Flight Training

[Mirage]

Gents, I completely agree with both of you regarding getting utility out of aviators after spending lots of money training them. I also agree there's got to be some kind of happy medium.

My perspective is informed by working for a CNO who had spent his career in the sub nuke silo and was a pretty f-ing poor CNO. I believe that a lot of his issues were caused by his staying in his silo. I think that leadership of aircrew is different from leadership of ABHs is different from leadership of SEALs and the more exposure an officer can get to the different communities, the better prepared they'll be for senior leadership.

And the Navy's system is such that we just don't keep 40-year-olds around to do JO-type flying. Maybe we should in order to maximize the return on the training investment. But we simply don't: no matter how good someone is in the plane, they simply will not be in a squadron as anything but a senior leader after a certain point.

At the end of the day, the bolded part above is the root cause of the pilot/experience retention issues. There's just no way around it... either the Navy changes the system to keep non-command track O-4/O-5's for their flying expertise, or they accept that they will lose a huge number of pilots after their contracts are up. Many, many of us join (or decide along the way) that they really just want to fly, not become Admirals and take constant career-building non-flying detours.

Every year, the Navy gets this information in their surveys of departing pilots, and every year they make the same decision: to accept their loss rather than change the system. If a war comes and they need all the war fighters they can get, they will change their minds, and it will be too late because all the talent will be flying for the civilian competition.

 

[Waveoff]

MPRA jokes aside, who do you want filling all those shooter billets? I'm not sure Millington has enough post Div-O, hot running SWOs to fill them all . . . .

But . . . . it would be fun to watch LTJG spiccolli, fresh off his first DDG assignment man the bow cats, stressing about cross wind limitations and weight board numbers

For your last sentence, we place a lot of trust in people for a lot of things. The Navy has shown that with the right quantity and quality of training they could get someone to learn anything safely. Young adults man nuclear reactors, drive ships, fly armed against standoffs, fly fighter jets, etc, all in their first tours.

 

[IRfly]

The fact that most VFA Squadron commanders and CAGs and most TACAIR Admirals went to TOPGUN and never did a shooter tour, boat tour, etc; tells you all you need to know about how much value the disassociated tour is to the Navy.

Literally the fact that TACAIR doesn’t have to do them is a spit in the face to all the other communities.

A good solution for it is to make warrant officers fill disassociated tour billets and keep Aviators flying.

This is a pretty limited take. VFA guys deploy to the boat. CAG staff (even as CAG paddles) is another boat tour. It's not a spit in the face to anyone, and especially not to the community where someone could theoretically go all the way to post-O5 command without ever setting foot on a Navy ship.

VFA guys also have something like 7 or 8 JOs in a squadron, as opposed to the 30-something JO pilots in an MPRA squadron.

 

[IRfly]

At the end of the day, the bolded part above is the root cause of the pilot/experience retention issues. There's just no way around it... either the Navy changes the system to keep non-command track O-4/O-5's for their flying expertise, or they accept that they will lose a huge number of pilots after their contracts are up. Many, many of us join (or decide along the way) that they really just want to fly, not become Admirals and take constant career-building non-flying detours.

Every year, the Navy gets this information in their surveys of departing pilots, and every year they make the same decision: to accept their loss rather than change the system. If a war comes and they need all the war fighters they can get, they will change their minds.

Exactly. But isn't there some program they came up with to keep pilots in the VTs?

 

[Mirage]

Exactly. But isn't there some program they came up with to keep pilots in the VTs?

Yeah, a fake program designed to try to fool people into chasing a carrot that didn't really exist. I think they chose like 3 O-5's each year back when I was keeping track of it. Doesn't move the needle for the army of O-3's and O-4's wanting those billets.

 

[TyKing]

This is a pretty limited take. VFA guys deploy to the boat. CAG staff (even as CAG paddles) is another boat tour. It's not a spit in the face to anyone, and especially not to the community where someone could theoretically go all the way to post-O5 command without ever setting foot on a Navy ship.

VFA guys also have something like 7 or 8 JOs in a squadron, as opposed to the 30-something JO pilots in an MPRA squadron.

Yet they still send Helo guys to do non flying disassociated tours even though they deploy to the boat and can do a flying tour with CAG staff as well.

I hear you on the numbers part. However, that does not justify sending a majority of your JOs to a non flying disassociated tour for “career broadening purposes”. They would be better off either by staying in their communities to be more effective tactically or staying at their production tours to help produce and train more Aviators.

 

[IRfly]

Yeah, a fake program designed to try to fool people into chasing a carrot that didn't really exist. I think they chose like 3 O-5's each year back when I was keeping track of it. Doesn't move the needle for the army of O-3's and O-4's wanting those billets.

Hah. Typical Navy...

 

[IRfly]

Yet they still send Helo guys to do non flying disassociated tours even though they deploy to the boat and can do a flying tour with CAG staff as well.

I hear you on the numbers part. However, that does not justify sending a majority of your JOs to a non flying disassociated tour for “career broadening purposes”. They would be better off either by staying in their communities to be more effective tactically or staying at their production tours to help produce and train more Aviators.

If the underlying cause of the Navy's pilot shortage actually is that the VTs where MPRA pilots can instruct are backed up due to a shortage of pilots (not a shortage of planes, or insufficient maintenance, or OBOGS problems, etc) and the Navy is pulling pilots from already undermanned VTs to go be a TAO, then you're right. That's crazy.

I maintain that for me, the disassociated tour was not just pencil-whipped "career broadening," but it also helped me understand the way a CSG thinks and operates much better than I had understood as a JO. And that, in turn, helped me understand where MPRA fits into CSG operations. And THAT, in turn, would have helped make me much more tactically effective had I got back to the squadron for a DH tour (to recap, I lateral transferred). Not saying it's true for everyone.

Whether Big Navy values it? about 1/3 of the shooters on my boat became operational COs. I see that the AOPS on my boat just got picked up for Major Command at Sea. Both recently retired 4-star MPRA admirals, one of whom was PACOM, the other of whom was nominated and confirmed as CNO (oof), did disassociated tours.

 

[robav8r]

For your last sentence, we place a lot of trust in people for a lot of things. The Navy has shown that with the right quantity and quality of training they could get someone to learn anything safely. Young adults man nuclear reactors, drive ships, fly armed against standoffs, fly fighter jets, etc, all in their first tours.

Good Gawd man - it was a joke ?

 

[jollygreen07]

Yeah, a fake program designed to try to fool people into chasing a carrot that didn't really exist. I think they chose like 3 O-5's each year back when I was keeping track of it. Doesn't move the needle for the army of O-3's and O-4's wanting those billets.

I know at least one low-life O-4 who made it. ?

It’s a huge missed opportunity. Every time someone from PERS or CNATRA actual visits my TRAWING I ask the same question: “why don’t you extend this program’s reach to JOs who will fly their asses off? They are going to quit. Why not retain that talent?”

“We need aviators on boats” is invariably the answer.

 

[FLGUY]

Gents, I completely agree with both of you regarding getting utility out of aviators after spending lots of money training them. I also agree there's got to be some kind of happy medium.

My perspective is informed by working for a CNO who had spent his career in the sub nuke silo and was a pretty f-ing poor CNO. I believe that a lot of his issues were caused by his staying in his silo. I think that leadership of aircrew is different from leadership of ABHs is different from leadership of SEALs and the more exposure an officer can get to the different communities, the better prepared they'll be for senior leadership.

And the Navy's system is such that we just don't keep 40-year-olds around to do JO-type flying. Maybe we should in order to maximize the return on the training investment. But we simply don't: no matter how good someone is in the plane, they simply will not be in a squadron as anything but a senior leader after a certain point.

Again, your point is valid for those that go onto Command billets and Staff tours.

The Navy has thrown around the idea that they are open to radical ideas and change. Maybe they should look into radical ways of changing personnel and career management. Finding other individuals to man those CVN billets, allowing people to do a longer JO Sea tour into a longer Shore tour then go right to DH and bypassing the boat would keep talent around and help production immensely.

As Tyking said, TACAIR Skippers, CAGs, and Admirals can go their entire careers in the cockpit. So while I understand that seeing the surface Navy has value, it is obviously not a requirement.

 

[Rockriver]

Back in my day, CAGs and CAG LSOs flew during their sea tours. I knew a winged flight surgeon (single anchor) that flew and heard that some CV skippers flew on cruise. Yet Shooters, Handlers, and Hangar Deck Officers did not. Is this still the case? If the Navy is seriously considering a change as big as winging SNAs before they've even seen a boat, perhaps they could revisit this area too.

Also, there was once an emphasis in the Training Command on weeding out the weaker players earlier in the syllabus rather than later. Still, there was the occasional SNA who failed to qual at the boat in T-2s. It's going to be ugly if a newly winged aviator can't keep the ball centered in the RAG after a couple of years of flight training.

 

[croakerfish]

We’ve talked about finding creative ways to get “other people” to man the typical disassociated sea tour billets, which I suspect is how they came to be filled mostly by non-TACAIR aviators.
But given that we are frequently short-changing fleet squadrons and production billets for the sake of these jobs, isn’t it time we look for efficiencies by simply eliminating some of these billets? They can’t all be THAT important.

 

[Swanee]

Again, your point is valid for those that go onto Command billets and Staff tours.

The Navy has thrown around the idea that they are open to radical ideas and change. Maybe they should look into radical ways of changing personnel and career management. Finding other individuals to man those CVN billets, allowing people to do a longer JO Sea tour into a longer Shore tour then go right to DH and bypassing the boat would be keep talent around and help production immensely.

As Tyking said, TACAIR Skippers, CAGs, and Admirals can go their entire careers in the cockpit. So while I understand that seeing the surface Navy has value, it is obviously not a requirement.

Why not make billets like Shooter a CAG staff tour so guys can keep flying while they do it?

Or why not do what we call A-coding or P-coding a billet in the Air Force and allow them to attach to a squadron that will keep their records soley for the purpose of keeping them flying.

 

[taxi1]

It's going to be ugly if a newly winged aviator can't keep the ball centered in the RAG after a couple of years of flight training.

Hello, rotary and MPRA