azguy, come on now. EVERYONE knows aviators are far more valuable than shoes, especially in combat. What's wrong with you
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NEWS Air Force leadership talks frankly about pilot retention
- Thread starter ChuckMK23
- Start date
Too drunk to find, but in the TACAIR communities last time I saw they couldn't meet mins to make DHs. And just having the numbers retained to make mins is terrible. We would be like SWOs at that point. I know you guys have your DH board thing now, but talking to my buddies now as long as you can breathe through both your mouth and your nose you can screen, so that is not a good construct. Just because you have the people willing to stay doesn't necessarily mean you have the right people willing to stay. Unfortunately for the TACAIR guys they haven't met either number.
This year's SWO DH board was the most competitive / most selective in the URL, period. That's incontrovertible.
Still waiting for the numbers to prove that pilot billets are going unfilled due to airline hiring. Thanks.
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
I have seen 8 year E-6 MM nukes get out and go to work at a nuclear power plant making 100K as a trainee (that includes mandatory overtime) so I wonder how much a nuke officer would make at that same plant?
Why? Doesn't seem to be working for the Air Force.
Can there ever be an effective permanent solution to a continually changing manning equation? Because that is what people are asking. Granted BUPERS is often a step or two behind the leading edge of the problem, I'm not sure that they can afford to hedge bets based upon rumor and ready room chatter. Has there actually been a DH manning shortfall in the last few years? I know lots have dropped letters, but until there aren't folks waiting in the wings to fill forward, it isn't a "problem".
Please PM your supervisors name and email. We need to get you some NKO training soonest !!!
That's because in the recent years the Air Force has become more like the Navy with respect to ground jobs/collateral duties and non flying tours. The Air Force is no longer the flying club with big grey jets that it used to be.
Unfortunately, the easiest way for the services to fix their pilot retention issues is to promote them to O-4 and then reject their resignation requests. Something like 90% of all Navy pilots are now up for the O-4 by the time their MSR is up. Recent years have seen the detailers leveraging the system to extend people's time in the service so they don't get leave flight current. We've seen the Marine Corps pull the "automatic continuation" rabbit out of the hat. It's only a matter of time before they become desperate enough to just start stop loss for pilots.
I know many an LT who are counting on getting booted out, taking the bonus and the boat job in the process. Sheer lunacy IMO.
For someone concerned with numbers, I'd love to see the evidence on this. Don't SWOs have the highest attrition in the Navy at MSR? If that's the case, how could they possibly be the most competitive for DH?
Also, if the SWO board is more competitive than pilots, doesn't that prove our point? Don't we want our boards to be competitive? If the Aviation Community's boards aren't competitive, isn't that a symptom of the issue: we need to fix personnel issues in aviation?
I assume you mean lunacy on the Navy's part, not the LTs.
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The better questions to ask are, and this is if we could care less about the quality of the DH's and CO's we make, (as been alluded to in this thread with spots being given to mouth breathers):
1. What percentage of these people will stick around (forecast attrition)?
2. Is that enough to fill our DH and subsequent CO spots?
3. If it is not, how do we entice more to stay and what are the market forces that are enticing them to leave? (Is it pay? Quality of life? Both? The Air Force and Marine Corps seem to have both of those issues right now.)
I have a hard time thinking that any SWO at MSR vs. any pilot at MSR is more "valuable." Granted, that's an uneven comparison, since they are different years, however, if the SWO community can make their DH's with such apparently high attrition, than perhaps the input is too large to begin with (as in: too many MIDN become SWOs).
I've never seen any product like this produced by PERS-43. But since PERS doesn't have a published product proving that they aren't effectively dealing with a manning problem largely because they won't acknowledge its existence, I guess we'll just assume the person in the community doesn't know what's going on here, but the person outside of it does.
Email from the Director of PERS-41 said:
So the lack of any legitimate DH board for us over the past several years has really jacked up SWO DH flow. The last 5 or so YGs had roughly a 85-90% screen rate for DH. As a result, anyone without some serious skeletons in their closet was screened. PERS-41 failed to really pay attention to the end-game numbers and for several years now, we've made ~50 more DHs per year than we need (or ~18% more end strength than is required).
This has lead to DHs being stashed for a year+ waiting to get into a seat, or DHs serving very short (12 month) tours and having to scrap for the good paper.
Starting this past year, they cracked down and are only screening each YG to the number of DHs they actually need (~275, I believe). There are incentives to screening in that first year, to include a $30k kicker to the original SWO DH bonus.