The Air Force has nice accoutrements, but tends to attract insufferable douchebags who revel in bureaucracy and pedantry.
The Navy has rougher living, but we have more fun.
Our leadership has its own faults, but theirs are cheeky and fun, not cruel and tragic like the Chair Farce.
If you wanted to compare us like churches, we are the liquored up Catholic kids out back with cherry bombs blowing shit up in the crappy Philadelphia diocese; while they are the really nice, somewhat awkward, Mormon kids peddling (see what I did there?) their wares on the really nice Schwinn 21 speeds while hosted by the rich families from Stepford Wives...
Pickle
I'll disagree with you, although your sentiment is a very common one with Navy guys. And it's a sentiment I wore with pride as a Naval Aviator until I worked for the USAF. I will agree with
@sevenhelmet in that doing an exchange tour doesn't make you a resident expert in their service culture, but it gives me a far better perspective than most ignorance being peddled around ready-rooms about scarves, lack of autonomy and pedantry.
First and foremost, some of my really good friends are Air Force pilots I met at Vance. Many are very laid back, extremely knowledgable, and amazingly talented aviators. Not all of them are DnD losers who joined to get laid. There will be douchebags everywhere, although those seem to be fighter guys more often than not, but that's not a blanket statement.
The "nice accoutrements" the USAF has are the things we ought to have in the Navy, and don't, like actual training programs. Advanced Instrument school, or even an actual "instrument ground school" (which is required, and I've yet to see in my Navy career. It's usually a CD-rom with some PPT training, or it doesn't exist at all). These things are part of the profession of aviation. The USN creates some hardened aviators through trial by fire. You either figure it out, or you fail. The USAF goes all out in providing excellent training for virtually everything, to a fault. Need to teach a "local survival course" for all new check-ins. That'll be a 2 week TAD to get qualified to do it. In the Navy, those types of jobs are either forgotten about until it's missed on an inspection or the newest JG is given the task of reading the instruction, powerpoint and then designated to give said training.
The Air Force has issues with maintenance? SQ/CC goes to the OG/CC and bitches out the maintenance squadron for not providing the jets needed. In the USN, we just go without up aircraft at best, or gundeck maintenance to make up jets out of down jets.
As for the cherry-bombing kids behind the church... in my Navy squadron experience, liquor and beer was outlawed, even after hours behind closed doors. My USAF experience was an actual squadron BAR with beers encouraged even with students during the last debrief, and regular roll-calls with drinking and shenanigans.
I understand the cultural differences, and the necessities of each. The Navy is an expeditionary force, designed as a whole (for aviation) to focus on jets flying off carriers. So no, we don't need to know that much about instrument flying to necessitate an AIS, or learn the intricacies of TERPS, and other things that exist "in the weeds" of professional aviation. We as a Navy operate with limited people and resources and so everyone has to wear 7 hats, albeit we're not very good at all 7 things we have to do, and it will be 6-12 months we have to keep the plates spinning before we move on to the next "opportunity to excel" at something else and turn over those programs to someone else.
That being said, I've never seen an Air Force guy wear a scarf unless it was at some formal roll-call or as an ironic gesture, nor have I seen an ironed flight suit. The weirdest thing they do is cut off their FOD flap, and the fighter dudes have their own subset of stupid shit like pointing with elbows, eschewing the words "box, head" and other nonsense.
No one I know in the Navy sees the irony of aviators making fun of SWOs for bitching about how we're prima donnas, and yet we poke fun at the USAF for being prima donnas. They aren't soft, they just have a lifestyle and appreciation for the important things like resources, training, and safety that we lack, and we punish them for it.
And finally, to dispel the myth I perpetuated myself about how a USAF O-5 has equal authority to a Navy O-3... not so. Specifically, the USN O-3 may DO THE WORK for the tasker that an O-5 in the USAF would do, but the authority still lies up the chain. You're the CDO? Great! Need to release a SITREP? Hmm... still gotta send it up to XO/CO, or higher. When I was with the USAF, the SQ/CC or DO would just do the SITREP because ultimately THEY were the ones releasing it, so it just made sense to do it. In the Navy, we have no more authority than in the USAF, we just end up getting tasked with doing all the work, which often takes more time and effort than if the originator just did it themselves.
And I imagine the same goes for in the cockpit stuff. I'm not a TACAIR guy, so I'll welcome any comments/corrections, but it's not as if our JO pilots are unique in making decisions to drop at their level, whereas the USAF pilots have to make calls up the chain to the general to get anything done. The call still has to be made from the JTAC, coordinated with the TOC and kill box cleared, etc.
This is all stuff simply to defend the preconceptions as to how the USAF is due to the fact this is a Navy forum with a lot of preconceived notions, not simply because I'm some USAF fanboy. I recognize that the USAF does a lot of stuff well, and also has a lot of stupid shit to contend with, but certain as much or less than the Navy has on its end. I'm sure the roasting begins after I hit "post reply"...
