Cost of operating Military planes
- Thread starter ozone
- Start date
Its the direction the AF as a whole has gone, sadly. Not just limited to Lakenheath. Pretty much every base runs this way, and there are few if any senior officers who want to buck any trends and be seen as "different" or "not on board" with the current wave of ever-worsening crap. There are no more Robin Olds types anymore, and the system will actively work to destroy any possible new ones.
RDoug
Well-Known Member
That is a shame. You'd think with the well publicized crumbling of the Air Force portions of USSTRATCOM there would be more important things on the plate than turning loose the uniformed bureaucrat brigade in favor of the real warriors. General LeMay must be twirling in his grave at near transonic speeds by now.
hook_dupin
Well-Known Member
To put it in perspective, a guy from our squadron ended up going to the same place as my next assignment about a year in front of me. I asked him how it was, and he said "Not too bad. Put in an average Laken-day Monday through Friday and occasionally on the weekends, and you'll be fine." That follow-on assignment was Test Pilot School.
I remember one occasion where a guy was mandated to take Laken-Leave. His use-or-lose leave balance was pretty high, and the upper echelons of course want people to use their leave. He was washed from the flying schedule for a few days, but had much queep to do. Funny how the execution of the "we want you to use your leave" edict got so screwed up.
At the same time, we once "kidnapped" our squadron commander and took him to Finland for a weekend of boozery and to establish poor American relations.
I absolutely refused to ever take leave, then come in to the squadron, or even do anything even remotely AF related. Leave was my time, not the AF's time to abuse as they pleased. Why people would EVER do that, I have no idea. That's sick. This isn't a slave trade.
I had a bunch of use/lose once, so during one of the wildland fires going on in southern AZ here back in 2002, I took 2 weeks of leave to go work a contract I had gotten for providing a wildland fire engine truck to the fire. Spent all 2 weeks there earning some good cash for the hard work being performed. When the SQ/DO found out, he went screaming mimi freaking unglued, asking me what the hell I thought I was doing? That he wasn't aware and that I didn't have any kind of "dangerous activities" form filed with the unit.......the form that guys who fly private planes, skydive, hang glide, etc, have to fill out to inform the unit of what they do. I kindly informed him that if he references the form, and looks at ALL the activities listed on the form, firefighting is nowhere to be found, therefore the form didn't apply to me as apparently the USAF didn't consider firefighting to be a dangerous activity. So no, jackass, I don't have one on file and didn't intend to.
Of course, that didn't win me many friends in the work harder, not smarter, world of fighter squadrons in the USAF. But I had better things to do with my life than spend 14-16 hours of my day doing utter bullcrap 5 days a week, then being expected to hang around for social evening on Friday nights. Kiss my ass, I've got more important things to do.
One day, it all came together. As a Flight Commander in the 117, I was getting bogged down in constant paperwork that would appear in my inbox on my desk, no matter how much I worked on the stuff and cleared the pile down. So one day, I took about 1/2 inch thick of that stack in my inbox, walked down the hall, and ran it through the shredder in the hall next to the copier machine. I just wanted to see if anyone would ask me "hey, did you happen to see X form, or Y piece of paperwork, or Z report come to you? Any idea where it is?" And low and behold, I wasn't asked once, not once, about that. From anyone, at any time. Told me all I needed to know about the effort I was putting in, and how much of my life I was wasting with the queep of a USAF flying unit.
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ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
This makes me absurdly glad to have pursued flying as a civilian rather than try the military route.
///AMG
Well-Known Member
haha if they ever make "office space 2" I hope you are an advisor to the director/screenwriters. That is gold
While flying itself in the military was fun, the military had SO many ways of making it as un-fun as possible. Sure, I realize that that the flying of the aircraft wasn't the main thing nor was my enjoyment of same, that the primary thing was employing it as the weapon system its designed to be in order to accomplish its assigned mission sets. I get that and support that 100%. But the AF seemed to go out of their way to pile on so much unrelated crap to that, as well as make just doing the mission more work than it really needed to be, that as you rose higher in rank and got more responsibility heaped on you (more queep) it rapidly became not worth it anymore.
The way it was put to me long ago was that you have two buckets: a bullshat bucket and a fun bucket. Whichever bucket fills up first, will determine what you do. Well when my fun/enjoyment/satisfaction bucket was about the 20% full, the bullshat bucket was long since overflowing. So that made my decision on what I had to do, in order to not only preserve sanity, lifestyle, marriage, etc; but to also ensure that I worked to live, not lived to work.
Honestly, I had mission satisfaction with many of the missions I flew in the jets I flew. But they were work, and often hard work, very mentally taxing at times and in certain situations. Very few times did I have a chance to just sit back and enjoy the flight.
Fun/enjoyment-wise, I had far more of that in the PA-31 flying cargo way back in the day. Because there was far more flexibility to do so. Its just a matter of realizing those differences.
NewYorkophile
Fly Casual
It's obvious to us, but perhaps not the outside world, why so many of us left active duty and are going airlines.
I'm currently at everyone's favorite undisclosed location, and the queep is NOTICEABLY lower than prior years. I'm assuming this is due to Hesterman/Welsh. Just two days ago I was sitting in civilian clothes (wearing sandals and no reflective belt, gasp!) having a beer the night before my next combat mission. Besides the abysmal state of the crappers, it's been pretty good here so far.
e6bflyer
Well-Known Member
That patch is horrible. Something you would want to wear for a week to get your point across and then relegate it to the inside of your jacket.
I went through Vance (not because I wanted to) in the 2002 timeframe.
Our class patch featured Eddie of Iron Maiden fame. Not bad. My favorite one at the time was two classes behind us. It had a billiards rack full of pool balls with some Latin inscription underneath. Simple enough, it got approved by leadership. The kicker was the class was all dudes and one girl...on the Friday patch, instead of the Latin, it read "All balls and a rack". All in good fun, she actually thought of the idea. No way that would ever make it on the outside of a flight suit today.
I went through Vance (not because I wanted to) in the 2002 timeframe.
Our class patch featured Eddie of Iron Maiden fame. Not bad. My favorite one at the time was two classes behind us. It had a billiards rack full of pool balls with some Latin inscription underneath. Simple enough, it got approved by leadership. The kicker was the class was all dudes and one girl...on the Friday patch, instead of the Latin, it read "All balls and a rack". All in good fun, she actually thought of the idea. No way that would ever make it on the outside of a flight suit today.
///AMG
Well-Known Member
I'd also submit that military aviation, at least tactical flying, is rarely relaxing and often downright un-enjoyable. Yes, you get some of the coolest experiences you can have strapped to two wings (or a spinning one in the case of modern day MikeD), but it is always busy, completely task oriented, and often quite stressful......both in combat as well as in training. I wouldn't trade my experiences flying in the mil for anything, and I hope to do this for a while to come, but it most definitely isn't all cloud surfing and tail chase like the movies and youtube videos make it out to be. You can F it up in the blink of an eye and end up never flying again, killing yourself, or possibly killing the good guys/wrong guys. I'd say maybe the last of those 3 is the worst possible scenario. Most of the enjoyment I've derived out of this job has been after the fact, in memories of cool flights where I was too busy at the time to recognize how cool it was. Just a thought on mil vs civilian routes and maybe some of the perception of the military experience.
D
Deleted member 27505
Guest
Well, yeah. It had about a 3:1 maintenance hour to flight hour ratio. Not to mention, we couldn't keep parts on the thing most of the time. Fleet atrophied largely due to cannibalization of parts.
D
Deleted member 27505
Guest
AF is rarely, if ever, "on board". That's a Navy thing. No golf courses on boats.
D
Deleted member 27505
Guest
Great idea. But you are missing the most important element of this equation... the customer. Farmers and crop dusters are customers. They buy something they need and the transaction pretty much ends there. They aren't going to pay outrageous prices for a crop duster. Farmers, as simple as we are, need a cogent economic rationale for a purchase. The DoD does not. The Dod is not just a customer. Dod is a customer, but it is also a sales organization to multiple organizations and nations. DoD is a customer, but it also invests its suppliers with many of their employees. DoD is a customer, but its suppliers employ a huge number of DoD "retirees". DoD will be lucky to have a 2014 financial audit out by 2020. And even then, much of it will be dark..."for security reasons". Did you really believe that DoD pays $10000 for its toilet seats (and that was in 1982 dollars). DoD ain't got no Momma... it does what it wants.
How would I have known it wasn't noticed if I didn't do the test? I don't like exercises in futility, which was what putting all those hours was, at the sacrifice of a lot. Yossarian was right, and nothing has changed from his time and story.
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
Working "normal" hours would be a sure-fire way to not get the duties, the awards, and the other ancillary things needed for both career and rank progression.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant after you did your test why would you continue doing all that meaningless work if it wasn't big noticed?
Sounds like being there is the basis of career progression not the amount of work accomplished. Was it better in the good old days?
That's my point, I stopped. Throttled way back on the BS, reduced my working hours there, all while beginning my processing work to move on to my next assignment, or get out, whichever worked out best. Which turned out to be the latter option.
