What does a typical career path look like for an FTS VR pilot? Could you stay in the cockpit for the majority of your time or do you have to do tours outside of the cockpit for career enhancement?
It’s harder to homestead in a squadron these days as FTS. PERS pushes the FTS more towards the ‘reserve management’ role, aka, working in a NOSC or some other reserve related staff or billet.
If you go FTS, go with the knowledge that you’re guaranteed one flying tour as a DH. If you switch early, as in right after your first shore tour, you can likely get two tours as FTS in a squadron. After that it’s a crap shoot. There are some squadrons with O-5, non-CO/XO types, but there aren’t a lot.
That why I went Air Force, I was in an FTS squadron for 8 years and just wanted to fly, even volunteered to go instruct in primary, etc. The detailer pretty much told me I had to go to a non-flying job.