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VX-20

P-3’s in the fleet (3 tours). P-8, C-12, C-40, and E-2 in the test world.

That’s where we got ours! We had a GS-14 who had a side hustle flying with the Guard, and eventually the AF Generals said, “Why the eff are all the other four stars rolling in G550’s while we’re slumming it in these ratty G100’s?!” So, the AF bought G550’s and said they could fly the C-38’s...

Maybe like…3 years? Idk. I was busy flyin’ and stuff. Now that I mostly fly UAVs, I can even post in flight!

This thread is a trainwreck. No pilot should want to go EP-3 now. That’s like a 16 year old getting a driver’s license and saying he wants a ratted-out Model T as his first car. Better plan: Go straight stick VP, get good flight time, all that “large crew leadership” experience you crave...

Two operational tours flying various flavors of P-3’s, then off to TPS, and got to VX-20 at the perfect time for them to be winding down P-8 projects and spooling up UAV projects. It wasn’t hard to become “The Navy’s UAV Guy” when there were only like 4 of us and two left to fly for SWA as soon...

Hi. I’m the only current and qualified MQ-25 AVO in the Navy. The dragged me in kicking and screaming, bur that doesn’t mean I don’t think it could be a really good deal for the right person. Feel free to PM.

Used to be able to get a contacts waiver for pilot. . .I know more than one pilot who wouldn't be here were it not for that. Has it gone away now, what with all the PRK and LASIK out there?

^^^^This. Even if staying in the Navy for life is your plan: take the ATP written now. I recommend using this site as well: www.sheppardair.com 72 hours, from download to test. Got a 96% and all my money back (I reported a question that wasn't in their bank).

I like where this is going. . .

While I think this makes sense for a lot of reasons, I shudder to think of what this means for my future job security.

The SIPR webs. Or, you know, the NAS Jax base newspaper. :D I think we're up to like 3 squadrons fully flopped over to the dark side, with one more in the pipeline? All the Jax squadrons are going 1st, then the legacy Hawaii squadrons, which are currently supposed to homeport change to...

In Hawaii the lot is a dirt lot, with no cover. I came back after 6 months and trashed the car cover I had put on it, and it took the better part of an hour to cut out all the weeds and small trees that were growing up through the wheels. Next deployment, I just overinflated the tires, changed...

Guys, you're missing the point. If we don't give NAMs and COMs out to the shore duty YNs and PSs for filing travel claims and making coffee, our pay and benefits will be AFU for months to come.:D Logically, then, we have to give the same awards to ADs who work 9 hours on an engine change or...

Collectively, we can't keep spending the way we have and expect budget woes to improve. Somebody's ox has to be gored. I'm okay with it being mine/ours, but I'd also like to see some other programs/departments share some of the burden.

Navy Times estimates just shy of 1.5 million active duty personnel on the rolls this years. We take that $1.4B DoD hemorrhages on the commissaries each year, skip the middleman, and just pay it out as a stipend to all active duty folks. It works out to just under $1000 per person. I buy...

Tip of the iceberg. I "have a friend" who has copies of the Solidworks files for all the components. The same guys made the much-hyped Warfairy configurable AR printable model. This kind of stuff is only going to keep advancing and proliferating. I see no problems with this. The problems come...

Rumors heard from a pair of O-6s at BUPERS I talked to last week is that, "The bonus is going back up. We're 2 years away from the new T-notch and most communities are losing pilots at an unsustainable rate."

Word on the street is that all the VPness will be gone from KBay by 2017, except for VPU which will sundown in 2018. The wing is set to move in 2016, as of now. I'm betting this will influence a lot of pilots' choices to take the bonus and hang around for a DH tour. . .I know it's making FTS at...

The real question, is why hasn't anyone started making Baboo patches in real life?

It used to be. It was sometime in the late 90's/early 2000's when it became it's own community, complete with career path and all. CODs used to be a weird, good-ish deal for E-2 and P-3 cats to do instead of a shooter or TACRON tour.

I didn't say they were all like that, but I implied it's a significant fraction and I stick to that assessment. My experience has led me to this conclusion and I'm willing to concede that I may benefit from a larger sample size; regardless, the conclusion is my own and not some groupthink...

"Go along to get along" is the name of the game today. "Keep my head down, maintain status quo, make it to retirement. . ." is the mantra of so many "successful" members of the O-4 and above crowd. And that's sad. As Keith Richards put it, "It's not just about living forever. You've gotta...

We've got mines and some fancy new(ish) torps, too. Basically, that whole picture just sucks. I bet it was taken in Jax.

They're gonna be around for a long time, too. When the whole world goes digital, sometimes the guy with the analog missile has the advantage. . .

To be perfectly honest, the hits on that low-cost, reusable floating target (or whatever it's called now) are spectacularly underwhelming. To most people, if you say you're gonna hit a target boat with a missile, they expect flames and twisted metal, not a 12 inch hole in some netting. . .

Yeah, this is how I look at home ownership. I think some others in this thread are taking the "Should I put money in mutual funds or buy a house?" tack, when for most of us the question is "Do I buy mutual funds and rent a home for a few years or buy mutual funds and buy a house knowing I will...

One of my buddies puked every single flight in T-34s and about 1/3 of the way through T-44s, he said, "If I puke tomorrow, I'm just gonna take it as a sign that this flying gig isn't for me. I can't live like this anymore!" He's a test pilot now.

Yeah, I think Zippy must be an old guy remembering how it was. I can't even name 28 places for P-3s to det out of today. It's more like. . .maybe. . .8 regular ones and a half dozen other ones where you could go for like a week or so for an exercise. If we had money for exercises, that is.

Wait, which current carrier-based plane doesn't have folding wings? I was pretty sure all do. . .

You've already gotten a few very valid answers focusing on the wing sweep. I'll take a different approach: we fold wings on the boat so we can pack more planes on the roof and in the hangar deck. You'd need on hell of a wing sweep to realize as much space savings that way. Look at the...

WTI school = 1st, second, or 3rd tour (this last one is rare) TPS = 2nd or 3rd tour (again, rarer choice for 3rd tour, but it happens; usually as more of an abbreviated 2nd tour into third tour) NPS = 2nd or higher tour (although smart kids who want a masters more than wings can scam this before...

My favorite part was the hardcore Gunnys who bemoaned the change in uniform to one that was less maintenance-intensive (i.e. no starching/ironing/boot-shining) because they'd no longer be able to tell who the "true professionals" were.:confused: :D

1000 hours of P-8 time? Maybe if you become a skipper and never leave the cockpit. . .

I, for one, find the prospect of spending years training and talking about going to space to then do one spaceflight to be, well, pretty blah. The idea of having a T-38 or F-18 at my disposal to fly around the country with an expense account. . .now there's where the excitement is. . .

Krylon is your friend. I recommend "Gloss White" although "Semi-Gloss" is a little less showy. I have no solution (obviously. . .) for keeping the soles from crumbling.

$85 for a pair of shoes I will wear once or twice, tops, while not cripplingly expensive, is still ridiculous. That kind of attitude is why we get billion dollar, "gold-plated" ships and airplanes that have less functionality than the platforms they replace.;)

And they had white soles? That seems to be the long pole in the tent on all the hard-soled white oxfords I can find. . .

I had my brown Bates re-soled in Bahrain for like 20 BD. Totally worth it, since he shined the shoes on his bench grinder'looking thing for free and I haven't had to do a thing to them since. What I really want to know is where the hell can I get a pair of white leather shoes with white soles...

I don't care about his military service or his politics. According to his bio, he was instrumental in expanding Lululemon and making them a household name. That's good enough for me.

You either have no imagination or are incredibly naive about how the news media and special interest groups will use this.

FIFY

Seriously. Flt doc challenged me to eat his all natural, no preservative, organic, non-GMO, blah, blah, blah, diet for 2 weeks. That meant shopping at Whole Food$, and a 300% increase in grocery bills. At the end of the experiment, I concluded that I'd rather eat the preserved Soylent Green...

KBay is a 7 day a week store. Or rather: was, I suppose. Oddly, I went a few weeks ago and the lines on a normal Saturday morning were like 50 deep. After a half hour in line, I found out that between the DeCA hiring freeze, USMC PCS season, and the disgruntled high school kids not wanting to...

I don't have the IC that clarified that section in front of me, but IIRC, it gave the approval authority for FAA evaluators back to the squadron CO. It was in that section that basically said, "Yeah, we totally wrote this from a pointy-nose perspective and didn't think about all you big wing...

I hate you. What's the DTG of that ALNAV with the community transition instructions, again? :cool:

"We're looking at YOU, Hawaii squadrons. . .":(

I heard the very same from the O-6 at PERS-43. There's a slideshow out there that shows it graphically, with exact numbers. I thought it was like 05 or 06 on the starting side, but I could be mistaken. They were forced to deliberately under-assess for 1st tour fleet seats, relative to what...

Holy shit. . . if the % is fixed by the board precept, then maybe the VP community was actually trying to hook up its bubbas by forcing all the records of eligible folks into the tank (including those who had already dropped letters, lat xfer, FTS, etc.). You can inflate your total by 10-20%, so...

I have two and I can't imagine NOT flying. I realized a while back (about 6 months after my wife did, incidentally), that flying totally centers me and even a shitty day in the plane makes me a better person. It's like Randall in that go kart scene from Clerks. I don't try to explain it, I...