I remember thinking that the FRS and Fleet Quals were a different kind of challenging. Much more concept and application of book knowledge than just wrote memorization and monkey skills. Oh, and that time management thing in the fleet between flying and ground job.
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No more CQs?
- Thread starter phrogdriver
- Start date
Well to be honest Sir I never thought of it like that. I thought high school did a good job of preparing me for college, as it should have as a college prep school. Most of the learning I do in flight school has little comparison in college with the exception of learning how to pull important snippets of information from large documents and how to think about things logically.
I’ve had to relearn how to learn in this environment. There’s a lot of repetition, rote memorization, visualization (chairflying), and practice; none of that I personally learned to a great extent in college. If anything it seems like preparing to be an actor in a play or an athlete on the field, maybe a bit of both.
I don’t know how much work IPs have put in between flight school and returning to instruct because honestly I know so little about it. It’s mostly a mystery to me how anything outside of flight school functions because it’s my only experience. My only knowledge of the FRS or the Fleet comes from picking the brains of my IPs and folks on here so sometimes I get to see a little into my future but mostly I’m just concerned with learning to fly better than I did yesterday.
That’s good to know that I have a long road ahead of me. I’ll continue to prove I can be trained.
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Haha, that actor/athlete analogy is a pretty good one.
Let's put it like this. At the FRS they are going to film and dissect everything you do. Down to what button you press, what display you have selected, where your radar cursors are, what range scale you're in, what you say on the radio, who you say it to, what format you say it in, and if it was your turn to speak. Oh, you're also flying some kind of formation, either visually or with sensors. And....those things are constantly changing all the time.
It doesn't bode well if you're the kinda guy that can't start the jet, marshal in the right spot, check in on time, navigate to/from the working area by yourself, join on your lead, and then land without issues. Hopefully you've nailed down these administrative issues in flight school, or else I'm not doing my job.
I like to tell students that the entire T45 syllabus is one flight at the boat. You start, you launch, you perform a rendezvous to get gas or transit, you execute some sort of A/S or A/A mission, maybe get gas again, and then marshal for an instrument approach to a night carrier landing. The whole syllabus....one flight. Everything we do in the T45 is admin.
Let's put it like this. At the FRS they are going to film and dissect everything you do. Down to what button you press, what display you have selected, where your radar cursors are, what range scale you're in, what you say on the radio, who you say it to, what format you say it in, and if it was your turn to speak. Oh, you're also flying some kind of formation, either visually or with sensors. And....those things are constantly changing all the time.
It doesn't bode well if you're the kinda guy that can't start the jet, marshal in the right spot, check in on time, navigate to/from the working area by yourself, join on your lead, and then land without issues. Hopefully you've nailed down these administrative issues in flight school, or else I'm not doing my job.
I like to tell students that the entire T45 syllabus is one flight at the boat. You start, you launch, you perform a rendezvous to get gas or transit, you execute some sort of A/S or A/A mission, maybe get gas again, and then marshal for an instrument approach to a night carrier landing. The whole syllabus....one flight. Everything we do in the T45 is admin.
Hm. Well thank you for that insight Sir I never thought of it like that.
To put it in less formal terms, think of it like going from HS senior to college freshman. Where in one place people look up to you and you are cool at parties, in the other place no one gives a shit who you are. You know nothing and no one and have to climb that ladder all over again.
A LOT.
As we’ve all said, at least for the jet community, T-45s and gray jets are different universes. Not a polish, but a completely new level with very new material. The IPs have been through that rag, as well as additional syllabi in the fleet that make the rag look easy (combat wingman, section lead, division lead). Additionally, workups, deployments, good deal exercises (such as fighting F-22s, or Red Flag Alaska, or even sports flyovers) add to your mental and flying skillsets. The rag and fleet require constant study. The reason for this is simple and has two parts: 1) the volume of knowledge is unlike anything I’ve experienced in my life. Thousands of pages from dozens of documents. There’s no way to know it all at once, and no way to know most of it without constant study. 2) the material frequently changes; specifically tactics, but also software and hardware updates to the aircraft.
The thing that always sticks in my mind is a message I got from one of my mentors right after my patching ceremony at Weapons School. “Congratulations, now the hard part starts.”
Your entire career in naval aviation will be a learning experience. If you ever get to the point where you feel like you know it all, you’re wrong. There’s always more you can learn.
Your entire career in naval aviation will be a learning experience. If you ever get to the point where you feel like you know it all, you’re wrong. There’s always more you can learn.
I think what @Birdbrain may have been thinking, partially correctly, and like so many other flight school students (including myself!) is that his IPs have so much knowledge because they got experience. That's partially correct. Eventually, all those things that @wlawr005 talked about do become routine. I won't tell you it's right, but you'll see guys do some startup or shutdown checks without the checklist beause they have done it so many times. You'll eventually fly around the boat without the various airspaces taking up much any mental thought; it will be natural to you without having to think hard about it. You'll eventually get through the software to find, fix, track, target, and engage your adversary correctly without having to think "ugh crap what do I click next?" What you and so many other flight school students may not realize though is that it's not just experience, it's a ton of studying. And just to get to those flights that give you the practice reps you'll have to prove yourself in the brief and debrief. For my sea story below, getting into the flight required extensive knowledge of MANPADS, RPGs, RADAR systems, how countermeasures work and why (I still remember the freaking value watts/steradian... no, I still barely understand what a steradian is), what the weaknesses of our countermeasures are, the way the sound of the helo travels at different speeds and AOBs, etc. etc., not to mention all the offensive pieces of how a HELLFIRE missile and the lasers we use work. After doing all the CAIs/CBTs/whatever we are calling them these days, then earning all those sign offs on my own time, that's when OPS said "ok, schedule @DanMa1156 for the flight." I was paired with my XO as my instructor and a peer of mine as my wingman who was earning her flight as well.
Here is the "Sea" Story: One of my favorite debriefs of all time was from WTIs during Airwing Fallon. In the same debrief I was asked if the footage they got of me maneuvering and launching countermeasures during the Surface to Air Countertactics range could be used as the "textbook example" of what to do for future WTI classes, but 10 minutes later during my HELLFIRE shot, where my wingman was lasing for me, they called it invalid because they assesed we were within 1 degree (1 freaking degree!!!!!) of the limits of the safety fans for buddy lasing and they were asking us, not rhetorically what we were thinking, why we chose that angle to attack from, etc. etc. It was all sound to them, but the shot remained invalid because of the safety fan. (For those who care, the S can't or otherwise doesn't carry the pods that allow the range to track you so well, I forget what those are called... so they were using their radar and our transponders to figure out our position... I flew that flight with my XO as my instructor and his smirking face was like "c'mon guys, really?" because he knew we set up the safety fans correctly.)
What don't I remember at all? How we took off, joined up, checked in on the range, cleared the range, calculated our bingo, did PASST-Gas and Gauges checks, etc. because all of that had become second nature.
I was also mocked mercilessly (as should be done!) for a radio call I still have no recollection making of "break right, they're coming!" It literally brings my wing-woman to tears every time she tells the damn story.
Sadly, your sea story isn't one to imbue the idea of how exacting Naval Aviation is, but instead shows the potential (but not universally) of how useless SWTIs can be.
I can see how it can be read that way. My point to the flight school student who read the post is: there's a lot of work, the standards are high, and the reward for much of the hard work is the ability to do more hard work.
If I can find the meme, I saw the other day, I cracked up laughing, it was "what gies people feelings of power," It was "10% money, 20% status, 70% "telling someone their missile shot was invalid."
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Not limited to just one airframe...
On that token, it’s interesting to see the shock in a student’s eyes when I ask them if they prepared their own board for the brief or just stole a buddy’s and kept what they needed and erased and edited the rest. Yes, it’s easy to see the difference in two (or more) sets of hard writing and no, I don’t care personally, but boards are going to be a VERY big deal sooner rather than later and forewarned is forearmed.
Once upon a time on the FRTC, a very confused Prowler Tactics Instructor wondered why they couldn't get good power-out checks on a certain station. Well, that's what happens when the station has a HARM on it, not an ALQ-99 pod. Facepalm.
That said . . .
. . . the ones with this mentality are good allies for a young nugget to have in their corner (you're welcome @cfam
). The more senior you get, it's not just how hard it is for YOU to keep up with everything, it's that your decisions will begin to impact the lives of other people. As a DivO, it will start with your enlisted Sailors. As a DH, WTI, XO, or CO, the potential frag pattern of your decisions just gets bigger and bigger, whether for good or ill. And especially in any kind of instructor role, it's not just about finding the ones who slipped through the cracks and getting rid of them, it's also about how many of those middle cases you can bring along for the ride, because the rockstars take care of themselves.I'd argue the type of people foisting chickenshit on @DanMa1156 are the type of people who forgot that a) their patch says "Tactics Instructor," not "Tactics Evaluator," and b) if everything's a priority, then nothing's a priority. Which leads me to my last point: sometimes as people go down the career path, seeing EP FITREP after EP FITREP does something to folks' minds. Success starts to breed arrogance, and all of a sudden, that humble Cat I turns into a prick who thinks their shit doesn't stink. Don't be that guy. Remember where you're at now in flight school, and keep that humility even if all the breaks break your way in the fleet. Eventually, we all end up in the private sector, where no one gives a shit what you did in uniform outside of the cool stories you can tell at work happy hours.
So you were still within limits? Why constrain yourself additionally? Sigh...
Poorly explained/written - unless you're being sarcastic - in which case I'm just covering my bases.
Wingman was inside my safety fan by a degree, thus making it "out" of limits.
Edit from my previous post: TACTS pods I think is the word I was looking for.
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