Aviation Continuation Pay (ACP - The Bonus)

[brabus]

Also, a common misguidance is “well I just don’t need that much money.” Totally agree, but what you will value for sure is an exceptionally large increase in QOL (with ability to choose whenever you want to give up some off days to make all that money to pay cash for the kitchen remodel your wife wants). I significantly underestimated QOL gains, it’s a real thing that just can’t be realized until you break free of the only work life you’ve known since you were 18-22ish. 

[Danger41]

Thoughts on having AD retirement safety net instead of hustling ANG?

[Scooter14]

Thoughts on having AD retirement safety net instead of hustling ANG?

Who says you can’t have both?

Do your 11-12 years AD.

Join ARC unit.

Get hired by airline.

Drill with unit, go on a deployment or two, sit alert. Upgrade. Go to in residence PME. Whatever to mitigate first year pay and get orders. MEST, whatever.

Fly the line for year two at the airline. Continue to chip away at AD time until you’re close to or over the 15 year AD mark.

Seek out a temp AGR or ADOS tour. Flying, non-flying. Doesn’t matter. There’s a lot out there, especially if you’re willing to move. There’s probably a need at your own unit the way things are going now. If you’re willing to work and you have the qualifications they are willing to give you the chance.

Get to 20 active. It’ll probably take you 25 years of total service to make it happen. Go back to year 6-9 pay at your airline with an AD retirement safety net for the next economic downturn.







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[herkbum]

Who says you can’t have both?

Do your 11-12 years AD.

Join ARC unit.

Get hired by airline.

Drill with unit, go on a deployment or two, sit alert. Upgrade. Go to in residence PME. Whatever to mitigate first year pay and get orders. MEST, whatever.

Fly the line for year two at the airline. Continue to chip away at AD time until you’re close to or over the 15 year AD mark.

Seek out a temp AGR or ADOS tour. Flying, non-flying. Doesn’t matter. There’s a lot out there, especially if you’re willing to move. There’s probably a need at your own unit the way things are going now. If you’re willing to work and you have the qualifications they are willing to give you the chance.

Get to 20 active. It’ll probably take you 25 years of total service to make it happen. Go back to year 6-9 pay at your airline with an AD retirement safety net for the next economic downturn.







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Congrats on getting into the check of the month club!


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[Scooter14]

Congrats on getting into the check of the month club!


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11 more days brother! Thanks!


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[ATIS]

14 hours ago, Scooter14 said:

 

Who says you can’t have both?

Do your 11-12 years AD.

Join ARC unit.

Get hired by airline.

Drill with unit, go on a deployment or two, sit alert. Upgrade. Go to in residence PME. Whatever to mitigate first year pay and get orders. MEST, whatever.

Fly the line for year two at the airline. Continue to chip away at AD time until you’re close to or over the 15 year AD mark.

Seek out a temp AGR or ADOS tour. Flying, non-flying. Doesn’t matter. There’s a lot out there, especially if you’re willing to move. There’s probably a need at your own unit the way things are going now. If you’re willing to work and you have the qualifications they are willing to give you the chance.

Get to 20 active. It’ll probably take you 25 years of total service to make it happen. Go back to year 6-9 pay at your airline with an AD retirement safety net for the next economic downturn.







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You forgot to mention “hang out with cool USN and USMC buds in the CAOC”.  
ATIS 

[Scooter14]

You forgot to mention “hang out with cool USN and USMC buds in the CAOC”.  
ATIS 

Do I get joint credit for that?

It’s funny, two of the last sets of orders I took brought me to AOCs (607 and 609) and both of them allowed me to have a beer with people from this community.

Just another reason to put yourself out there and find something out of the ordinary to participate in.







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[ATIS]

1 hour ago, Scooter14 said:

 

Do I get joint credit for that?

It’s funny, two of the last sets of orders I took brought me to AOCs (607 and 609) and both of them allowed me to have a beer with people from this community.

Just another reason to put yourself out there and find something out of the ordinary to participate in.







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No Joint Credit, just bragging rights and a place in DC to crash and drink beer whenever you are in town. 
 

ATIS

[bcuziknow]

5 hours ago, ATIS said:

You forgot to mention “hang out with cool USN and USMC buds in the CAOC”.  
ATIS 

As well as promote 1 or 2 times again!

[SocialD]

18 hours ago, brabus said:

Also, a common misguidance is “well I just don’t need that much money.” Totally agree, but what you will value for sure is an exceptionally large increase in QOL (with ability to choose whenever you want to give up some off days to make all that money to pay cash for the kitchen remodel your wife wants). I significantly underestimated QOL gains, it’s a real thing that just can’t be realized until you break free of the only work life you’ve known since you were 18-22ish. 

 

This has been a pretty common misconception by many of my squadron mates.  The only ones who come back on orders, are the guys who are within 5 years of their 20.  The rest have gotten a taste of the QOL and are now DSGs for life.  It's funny is seeing the "I'm never going to the airline" types, especially the ones who gave airline guys shit, who are now DSG for life because of how good the QOL is for them.

 

Unfortunately, I had to go on orders in early December and I forgot how bad being full time sucks.  I've worked more in the last two months than I did in the last 5 months of 2022 at Delta...never mind the massive pay hit.  I guess if all I did was show up, fly and go home, it wouldn't be terrible.  But I don't think people realize how much of life in the military is fighting one self-imposed (by the AF) roadblock after another.  It's completely maddening and what makes me dread getting up and going to work almost every day right now.  It's something you don't grasp until you have a job where all you have to do is fly and you're not constantly fighting just to get basic shit done.  Then the huge added benefit is that you don't take work home with you!  The end of these orders can't get here fast enough!

 

16 hours ago, Danger41 said:

Thoughts on having AD retirement safety net instead of hustling ANG?

 

 

I'm nothing close to a weapons officer, but "it depends..."  My recommendation to all our young guys is that if you even think you may to the airlines at some point, I'd get hired ASAP because seniority is everything.  If you're within 5 years of a 20 year retirement, depending on how far you'll go for orders, then I'd imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to get to 20 while out on MLOA.  Lots of orders floating around the system...ask Brabus

[FourFans]

1 hour ago, SocialD said:

If you're within 5 years of a 20 year retirement, depending on how far you'll go for orders, then I'd imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to get to 20 while out on MLOA.  Lots of orders floating around the system...ask Brabus

...from a completely different perspective: I punched from AD at 17 years and am about to finish my 3rd good year in the AFRC.  I AM NOT GOING ON ORDERS.  I just rolled into year two at my major airline, and you would have to throw 7-figures+ a year at me to get me to go active for 3 more years.  The BS level is simply not worth it, and the arithmetic is a wash on that active retirement.

[herkbum]

Do I get joint credit for that?

It’s funny, two of the last sets of orders I took brought me to AOCs (607 and 609) and both of them allowed me to have a beer with people from this community.

Just another reason to put yourself out there and find something out of the ordinary to participate in.







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Not to mention great midnight chow friends while “slaving away” at an Osan exercise!!


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[FLEA]

8 minutes ago, herkbum said:

Not to mention great midnight chow friends while “slaving away” at an Osan exercise!!


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Dude Checkertails at 2am during exercise weeks is some of the best memories I have in my life. That shit was awesome. 

 

[BroncoEN]

Seems that April is the approximate date for the bonus announcement. Is ANG the same? Pondering AGR orders if a nice bonus is associated, just no idea the timeline when the bonus will be announced after this new NDAA

[brabus]

11 hours ago, BroncoEN said:

Seems that April is the approximate date for the bonus announcement. Is ANG the same? Pondering AGR orders if a nice bonus is associated, just no idea the timeline when the bonus will be announced after this new NDAA

ANG usually is around that time, but never seems to be exactly coincident with AD. Do you have a line number!?

[SocialD]

12 hours ago, BroncoEN said:

Seems that April is the approximate date for the bonus announcement. Is ANG the same? Pondering AGR orders if a nice bonus is associated, just no idea the timeline when the bonus will be announced after this new NDAA

 

 

Do yourself a favor and stop pondering...

[BroncoEN]

5 hours ago, brabus said:

ANG usually is around that time, but never seems to be exactly coincident with AD. Do you have a line number!?

Thanks for the info! Yea I have a line number, AGR might be right due to family circumstances for a bit… TBD 

[HeyWatchThis]

On 1/11/2023 at 11:49 PM, nsplayr said:

Dude this kind of shit infuriates me. Congress passed a law, it's signed by the President, it directs the DoD to do X,Y, or Z. The DoD then fails to take any action, can't update AFIs in a timely fashion, provides vague or no business rule guidance or policy memos, and then just fucking gets away with it sometimes for YEARS. If I were a Congressman I would unscrew heads and start shitting down necks until the law was implemented.

This same thing has happened with the 2021 NDAA expanded baby leave on the Guard side. I've literally been told I (and quite a few other guys in my unit) fall into an "unfortunate Catch-22" that prevents us from taking the leave...it's shenanigans. We had babies (well, our wives did, thanks dear!), we earned the leave, but we can't take it, what kind of fuckery is that? Our local-level commanders are pissed and sympathetic, but they are hamstrung by MAJCOM and NGB nonners who are saying it can't be done.

An officer's job, IMHO, is to receive intent from his/her superiors all the way up to the NCA, and then apply his/her knowledge, skills, leadership, creativity and ingenuity in order to meet that intent with appropriate effects on the battlefield, however that is defined for your career field.

Somehow every single one (ok, to be fair, 99.69%) of our personnelists and finance officers seems to have missed that very important lesson from their commissioning source and subsequent PME. As a group, they are pedantic, lawyerly, miserly bean counter shoe clerks who treat every single dollar as if it's coming out of their own personal wallet and scour every single potentially beneficial personnel policy for loopholes and ways they can fuck people over rather than implementing the intent of the policy as written.

/rant off

Well looks like the Air Force's lap dog agrees with not paying us the full flight pay:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA669-1.html

Key Findings

• The yearly cost increase associated with paying members of the RC risk pay and flight pay at the full monthly rate would range from $46.3 million to $88.5 million annually, or 100 percent to 194 percent over the baseline of $45.7 million annually. Although the cost increase would represent a substantial increase in the S&I pay budget, it would be small relative to the overall RC personnel budget: less than 0.4 percent for fiscal year 2021.
• RC members serve more periods per month than the stereotypical one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer. The implication is that the cost increase associated with a full-rate S&I pay policy is less than expected because RC members are already paid closer to the full monthly rate than expected.
• The number of RC members who would qualify or would potentially qualify for either hazardous duty incentive pay or aviation incentive pay in a given month ranges from 17,796 to 379,148 (out of more than 800,000 total members).
• The full-rate policy could reduce incentives to participate in the RC for more than the minimum required training periods. Thus, the full-rate policy would adversely affect readiness. Furthermore, the full monthly rate policy would be inefficient because it would increase costs while potentially reducing participation—i.e., paying more for less.

From my scientific research (IE asking around the sq) this is not the story I've gathered but I'm sure their simulations are smarter than asking actual people.......I know in my small corner of the woods a lot of our min runners (IE dudes who show up MAYBE once a quarter would actually start flying at least a local once a month....

My guess is will be the BS ammo they try and present Congress to get out of paying us full flight pay....

[Scooter14]

Well looks like the Air Force's lap dog agrees with not paying us the full flight pay:

Sadly I’m not surprised one bit.


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[FLEA]

21 hours ago, HeyWatchThis said:

Well looks like the Air Force's lap dog agrees with not paying us the full flight pay:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA669-1.html

Key Findings

• The yearly cost increase associated with paying members of the RC risk pay and flight pay at the full monthly rate would range from $46.3 million to $88.5 million annually, or 100 percent to 194 percent over the baseline of $45.7 million annually. Although the cost increase would represent a substantial increase in the S&I pay budget, it would be small relative to the overall RC personnel budget: less than 0.4 percent for fiscal year 2021.
• RC members serve more periods per month than the stereotypical one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer. The implication is that the cost increase associated with a full-rate S&I pay policy is less than expected because RC members are already paid closer to the full monthly rate than expected.
• The number of RC members who would qualify or would potentially qualify for either hazardous duty incentive pay or aviation incentive pay in a given month ranges from 17,796 to 379,148 (out of more than 800,000 total members).
• The full-rate policy could reduce incentives to participate in the RC for more than the minimum required training periods. Thus, the full-rate policy would adversely affect readiness. Furthermore, the full monthly rate policy would be inefficient because it would increase costs while potentially reducing participation—i.e., paying more for less.

From my scientific research (IE asking around the sq) this is not the story I've gathered but I'm sure their simulations are smarter than asking actual people.......I know in my small corner of the woods a lot of our min runners (IE dudes who show up MAYBE once a quarter would actually start flying at least a local once a month....

My guess is will be the BS ammo they try and present Congress to get out of paying us full flight pay....

How the fuck does any person with a general sense of reason and logic come to the bolded conclusion? "If we pay them more they will work less, so don't pay them more!" WTF? 

[brabus]

I don’t see how there is a single correlation between flight pay amount and effort at work. Higher flight pay is one tool to make the overall compensation higher in an attempt to keep guys from jumping to the airlines, that’s all it does. Rand took a massive swing and a miss on this one. 

Edited February 8, 2023 by brabus

[jice]

37 minutes ago, brabus said:

I don’t see how there is a single correlation between flight pay amount and effort at work. Higher flight pay is one tool to make the overall compensation higher in an attempt to keep guys from jumping to the airlines, that’s all it does. Rand took a massive swing and a miss on this one. 

They didn’t consider military compensation in the context of folks’ overall compensation.

If they had, RAND would realize that (in the case of AvIP) most folks are making an economically irrational decision to show up at all.

Again, every A1 at every level should have a permanent labor economist on staff… but we’d probably pay just enough to find the worst ones. 

[jice]

1 hour ago, FLEA said:

How the does any person with a general sense of reason and logic come to the bolded conclusion? "If we pay them more they will work less, so don't pay them more!" WTF? 

IF the incentive pay were the primary source of income AND human beings were rational actors, this would be a reasonable conclusion. Meet the min, get the pay, do other stuff… but very few are paying the gas bill with special pay from the RC. 
 

BUT human beings are not always rational actors, especially military members who are specifically excluded from most income/compensation studies for exactly that reason. Turns out patriotism/flying with the boys/guilt have a dollar value… that the military insists is a magic power rather than a form of compensation.

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by jice

[HeyWatchThis]

A silver lining might be the fact that the DoD had to prove it would be "detrimental to the force" to justify not paying the full amount.  RAND also hedged their answer by admitting that the increase in flight pay would increase the number of people wanting to join the guard/reserve.  So according to them, individual participation would decrease but recruiting/retention numbers would increase.

The language in the NDAA has bipartisan support so probably just my bias coming out but I don't think this report is the smoking gun the DoD I'm sure was hoping for but still frustrating from our perspective.  I honestly don't get the level of effort the AF/DoD puts into NOT paying us...

[Danger41]

Is this the 1500 a month maxed out flight pay discussion for Reserve component (is that RC)? Any discussions on this for AD?