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Blown Tire

By lex, on March 30th, 2009

Broken plane.

Say, who’s going to pay for that arresting gear engine, anyway?

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March 30th, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: Flying, Navy

60 comments to Blown Tire

  • ras
    March 30, 2009 at 8:26 am

    In the old days, it would have been NAS Norfolk, AirLant, and/or NavAirSysCom – all with a vested interest in A-Gear. Now, it goes to COMNAVREGMIDLANT to compete with Sub and Black-shoe priorities!

  • Rhinowso
    March 30, 2009 at 9:20 am

    I wondering if the dwindling flight time had anything to do with this kind of thing. Squadrons all over the place are wrapping up jets for months on end with the $ no longered available to fund them for even basic operations. Two squadrons I know of are funded for 17 and 11 hours a month for the rest of the fiscal year respectively… barely enough to stay NATOPS current… one or two 0.5′s a month per pilot… yeah, that’ll be safe…

    I hate to be a naysayer, but all it will take to evaporate all of the money “saved” on gas and operaitons is a couple of mishaps with planes damaged or destroyed. Of course that is to be mitigated with “ORM”… that is the “leadership’s” solution for everything… talk about it more, it will fix everything… that and plenty of sim time… YGTBSM!

    Reality check, anyone? Anyone?

    BTW, I’m sure they can buff the scratches out of that “Hummer” and get it under that Class “C” wicket. MACO anyone?

    Mishap, what mishap? We’ve never been safer!

  • G-man
    March 30, 2009 at 10:17 am

    What is unit cost of E-2C these days? E-2D arrival time? One way to get new aircraft – just be sure the crew is ok. That old “good” versus “great” landing thing.

  • b2
    March 30, 2009 at 10:40 am

    r-swo,

    But your Rhino simulator is sooo good! Surely you didn’t think flying fer the “Enterprise” was all beer and skittles? Could be worse- you could be a “FO for drones. ;-)

    Not enough flight time- real flight time- is a big, big deal. Either do it right or go to a drone fleet…..I use to wince back before we established this Enterprise when Wally Masseburg, a P-3 pilot who never did one day at sea, used to lambast carrier pilots of the 90′s era on his travelling roadshow for having wasted all that OM&N $$ collecting traps…made me feel guilty and pissed off at the same time. He was wrong.

    Now, because of budgetary/efficiency experts gaining the upper hand when senior aviator leadership is weak (IE- they forgot and decided to play businessmen), the pendulum has swung and we are seeing the effects of not enough flight time…

    b2

  • JoeC
    March 30, 2009 at 10:56 am

    Rhinowso said:

    “barely enough to stay NATOPS current… one or two 0.5’s a month per pilot… yeah, that’ll be safe…”

    The real downside I see to that is the number of disaffected flyers with ambition and skill saying to H3ll with it and departing for the great nirvana of commercial air.

    Those that can, do. Those that can’t, manage (somehow to cling to the air of the pilot and having no form or substance…for long). And those that can’t manage, teach others by being the bad example as in: everyone has a purpose in life, even if only to be the bad example.

    Another truism, is idle hands breed mischief. So the squadron C.O.’s will put the idle O’s to work micro-managing and pushing paper and inspecting and standing around making a general nuisance. Hey! Managing the troops is a required skill also. What better time to learn? This trickle down micro management has the effect of pushing out the micro managed, who end up saying I don’t need this sh!t either and leave. Voila! Smaller force, reduced cost. Goal achieved. (see: those that can… above) (let alone the anger issues, the sly sabotage, and the outright destruction of really expensive toys.)

    So if the Won’s goal is a leaner, meaner workforce, he may just achieve it…albeit not in a form envisioned.

    • Rhinowso
      March 30, 2009 at 11:02 am

      Leaner doesn’t always equate to meaner… just because you can write the best TPS reports in the squadron doesn’t make you a tactical expert… or even competent!

  • Rhinowso
    March 30, 2009 at 10:56 am

    But if we have a drone fleet and the “leadership” could make all of the tough calls, who would they have as a scapegoat when they mess it up?

    Sim’s that are always 1-2 years behind are soooo useful for habit patterns… oh wait, they’re really not… soon we’ll be walking around the ready room “pretending” the tactics… better yet, we can use the hangar since no one will need to work on the jets we aren’t flying…

    I forgot! What will the CAGs do without their “Strike of the month”!?!? Sound the alarm! More CAG laptops, I bet… more planning sessions… joy…

    I understand the “more with less” (don’t agree, but understand the concept). But how do you do more with nothing?

    Again, I digress…

  • virgil xenophon
    March 30, 2009 at 11:14 am

    Tsk,tsk, such bitter cynics :) But as Lilly Tomlin says “If you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking you’ve become too cynical and paranoid; don’t worry, go back to sleep, you can never match real life.”

    Don’t worry, not enough hrs of flt-time to keep proficient? Easy, just change the reg’s definition of what it means/number of hrs needed to be proficient. Voila! Your current again, not to worry! Same with live fire exercises. Got budget problems? Easy. Need to accomplish quarterly now? Say increased sim time means only annual needed. Problem solved. You guys worry too much….

  • Mike M.
    March 30, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    It makes you wonder what the cost/benefit would look like for an account at the local flying club.

    Yeah, it’s a wretched Cessna 172. But it’s $100/hr.

    Maybe we can have the new leadership at Government Motors fix it!

    BTW, going to unmanned aircraft won’t solve the problem. Those require proficiency flying, too.

  • G-man
    March 30, 2009 at 1:16 pm

    After we (the USN) just canceled $500 mil worth of ship overhaul/maint funding, I don’t get the surprise factor in cutting a/c flight hrs. b2′s comment about senior aviator leadership playing businessmen is callous, cruel, spot on and just another example of JO’s (I assume he is , or has been a JO) clearly seeing that the king has no clothes and begging/imploring their leaders to no avail to whisper in the king’s ear. Years ago at NavSea the VADM there had a nasty habit of touring ships and shipyards and weapons stations and having closed door meetings with the JO’s and the E-1-E5s. No CPOs, no officer above LT. All non-attributional. Who-eee, yeah he got the typical bitches, but after about 15-20 min the audience would get real serious with unbelievably sagacious insight to a problem that their senior leadership had been pissing on to no avail. Their most fundamental question was “why don’t they see ….”? The VADM told me that one of his biggest challenges was not SCN dollars and budgets, overhauls, etc, but the loss of our most talented and intellectually gifted young men and women that got tired of “the system” and bailed out. They didn’t want to be “in business”, they wanted to be part of something they felt worthy of their donation of their time/talent/life. As an aviator/freshly minted LT I thought “it’s different in aviation, these are just blackshoes and bubbleheads bitchin’ and moaning”. Ah, the denseness of youth.

    Cdr Byron about 12+ years ago in Proceedings had a great article on Warriors and how we are not breeding warriors but we continue the gestation of the warri-crats. Well, they’ve been birthed and we all agree that we seem to have our focus the last 5 + years – maybe more. Our best and brightest get tired of the cynicism – cuz it don’t pay too well. We don’t have a shipbuilding plan, an aircraft procurement plan, we’re gonna lay up an airwing and a CVN while every other sea going nation BUILDS!

    the sad thing is, we WILL lose a pilot or aircrew and then we bloggers will lament their loss and dissect ad infinitum the reasons behind. But that won’t diminish the loss nor reduce the future potential loss. And the saddest part is the high cost of loss versus the low cost of proper and sufficient training.

    “Dear Mrs Smith, I regret to inform you that due to mandatory budget cut-backs necessitated by the give-away of 1.5 trillion dollars of others money, resulint in 10% cuts to DoD’s budget that the US Navy was severely underfunded. However, the mission load did not decrease resulting in your son’s loss at sea when after 25 days of no-fly he flew a perfectly good jet into the ocean on a dark and moonless night. On behalf of a grateful nation you have my deepest blah blah blah”.
    Damned depressing.

    • bc
      March 30, 2009 at 1:31 pm

      yup. Some of my best skippers did these heart-to-hearts with the enlisted, inevitably followed by wardroom professional development along the lines of “we’re failing them; get it together”. DOs who didn’t know their sailors’ names were it not for the names emblazoned on their uniforms, let alone knowing whether they were meeting training development requirements and other basic aspects of care/feeding (read leadership).

      Having said that, there is no shortage of great Americans enlisting and serving who are doing fantastic things for our nation. The challenge, as always, is the turn-over; the loss of the ability to develop/keep the best and brightest the longest.

    • Rhinowso
      March 31, 2009 at 4:48 am

      “b2’s comment about senior aviator leadership playing businessmen is callous, cruel, spot on and just another example of JO’s (I assume he is , or has been a JO) clearly seeing that the king has no clothes and begging/imploring their leaders to no avail to whisper in the king’s ear. “

      The King hasn’t had clothes on for quite awhile and I haven’t seen leadership from anyone above an O-6 in years… All I hear is “Yes, there are stressors and risks, but we can do it…”

      Yessir, yessir, 3 bags full!

      “Cdr Byron about 12+ years ago in Proceedings had a great article on Warriors and how we are not breeding warriors but we continue the gestation of the warri-crats.”

      The truth is being a warrior or having tactical ability isn’t worth the paper it took to print out your qualification sheet these days. It’s much more important how long your JO EP was, if as an O-3 you were getting “Big Navy” quals that a couple of years ago O-5s were getting, or if you are “Joint” qualified. That and “diversity”… when the first thing the military beats out of your is your individuality – wear the same clothes, march the same way, talk the same talk… but we need to have an nice array of skin tones and genders around here to make sure we can do… (I’m not exactly sure what that gets us).

      “We don’t have a shipbuilding plan, an aircraft procurement plan, we’re gonna lay up an airwing and a CVN while every other sea going nation BUILDS! “

      Really? No..? There’s a plan – I’ve seen PPT slides, briefings, talky-talky… Lots of “Hmmm, ah yes, winter rules”… so at least we have a plan… oh no, we don’t. And everyone in the Navy knows it. We’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul for years… let me know how that is going to work out. How are people supposed to respect the “leadership” when this type of big picture disaster is just accepted and everyone carry’s on bussiness as usual?

      Lastly, I recently overheard this at a Navy Exchange where New Navy Working Uniforms were being purchased… “Oh, that is the worst-looking hat I ever saw. What, when you buy a hat like this I bet you get a free bowl of soup, huh? Oh, it looks good on you though…

  • virgil xenophon
    March 30, 2009 at 1:37 pm

    Point of Information for the active duty fighter jocks, jockettes and all alumni: We all know that there has never been a sim ever built that flies like a real fighter; that one “flies” a sim slightly differently than one flies the real thing with diff. mental cues–and that the mind gets mentally grooved to sim flying such that one is still in that mind set/”reconfig.” neural pathways status for a few hours afterwards to the extent that I remember reading years back that the Navy forbid flying for 24 hrs (?) after a sim session, while the AF refused to even admit that there was a problem (which I can personally attest to for my time and day)

    SO–Question #1 Does Navy still continue practice? And #2 For the AF types here: What’s the current Official AF policy/practice? Inquiring mind (singular, i.e., mine) would like to know.

  • Skippy-san
    March 30, 2009 at 2:46 pm

    Here is a question though. Presidential Budget 10 ( the first Obama budget) has not passed yet. These cuts in OM&N funding are coming out of current year dollars-which implies to me that some of the blame has to lie on decisions made by the Navy’s uniformed leadership about where OPTAR dollars are going to be weighted. If I could pull the string I’ll bet its because CENTCOM is flying on a 115% profile and the Navy still has two carrier Air Wings flying a pretty heavy OPTEMPO in WESTPAC right now as well.

    This is a RAG bird Anybody got any other details of where? ( Looks like Norfolk). Since it is a RAG bird-the prevailing wisdom used to be that the RAG’s got funded to a steady state dollar number-based on their required Pilot Production rate. So before everyone goes to ga ga about how flight hours contributed or did not contribute to this mishap-probably need to see what’s going on at a macro level.

    As an aside-seems those new eight bladed props take a licking better than their four bladed predecessors-seems to me unless the engines were shut down earlier the four blade would have shattered putting a lot more shrapnel in the Forward Equipment Compartment.

    • JoeC
      March 30, 2009 at 4:04 pm

      heh. Did a brief stint in VP90 in 1979 (before work sent me to WV) where I took a tour of a P3 which had a blade impact a snow bank. Sent the debris right through the side where the radio operator would sit… a position as an AT I was training to become. Made a right fair hole that blade did.

      So I’d say any change in shatter resistance is a good one!

    • Steeljaw Scribe
      March 31, 2009 at 3:06 am

      Skippy:

      It was Norfolk — from an email sent to me earlier this week:
      ” Aircraft blew a tire on touchdown and went off the runway – right over the arresting gear engine. Initial report is that the airframe is not repairable.
      Incident Synopsis: VAW 120 E-2 crashed during landing Chambers Field, 5 Souls on board no injuries. Aircraft severely damaged.

      On Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 1637 hours E-2C ran off the runway, struck the arresting gear motor, and slid sideways to a stop during landing.

      Crew exited the aircraft unassisted and reported that they were not injured.
      The entire flight crew was turned over to their squadron Flight doctor for evaluation. The aircraft was a total loss valued at $34,000,000
      and the arresting gear that the aircraft ran over sustained $30,000 damage.”

      • Nose
        March 31, 2009 at 4:36 am

        SJS “1637 hrs”

        You getting your gouge from Army men now?

      • JoeC
        March 31, 2009 at 5:37 am

        SJS said”.. The aircraft was a total loss valued at $34,000,000..”

        I find breathless statements such as “total loss” to be a bit of insurance bait… something akin to what the agent tells you when some dolt dents your cherry 1979 TRANS AM and the agent chortles “total loss”, of course minus your deductible, here’s $500, go away.

        What I see in the that mess of a wannabe farm implement is the latest pile of salvageable spare parts to be recycled through logistics, and that is probably 1/2 to 2/3 the actual cost, so I don’t see it as a “total loss” (but then I’m a scavenger at heart, I see fertilizer in that pile of…)

        So a NEW replacement cost model might hit that magic $34mil, but how much for a “ready to complete” model from the overhaul facility at Davis Monthan AFB?
        But of course, we don’t buy stripped airframes that are built out (completed) out of spares do we? nope. never do. uh-uh.

        (What good is the boneyard if you can’t use it for anything other than target aircraft?)

        heh.

        • bdgerjmn
          March 31, 2009 at 5:49 am

          Your point is well taken, however the aircraft in the boneyard are ‘off the books’ if you will and are not reportable. The ‘total loss’ category is the AMB’s assessment at the time of the mishap and ultimately NAVAIR engineers/SMEs will determine whether the airframe will be stricken(a total loss) or not. Updates to MDR/SIR if needed are then put out based on changing information or investigation results. This is done for a number of reasons. Once an aircraft is involved in a mishap, that aircraft is no longer in an FMC status, thus impacts to readiness whether it be at the FRS or a fleet squadron. In the case of a fleet squadron, a replacement will be requested, most likely from the FRS. Someone once said….”it’s all ball bearings”

        • Rhinowso
          March 31, 2009 at 6:00 am

          We have a hard enough time buying airplanes with all of the stuff that is supposed to be”inside”, much less buying them to strip stuff out of them…

  • AWC N
    March 30, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    In the for-what-it’s-worth file, the lack of $$ for training flights is nothing new. After my 1989-90 deployment, we went cold iron. Parked our birds for 2 months so we didn’t spend any money flying them and borrowed planes from the RAG and MAU squadrons to keep the pilots up to speed (got my only flight in a TP-3A during this lull).
    Us tube rats spent our time in trainers to maintain the gray matter.
    Interesting time period, the cold war was “over” and the P-3 community was in flux and the Russians were our friends now…

    • virgil xenophon
      March 30, 2009 at 4:14 pm

      In the feast or famine $ for tng bit I can remember back in the 70′s everyone up in the air on a Squadron max-fly day with us AF NATO types boring holes in the sky in race-track patterns using up our quarterly fuel allotment so that Congress wouldn’t have an excuse to use lack of usage as reason to order future cuts. At one time was a move afoot to allow quarterly allotments to be rolled over rather than lost but it went nowhere. The usual, nothing changes….

      • AW1 Tim
        March 30, 2009 at 8:12 pm

        Virgil,

        I can remember taking off from the Lockheed plant in Burbank, and being ordered to land at Hill AFB on the way back to Maine. Seems the squadron ran out of gas money, and we had to spend several days at Hill until the new quarter started up and we could buy gas.
        Hell of a way to run a military, eh?

        • Skippy-san
          March 31, 2009 at 7:51 am

          There are worse places to be stuck than Hill though-especially with time on your hands. Fire up the alert rental car!

          • Rhinowso
            March 31, 2009 at 8:07 am

            How about a division on the tanker the last day of the fiscal year. Cycle through the tanker, once you are topped off and on the starboard side, dumps on… then back to port observation for another bag full of gas…

            I wonder what the AF types thought of that…?

          • AW1 Tim
            March 31, 2009 at 12:27 pm

            Skippy,

            Oh yeah! What was nice is that my folks just lived a little over an hour north of there, so I was able to see them and have the crew up for a barbecue. :)

  • XBradTC
    March 30, 2009 at 4:29 pm

    I remember in ’89, our unit ran out of money for MREs, but not diesel. The answer? Sack lunches in the field. Here’s a hint, hard-boiled eggs don’t do well.

    • MajHarvey
      March 30, 2009 at 7:21 pm

      Oh, like the dried beef/pork patties did much better? :(

      • AW1 Tim
        March 30, 2009 at 8:09 pm

        FX in 1974. Outside Wendover, Utah. Issued with Genuine “C” rations with 1950′s dates. OD cans and P-38′s. Chicklets and Smokes.

        Pork Slices in Juice, Water Added. Ham & Eggs, Chopped. Peanut Butter & Crackers in tins. We still had M-14′s, steel pots and green fatigues. In fact, we still had steel/aluminum mess kits with slide-together flatware sets.

        The rations were heated up in large metal trashcans full of water set over burners. All the entree cans were dumped in and heated up. You opened your mess kit and they tossed a can onto it. there was another can of water right beside it. You dipped your canteen cup into it for hot water for coffee.

        After the meal, one of the steel trash cans had detergent added to it. You dipped and swished your mess kit and cup into it, then rinsed it in the other one.

        Heh. memories. I still carry a P-38 on my dog tag chain.

        • virgil xenophon
          March 31, 2009 at 5:46 pm

          AW1Tim

          Wendover: You DO know that’s where they trained the B-29 bomb wing that dropped on Hiroshima, don’t you–wanted a place in the middle of nowhere away from prying eyes with long runways, and as you’ve been there, you know it fits the bill!!

          One of the most miserably cold nights I’ve ever spent anywhere was when stuck in Wendover in a mom & pop motel whose heat was out, holed up waiting out a sand/salt storm while coming back to Illinois from summer vacation in CA. with my parents as a HS soph in late Aug., 1960 to start my jr year.

  • G-man
    March 30, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    Skippy
    Right on. I was not directly bashing POTUS, simply the idea that we can take a current budget and stretch it to cover things like higher Optempo for deployed forces. In an FRS years ago we were staffed at 120%, and had to give the Wing bubbas their due (ya know, so we could stay “friendly” and all). We had instructors that weren’t good for much other than a day VFR stay-within-5-miles kinda hop. Proficiency sucked, and every daily flt sked was hotly debated. If you’ve ever instructed, with enough cockpit time you reach the point of knowing what that plumber sitting in front or across from you is gonna do before he does it – no surprises. You can focus on their performance deficiency that leads them to make mistakes rather than worry about milking an extra 0.2 outta the flight.

    My real beef is that for the price of a couple of flights for Nancy Pelosi (or any other self-appointed schmuck – Hastert included) on a jet big enough to fly coast to coast without stopping, we could give our aircrew the time they need, deserve, and should demand. The real reward is a well trained confident pilot and probably an aircraft or two saved from Class “A”.

  • bdgerjmn
    March 30, 2009 at 6:55 pm

    $$ aside this mishap like many mishaps of late and yesteryear for that matter will most likely read like any others. Aircrew/Supervisory/Maintenance/Facilities/Material as causal factors. It will examine proficiency in terms of flight hours over the past 30/60/90 days and qualifications, adherance or lack thereof to NATOPS/SOP etc. In the final analysis it will be collated to an SIR and placed on every E-2 read and initial and sent up the chain for endorsements only to be repeated(hopefully not) sometime down the road. NAE is in a cycle right now where every flight hour is examined and every ounce of training is squeaked out of those flight hours. Some get “do more with less” confused with an attempt to streamline or make our training continuum more efficient given a set amount of resources. I have been on both sides of that coin and there is a fair amount of creep therein. I would say however that as an FRS instructor the collective bar is being lowered somewhat. Not in terms of standards but in terms of experience within the instructor cadre. The avergage total time an FRS IP brings to the table today is markedly less than even 3 years ago or even 10 years ago. Ultimately that experience level will begin to manifest itself into higher mishap rates I would imagine. The safety center is engaged right now in seveeral efforts examinining mishap rates/flight time/causal factors. Leadership is aware of the issue, but what is and can be done about the issue is another story. Of note, the class A mishap rate for FM/FRM/AGM collectively is in a downward trend over the past 5 years. Class B’s however are on the rise. Funny that, the safety center also just completed a study on the latter. Primary reason for the class B rise? Inflation!

  • Skippy-san
    March 30, 2009 at 7:26 pm

    bdgrjmn,

    It is interesting guys are coming to the RAG with less flight hours considering how much shorter turnaround periods between cruises are these days. Seems from the outside looking in 2.5 cruise first tours are the norm these days.

    • Curtis
      March 30, 2009 at 10:07 pm

      Small shoe box, middle of the road….

    • bdgerjmn
      March 31, 2009 at 3:45 am

      Skippy,

      Agree wholeheartedly. 2.5 years ago we had several JO’s show up with 750ish hours total time after their JO tour. The flight hour program is what it is and eeking out SFWT quals from the flight hour program can be difficult at best depending on FRTP phase and funding lines. Unless squadrons are actively engaged in ATO driven schedules supporting boots on the ground, I would summize that cruise flight time isn’t what it used to be(minus CVW-5 where every at sea period is like workups).

      • Skippy-san
        March 31, 2009 at 7:54 am

        750 hours? I had almost 1300 when I went to the RAG after my first tour. Now we had made three cruises during that time frame-including a stint to the North Atlantic where we flew round the clock for 26 days straight. (HHH ops-the fighters had banker’s hours.)

        • Rhinowso
          March 31, 2009 at 8:03 am

          Hey, figher guys have to be rested… you understand, I’m sure…

          1250 hrs after my first tour…

          • bdgerjmn
            April 2, 2009 at 4:30 am

            We have fighter pilots in the Navy? little f big A – it is what it is!

          • Rhinowso
            April 2, 2009 at 5:44 am

            My first tour was in Fighters… after that, Strike Fighters…

            Small f, Big A is correct. Too bad the Big A still needs some work…

      • Rhinowso
        March 31, 2009 at 7:59 am

        I cleared almost 400 hours last cruise… at least 1/4 of that was 20 AOB in a 5-wet tanker at 8K waiting for the “bolter-fest”. At least we know how to use our newest striker-fighter-tanker-recce-aircraft…

        Of the rest, I’d say at most 15 hours were some what “tactical”, be that actual or simulated. The rest is transit or doing circles in the sky watching over the ants or on a WGC (wild goose chase)…

        Lots of flight time, but not lots of good flight time. But it was better than no flight time…

  • Quartermaster
    March 31, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    More and more things are looking like the post ‘nam period. My brother told me that the NCOs were concerned about issuing live ammo on the small arms range. They didn’t know if it would be used to punch paper, or punch each other.

    I didn’t notice it at Ft. Rucker in flight school. Although racial tensions were a bit high at the time, the black guys in the class were as good as they come. Of course, a man looking to become a Warrant Officer pilot had some ambition and knew he had to earn those wings – the Army wasn’t going to hand them out based on some racial diversity nitwittery. Still, we wondered what was waiting for us the following fall when we were going to graduate (Sep ’76). I don’t think anyone in my class was still in by 1980 (only 2 years obligated after flight school at the time).

    While the obligated service has increased greatly, where are they going to go in this day and age? My understanding is the airlines are laying off pilots again, and there isn’t much a grounded pilot can count on. Killing people and breaking things just doesn’t count for much on a resume.

  • Byron Audler
    March 31, 2009 at 5:46 pm

    Skippy, I’ll have to pass that ice cream cone on to my ADC from VS-32 son-in-law, I’m sure he’ll get a laugh ;)

  • Skippy-san
    March 31, 2009 at 7:34 pm

    Quartermaster,

    I think there is another dimension to the pilot retention issue. Thanks to commuter airlines and the increased accession of pilots with non-military backgrounds-its not an automatic anymore that military pilots can leave and have a career with the airlines. Its too much of a pay cut. The airlines have gotten used to paying pilots less so its anyone’s guess what the future will be. I see more pilot JO’s leaving the military, getting their MBA’s and trying to make a career in management, or engineering. Sadly, without the fun that comes with flying.

    • Rhinowso
      April 2, 2009 at 5:57 am

      Well over half of pilots/NFOs I know who have gotten out in the past 2 years have either gone to get an MBA or directly into the business world. Only about 20% even try the airlines. Some guys do a combo of flying for the reserves and other private flying to make ends meet. Lots of these guys were TOPGUN graduates / Instructors.

      Pretty much all of them left because they didn’t like what the “leadership” is spewing these days as well as not wanting to stay on the “Everyone could be the next CNO” carrer path.

      Hell, after my last deployment I’d rather be chipping paint than a skipper. The red ball CAG put in all their mouths on a regular basis didn’t look comfortable… but that’s another story…

      And people don’t leave for more money (although they plan on making more eventually)…

  • Nose
    April 1, 2009 at 5:59 am

    Skippy,

    1. Ain’t much fun in flying big iron. (At least in the flying part…)

    2. I would welcome some military trained CEOs. Would be nice to see some ethics return to corporate governance. Maybe we could get one or two to run for office, too.

  • Flatlander
    April 2, 2009 at 7:46 am

    One of the things that has happened over the last 20 years is that more non-defense corporations are discovering the extraordinary talent and personal attributes that they can find from people with military experience. GE started to catch on to this big time around 1990 as part of their recruiting mix, and as GE alums have moved on to other companies the gospel has spread.

    Now would probably be a really good time to get an MBA given the near-term state of the job market. After all, an MBA is just an excuse to reinvent yourself professionnally. And to learn business-speak.
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