NEWS Air Force leadership talks frankly about pilot retention

[sevenhelmet]

Words...

Well written post, much of it directly applicable to VFA. Particularly the mixed messages about JOPA being tasked heavily while being admonished for not having enough fun/shenanigans.

 

[Flash]

I thought your post had a lot of good points and was well written. I particularly want to anchor down on this one. Things have gotten wayyyyy overboard with this and I think that's one of the big points when people mention "culture." This is particularly relevant on this thread because I hear that it is not just a Navy problem, but a (worse) problem in the USAF as well. The only people to correct this is senior leadership, and I don't know if they want to (or have the courage to) tackle this one.

The Army has got both beat on that front.

 

[croakerfish]

Appalling bullshit

Holy shit. I think you might have had an especially toxic front office.

 

[Gatordev]

Seriously. STOP. Go to the other thread to continue your tickle fights.

 

[DanMa1156]

Holy shit. I think you might have had an especially toxic front office.

I'll assume given the couple of responses and likes I've gotten, my experience could not have been limited to me. I'd also go out on a limb and say all 3 of my Skippers were very capable - each had his own strength and weakness; we had an especially toxic XO towards the end. Fortunately, final Skipper was probably the best Skipper of all 3 and was able to tone down the XO's maddening tendencies often.

 

[jtmedli]

On the Navy side of the house, how do we go about improving the culture?

I remember joking with several of my fellow JO's that our superiors would scold us for not having enough fun (at least, together), to which our responses were often:

a) When, if we are flying on weekends?
b) Why, if a JOPA walkout ends up with you backing CMC in saying it's disrespectful to the Enlisted (even if tacitly coordinated with OPS-O)?
c) Where, if you are worried about us getting drunk in public and the I-Bar / O'Club (on other bases) has MA's parked immediately outside it?

Despite the somewhat common complaints from above, I thought we did some awesome stuff: Kidnapped a Skipper to Vegas via a drunk party bus with the JO's and XO for the weekend; had "family dinners" in every port including some great Admins, 2 great admins in Tahoe (which, in fairness, were curtailed for many when the schedule came out Friday night and you saw you were flying Saturday or suddenly had a Level III brief on Monday - again, don't scold the JO's for prioritizing the front office's priorities); 2 truly great green-lights and 2 lesser ones; and plenty of just random JO get togethers in downtown San Diego that plenty of DH's and occasional Skippers and XOs were wont to drop in on.

The things I had an issue with on my JO tour were scheduling issues that felt like I got home from deployment and we were immediately back in work-ups; 2 sets of Skippers and XO's telling the JO's that "things will get easier" / QOL will improve "just after we complete HARP/Airwing Fallon/Fake TSTA/Real TSTA/C2x/CQ Det 1/2/3/4" but instead at the end of one would shift into "we need to prep for the next big event that's only 6 weeks away! You need to buckle down!"; petty and inconsistent behind-the-back picking of "winners" and "losers" for flight hours and quals, which was partially caused by the fact that I think it's a little ridiculous to ask HSC JO's to get Level III qual'd in 3 years in 3 different missions (and partially why, IMHO as a community, we don't really have a lot of buy-in from the rest of the Navy as to the value of our quals); and then, to top it off, getting completely hosed by a seismic timing shift that affected both my ability to earn anymore quals and my high-water FITREP reporting period that I've been told has probably ended my career.

I loved it, and I hated it, and I'm damn sure glad I did it.

I suspect the things I'd change are:
1. Expectations of qualifications (I assume this is HSC specific; I don't see other communities complaining about this), or lengthening the tour so you can reasonably become good at them.

2. Better work-life balance (I totally got and bought into the weird scheduling and hours associated with flying days then nights, etc.; I was less of a fan of the "we always are in ramp-up mode mentality. I know for sure I'm not the only one in my squadron who felt this way - I am quite certain my DH's resented it as well). I would add to this, especially in the first couple of months after deployment, and with no workup on the horizon in sight, the discouragement of taking leave was pretty annoying. Because of my fleet tour, I carried well over 60 days into my shore tour, and even with somewhat regular leave periods here, have a balance of 61 days as of my last LES (that's not a complaint, that's just pointing out the difficulty in taking leave during my fleet tour).

3. Stop the Chief / CMC worship. I loved most of my Chiefs, and I'm confident I was well-respected in their Mess, but I hated when a CMC would not remove himself from a JO or DH ranking board of 1st Classes; when one had nearly final say on what got written into evals; and when they had any sort of say who got on the flight schedule (including him/herself at times). Sometimes, this would spill overboard and Chiefs would definitely go behind the backs of JOs. I was lucky to have a great division Sr. Chief who pinned on Master Chief before we both left, but that wasn't the case for all of them - yet the Chief podium only grew in stature. As mentioned above: don't tell the JO's they suck for never doing a walkout if you're going to text us or call us one by one or hold an "emergency AOM" on Monday to scold all of us because "CMC saw you guys all left, what's it like abandoning your posts?"

I think in some areas, we have moved in the right direction. I still hate NKOs, but I definitely notice I've done less of them since they eliminated some of them (maybe we could just please make the cyber awareness one good for 2 years? Please?). I thought the fleet squadron I was in had a good culture of physical fitness. I thought my final Skipper really started to "get it" and when, on our final CQ det, we were fully loaded coming off a deployment, with almost no more quals to possibly earn around the boat, our ready room was actually a fun place to be where you weren't scolded for playing cards instead of studying, and we even had an Officers' wide Madden Tourney. Colored t-shirts turned out to actually be a bigger morale booster than I thought they would be. Flight suits off base is huge too. NHA is still trying to be more like Tailhook (still a long way to go, like... any front office support past "once your work is done today you should go to NHA"), and even cooler is that Tailhook is allowing anyone who has landed on a carrier in any method to be a member now, which is great. It's just that the 3 things I said could improve just had such a big impact on my career, lifestyle/QOL, and work environment, and I really feel like they detracted from what would have been a lot less frustrating 3.5 years.

Spot on, man. Sounds eerily familiar. Not that I had a bad tour or anything but there were definitely things here that sounded freakishly familiar.

 

[DanMa1156]

Spot on, man. Sounds eerily familiar. Not that I had a bad tour or anything but there were definitely things here that sounded freakishly familiar.

Thanks. Like I said, I had a hunch I wasn't speaking just for myself.

 

[RHINOWSO]

Yeah, it wasn't much different when I finished up AD and I'm sure it only got worse with the surges, etc.

We came up with a saying, "Death by a million paper cuts".

Very rarely was there a single horrific occurrence, just the daily getting screwed with at every turn, sometimes hourly (on the boat, of course).

 

[Flash]

So the USAF just announced three 'initiatives' to address its pilot shortage; 1- Increase ACIP, 2- Expansion of the pool of folks eligible for the bonus and 3- Bringing back up to 25 retired pilots to fill staff positions.

The ACIP raise begs the question, will Navy and Marines get the same increase?

 

[nukon]

So the USAF just announced three 'initiatives' to address its pilot shortage; 1- Increase ACIP, 2- Expansion of the pool of folks eligible for the bonus and 3- Bringing back up to 25 retired pilots to fill staff positions.

The ACIP raise begs the question, will Navy and Marines get the same increase?

For the lazy, here's the breakdown of old vs USAF-New:

New USAF:
- <2 yrs: $150
- 2-6 yrs: $250
- 6-12 yrs: $700
- >12yrs: $1000
- >22yrs: $700
- >24yrs: $450

Rest-of-Us:
- <2yrs: $125
- >2yrs: $156
- >3yrs: $188
- >4yrs: $206
- >6yrs: $650
- >14yrs: $840
- >22yrs: $585
- >23yrs: $495
- >24yrs: $385
- >25yrs: $250

So, for a 6 year contract:
Old: $9,816 (~$5k of which comes from the last two years)
New: $12,300
Delta: +$2,484

From years 6-12:
Old: $3,900
New: $4,200
Delta: +$400

Curious that there's such a large split so low on the totem pole - they've got guys for those 6 no matter what. The extra $50/mo for the guys who are leaving, 6- ~12years in,. . . does not strike me as a needle mover. If this is a USAF only thing, it does however strike me as something that will serve to solidify the bitterness all Marines feel somewhere deep inside.

 

[Treetop Flyer]

So they increased it less than enough to make up for inflation. Neat.

 

[Hotdogs]

So they increased it less than enough to make up for inflation. Neat.

Some one probably got an MSM and fitrep bullet for it too.

 

[Treetop Flyer]

Kind of unrelated: apparently a captain at my airline set a record by making a little over $88,000 in July.

 

[Deere1450]

Well. I have the best front office in the navy. I have the best JOPA bros in the navy. And I hate to fuckin admit it, but the hinges are alright dudes. I think I'm one of the few JOs that has it made and loving life.
I'm currently drunk on TAD and just wanted to post something. Ok. Bye.

 

[Deere1450]

I agree with you Deere1450!