, but MULTIQUOTE lives in infamy.