New Pilot AND NFO Max Age Limit!

[exNavyOffRec]

It’s not increased competition.

It’s opening the flow valve.

I am not talking about a huge influx, basically for all the reason that have been stated, I doubt the number of candidates between 22-27 will equal those between 27-32, I would bet most would be around the 27-29 age range.

accession rates stay fairly even and increases aren't huge. I would say you would see a few things happen, you would count on increased attrition, so you would increase the number you want to select, until you get a few years of this higher age in the books it will be some estimation going on, but I don't believe the increase in applicants will equal the increase in selections, so you will see an increase in competition, not a huge increase, but I would say some of those that were getting selected before might be having to retake the ASTB, remember before the USN went to MEPS physical before selection the general rule was 9 and 8's almost always selected, 7's 50/50, and anything less was rare.

 

[RandomGoat1248]

I can’t remember who told me this. Might have been a flight doc, but I’m not sure. But supposedly the NAMI shrinks did a study of student age and performance, and the attrition rate went significantly up after a certain age for just those reasons. And that’s one of the variables they used to set the max age for studs.

While I'm only a SNA, the age thing has actually already been brought up multiple times during briefs with the squadron and wing. During a sit down with the Commodore, he straight up asked who was older, who had a family, or who was a prior and told them that they historically had much higher attrition rates.


If you think about it, it makes sense. Those of us that are younger don't know any better. I just study, fly, workout, and drink when I have the time. I really have nothing else to worry about or really devote any of my time to.

 

[Uncle Fester]

I can see that- the number of 27-31 year olds being only a small number of the overall students.

I'd love to hear @Uncle Fester 's opinion on older students and the training pipeline, from his experience working in student control at NASC. API is a slightly different animal than pilot training, but students are students...

I can offer my opinion, but I don’t know what the actual data says these days. I can also say that we kept an eye on the “perfect storm” students - older, out of formal schooling for a while (degree through CTC or similar), with families. Those studs ran into difficulties at a higher rate and much earlier in the program than your Mk1 Mod0 23-y/o ensign straight out of school.

I tend to think that the reason is distractions - when you’re 30 with camp followers, your time isn’t your own to live in the books, stay with the study group late into the evening, jump on those weekend cross countries and knock out a bunch of X’s, etc. There’s lawns to mow and Junior’s t-ball games.

Also we saw some attitude problems. Not bad attitudes, per se; more that they tended to treat it as just another BS Navy school. Almost inevitably it took a pink sheet before they came to Jesus, but then again it only took one (or one near miss) for them to get with it. That was speaking of longer-service priors in particular, but I imagine the same would be true of an older cone who’d come off the street.

 

[Jim123]

I can offer my opinion, but I don’t know what the actual data says these days. I can also say that we kept an eye on the “perfect storm” students - older, out of formal schooling for a while (degree through CTC or similar), with families. Those studs ran into difficulties at a higher rate and much earlier in the program than your Mk1 Mod0 23-y/o ensign straight out of school.

Yeah, the bar is pretty low for what the Navy will accept as a credible bachelor's degree. The work and study habits behind some of those diplomas is not always, ahem, academically rigorous. Granted, studying for flight school is a little different than writing a 30 page research paper on the economic conditions behind the Civil War or preparing for a thermodynamics final exam- but I cringe at what the shock must be like for somebody who got a mail-in diploma from U of Phoenix online campus, or somebody whose transcripts include "life experience" credit or Navy COOL for what's basically trade school credit.

Sigh... real college is different than those things, although again, flight school studying is different too.

 

[squorch2]

Stucon used the following stud attributes to trigger special tracking (SMS):

• low NSS
• Vance primary
• academic pink sheets
• prior enlisted
• kids
• degree from a for-profit institution

Folks with more than one got Stan pilots for onwings and extra (good) attention.

Lots of priors did not take kindly to the help and attention.

 

[Hair Warrior]

real college is different

^ this

 

[nittany03]

Lots of priors did not take kindly to the help and attention.

What did they expect? To get handed wings? FFS. Maybe it's because I took a, well, unique path to getting winged and fleet qualled. At times, I was at the bottom of the pack. At other times, I was at the top of the pack. At further times, I was in between. The times I was one or the other didn't follow any linear model. But I muddled through. The point isn't about me, because I'm a reservist now, so who cares? It's about if someone is trying to help you . . . suck it up and LET THEM! JFC!

 

[picklesuit]

Stucon used the following stud attributes to trigger special tracking (SMS):

• low NSS
• Vance primary
• academic pink sheets
• prior enlisted
• kids
• degree from a for-profit institution

Folks with more than one got Stan pilots for onwings and extra (good) attention.

Lots of priors did not take kindly to the help and attention.

I had three of those wickets...didn’t get any extra attention (2007), managed to do just fine.

As an IP, looking back, I have no idea how that happened...

Most of my tough cases were older prior-E’s, but the ones that were good were REALLY good...

 

[xmid]

Roughly half of my AMDO's were older priors that DOR'ed out of flight training. Half... When most of them talk about their flight school experience it was the same story, "The squadron bent over backwards to keep me in the pipeline, but life happened and I DOR'ed."

As far as the rigor of the degree program, one of our usual members here has a degree from U of Pheonix and he's done well for himself. I know a guy that bragged at OCS about taking only a couple classes after Nuke power school to get his degree and he's flying U-2's now. Could it be that the self motivation to get your degree in a less structured environment might actually be an asset in a flight program that isn't going to hold your hand and make you study?

Most of my tough cases were older prior-E’s, but the ones that were good were REALLY good...

In my experience, the same could be said for those with significant prior flight time. We attrited several, but the ones that were good were REALLY good... Maturity, like flight time, can be a great asset. But only if you still go in to it humbly, and with the attitude that you are going to put 110% effort in to learning our way of doing things AND to be a part of the brother/sisterhood of Naval Aviation.

 

[Gatordev]

I had three of those wickets...didn’t get any extra attention (2007), managed to do just fine.

As an IP, looking back, I have no idea how that happened...

Most of my tough cases were older prior-E’s, but the ones that were good were REALLY good...

I'd argue you did have some of that extra attention in the form of Vance training, since it forces a more structured training environment much like SMS (as I know you know).

As an aside, since squorch was a HT guy, I took his post to be more HT-centric. I never went through VT(p) Advanced, but I always perceived the HTs as the most loosest of pipelines when it came to giving studs a certain amount of rope to hang themselves. I know that got better after I was a student (with formalized classroom ground school prior to starting as a big improvement). But it seemed like you were constantly drifting between stages, sometimes doing two stages at the same time (ie, TRANSFAMs) and much of the curriculum benefiting from the excellent gouge that had been created.

 

[SynixMan]

Stucon used the following stud attributes to trigger special tracking (SMS):

Folks with more than one got Stan pilots for onwings and extra (good) attention.

Lots of priors did not take kindly to the help and attention.

Thankfully, SMS is going the way of the Dodo with the new CNATRA training manual. It may have been a good idea when started, but I think it quickly turned into make work for SNAs and a chance for the command to say "See? We did something!" Keeping SNAs in the spaces to force studying things that may or may not help them didn't really teach the big boy/big girl maturity we're looking to foster in SNAs.

I 100% agree putting a stan/senior IP with a struggling student may be the right course of action. As overall professional and quality as the IP crowd I saw was, you'd occasionally get an IP/SNA mismatch for onwing pair. After three years of seeing how the sausage was made, I think the process works fairly well and all the parties are invested in it succeeding.

 

[squorch2]

Yup, that was HT-centric, and we also ran SMS a bit differently - less pain, more assist (i.e., set up folks with Stan IPs, more managed syllabus flows, etc.)

Ops was not a fan, but that stuff helps a lot - especially for folks who don’t or can’t learn gouge by osmosis from the student ready room.

 

[scoolbubba]

Ops is never a fan of anything that requires scheduling at a level of detail higher than a monkey flinging shit at a wall to see what sticks.

 

[ChuckMK23]

The Commodore at TW-5 at the time viewed Advanced attrites as a failure - meaning either the SNA did not receive candid feedback in Primary/Intermediates or in the HT's we we didn't intervene early enough to put more structure or manage his/her flow through curriculum. When I ran STAN we had student red flag reviews with with the Flight Leaders. Either the Flight Leaders were tagged with leadership follow ups or we in STAN got stage manager level instruction for a flight to get the young man or woman's deficiencies noted, documented so the next IP knew what to look for when the ATJ was reviewed prior to next hop. This was ridiculously effective. Downs were never a surprise.

 

[Flash]

As far as the rigor of the degree program, one of our usual members here has a degree from U of Pheonix and he's done well for himself. I know a guy that bragged at OCS about taking only a couple classes after Nuke power school to get his degree and he's flying U-2's now. Could it be that the self motivation to get your degree in a less structured environment might actually be an asset in a flight program that isn't going to hold your hand and make you study?

There will always be folks that succeed no matter where they came from or where they got their schooling, its not a big secret we have one guy here that flew with just a GED. But there are those shining examples and then there are the cold hard facts and unfortunately the outcomes from for-profit institutions are almost universally worse than those from non-profit ones, both public and private. I think it is great folks in this country have a lot of choice in higher education, more than pretty much any other country, but they and places like military should be aware for-profit schools are usually nowhere near as rigorous or as good quality as 'regular' institutes of higher learning.