3 weeks of worthless school in Lakehurst, NJ followed by a few days in either SD or Norfolk for firefighting and another worthless school. After that it all depends on where your boat lies in the training and deployment cycle. If you are in the yards, you will likely report aboard, get your feet under you, and then go TAD to another boat to get qualified. In any case, you will typically take on an easy ground job and bide your time until workups start in earnest. It typically takes about 4-5 weeks of flying with an airwing on board minimum to get qualified. 2 months is more realistic. Once deployment starts and you are qualified, life is fairly easy. You will shoot, eat, play XBox, and hit the gym. The schedule is usually broken up so that you are on deck 4 hours or so a day depending on how many qualified guys you have. Once you are qualified you also start instructing new shooters. You will eventually get a division officer job about a year into your tour. That can be extremely busy at times, but is pretty manageable. A lot of that depends on how good or worthless your chiefs are and how well the shooters work with the Warrant/LDOs in Air Dept.
The orders are 2 years, which is nice, but all depends on the Dept Head board. I was there 27 months, some guys were there for 18.
Out of those 27 months, I was gone about 16 of them either TAD or underway for deployment/workups. Being on a PNW carrier, you will see about an extra week or so of gone time each underway because you have to go down to SD for airwing on load and it is a 3 day transit each way plus a one day on load.
...longing for "short" 8 month deployments. Why did I do this? Oh yeah...no more PCS moves, every other Monday off, and a FIRS and reserve retirement!
