• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

USAF Waive Height Requirements

HuggyU2

HuggyU2

Well-Known Member
None
Brett,

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but getting rid of all of these waivers is exactly what this new policy does. It is believed that simply having to go through "a waiver process" discouraged people from applying... even though there was a good chance they would have received a waiver.

Instead, each pilot candidate will get an anthropometric analysis of a lot more than just height. I don't know how they will determine if or what you'll be allowed to fly, but I did read that pilots in the past have been granted waivers from as short a 4' 11", up to 6' 9". I recall that before Chad Hennings went to the Dallas Cowboys, he was pretty big and that was one of the reasons (or so the story goes) that he went to A-10s.

The U-2 cockpit doesn't accommodate a lot of body sizes well, and we have brought people out to the interview and put them in the cockpit to see if they were going to work out or not. Seating height and butt-to-knee length can be an issue.

The AF has allegedly laser-mapped many/most of of the cockpits in the inventory and will be using that data to determine the new standards.

I'm sure we will see this morph over time as the info develops.

p.s. Although it is good to get rid of inane and bureaucratic "rules" that need to be updated, I have to admit that I'm not overly sympathetic to those "discouraged" when they see a waiver process and give up. I've had to go through my share of waivers in the past to get to where I wanted to be. If the thought of having to pursue the waiver is too much, then maybe the goal isn't as desired as it should be.

And remember... just about everything in the military can be waived. You just need to find the waiver authority.
 
Last edited:
Brett327

Brett327

Well-Known Member
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
I’m not sure that we disagree. I personally don’t care if an anthro standard eliminates a lot of women(or men), as long as it’s a good standard. Making a standard with wiggle room for waivers is not a good way to do business.
 
nittany03

nittany03

Recovering NFO. Herder of Programmers.
pilot
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
HuggyU2 said:
Words
Click to expand...
I think part of the puzzlement is that for as much shit as we give them here, NAMI never did business that way. As long as I’ve been in, male or female, you got a full set of anthro measurements taken at your initial flight physical as a Mid or at OCS. I was accepted into the program knowing I was anthro’d out of the Harrier (who gives a shit, I’m Navy), F-14D (not A or B, just D ¯\(ツ)/¯ ), and T-2 (which was retired before I got to Meridian anyway).

The Navy never had some random height cutoff before they’d anthro you; they just went ahead and anthro’d you. It took 30 minutes of some corpsman’s time; whoopdeeshit. Who cares? If you didn’t like it, as I recall, you could get remeasured once. I never did. But plenty of folks went to Navy flight school knowing community X was off the table from the start. If you were a small female, or a scrawny fuck like I used to be, you might have to sign a waiver acknowledging you were too light for the ejection seat. But no one got booted for that. Too fat? Sure, that’s a different story . . .
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top