No CQ for you last week? Two of Factory's squadrons got almost all of their dudes complete.?.
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Rand study on USAF pilot retention
- Thread starter UInavy
- Start date
@Recovering LSO blaming this on mismanaged expectations is pretty sad. People expected to fly a lot. They’re not. In my career thus far, my leadership described flight hours, dets, etc. that I could not fathom happening to me. I’m talking every single one of them described flight hours 2-3 times per year of what I was getting (and my peers as well for that matter). Is this my fault for mismanaging expectations? Is it my fault for wanting to fly and not get to? I’ll take the debrief points on board...
213 and 131 (our Growler dudes) went. Our squadron wasn't materially capable of going. To be fair, we just started flying Supers in March.
Bump. I'm leaving my JO squadron with just over 800 hours in gray jets. That includes an entire work up, a full deployment, and 18 months in maintenance phases as well as a seven month extension.
During our eight month transition to Supers I whored myself out and ended up adding another AWF and C2X. Watching guys walk around with 1000 hour patches makes me laugh considering the nature of air wing deployments over the past 15 years. We turned our F-18 fleet into dust so CAGs and Skippers could write "combat" on their FITREPs when all a significant number of people did was fly around in circles.
You don’t want to hear this, but that’s not that bad. Have JOs gotten more than 800 by the end of a JO tour? Yep. Most of my hornet and super hornet peers left somwhere around 900 at the end of their JO tours with two combat cruises and associated accoutrements. That’s been awhile ago. Those of them that stayed and kept flying are now at 2k and 3k plus by doing a shore tour, 2nd sea tour, dh tour, etc.
At the same time you’re unhappy about your number of hours, you’re unhappy about the kind of flying those with the hours have done. Not sure why it makes you laugh, but it’s not all bfm and low levels (choker whites and dining outs?). Those CAGs and skippers certainly weren’t agreeing to overfly jets for their fitreps. The direction for the mission types and csg tasking comes from higher than them. They were pushing back when they thought the direction was unsustainable. If they didn’t push back that’s on the individual, but enough were thar the point got through. There’s a distinction between informed pushback and outright refusal of orders. The latter is not realistic in a functioning military.
If you want to assign blame to the authors of the past NSS and NDS, COCOMs and senior flags for agreeing to utilize our assets at a greater rate than they planned on replacing them, I’ll grab the torch with you.
Nah dude... nothing’s your fault... the point I’m making is that flight hour sums have not been what we’ve all heard of for decades now. I get it man, the admiral with 1,000 traps and 4,000 hours talking about how great Naval Aviation is today is an out of touch clown. His bag-ex’s are why we have fewer jets now. I get it, but there are a lot of dudes around here, and up and down your local flight line that really believe 40 hour months in mx phase w/ all the x-country’s, BFM, low levels, and airshows they can imagine should be what they’re getting, and if it’s not, then fuck this place. If that’s not you, move along, but those guys exist - lots of them. As I posted earlier, they didn’t get what they wanted. The problem there is that what they wanted doesn’t exist.
What's typical for a first tour JO by the time they leave their fleet squadron, 700-800? And is pretty consistent across TACAIR or would you expect certain segments (VAQ, CVW-5) to have more?
Couldn’t agree more... The primary culprit is in bold.
I’ve seen them all, but the S-3 bubbas that didn’t get a pointy nose jet were the most disgruntled . . . .
That right there, folks, is what's called "normalization of deviance." Not in the safety ninny sense of the phrase, but in the sense of readiness and real capability to deter enemies and win wars, that kind of foreign policy calculation, military risk stuff.
@UInavy , I knew what you meant and you're right, it isn't that bad compared to the average these days. But it's actually pretty bad. (Not trying to shoot the messenger and crap on you here, I'm quite sure you appreciate that what's good these days isn't all that great.)
Expectation management is that people go to flight school expecting to have the resources in their fleet squadrons to be great at their jobs, not provided just enough resources to be good enough to not crash an aircraft on a currency hop (which is what "flight hour tactical hard deck" really means).
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What deviance am I normalizing? Averaging over 20 hours a month (800/36) is well above the tactical hard deck. Does he have it good compared to his peers? Yes. Is it jacked up that guys get less than THD? Yes. I was referencing his situation. His (relatively speaking) isn’t that bad. Where do you think that lies relative to the THD?
Extrapolating that to a danger to “real capability to deter enemies and win wars, that kind of foreign policy calculation, military risk stuff“ is a huge logical leap. I did not make the plural of his anecdote into data. If I’d done that, I’d understand your comment a bit better.
800 hours (counting FRS time) in a 3 1/2 year tour is pretty crappy.
If you or your peers believe those stats good, in the grand scheme of things (they're pretty lousy), or that taking whatever you can get is as good as it gets, then I say that is just because that's all you've ever known.
If you or your peers believe those stats good, in the grand scheme of things (they're pretty lousy), or that taking whatever you can get is as good as it gets, then I say that is just because that's all you've ever known.
Crappy relative to what, Jim? What’s your metric? I didn’t say ‘that’s a great number!’ I said it wasn’t that bad. I’d be interested to know what you consider adequate for hours for hornet pilots. Do you like their T&R matrix? Also, I agree with @wlawr005 that the number of hours matter less than the training contained in those hours.
So again, I ask what deviation am I normalizing? Btw, attached are the number of sorties and flight hours for all the VF and VFA squadrons for the last 17 years.
Source: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1046296.pdf
