Swayne coming to a 121 near you

Spending a third of your career moving backwards, not moving at all, or furloughed can do that to a person.

I'll admit I do love my job. I don't really enjoy doing it 19 days a month, but It is what it is. And I have to give the kid credit, he seems enthusiastic. After watching his last video, I'm even thinking about calling scheduling, and seeing if I can score one of those sweet eight leg, nine hour two day trips he talks about. I mean, they even pay you per diem, on top of the 50% extra.


I spent roughly 15 months at the regional’s. Like I said, raped ape on the career progression ladder.
 
The timing of his last video was bad.
Negotiations on reserve rules improvement were stopped, as the company wanted concessions on the said OT premiums for it.
Probably a coincidence, but comes across as "hey, at least we have these awesome OT opportunities!"
I value my time off higher than extra couple of bucks, but any OT higher than 6-6.5 hrs/day (paid at 150%, 200% if critical coverage) is hard to come by, and most of it hovers at closer to 4 hrs. Just saying...
 
Most people learned that lesson at s younger age with these:

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Damn, we had 2 of those. The Honda Hobbit....


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I still get a partial wood when scheduling calls and I have to go to work. I enjoy what I do.

Then again I’ve climbed the career ladder faster than a raped ape. I haven’t been burnt out by a “lost decade.”
I've actually not talked to Sked here beyond a few calls for release (R03 = self notify, set your alarm and rack out) and a "can you help me find where to be picked up here for the MCO Long" I had to do on OE.

In the latter call, there was this pause, and a "Wait! This is the first time you've called us! Welcome to Spirit, First Officer Blue! We're proud to have you be a part of this team."

Me, traumatized from my regional: "This is Crew Scheduling, right?"

Them: "Ha! Yep! Welcome. Anyway, let me look at the MCO notes (etc.). [details] And we look forward to speaking with you again soon!"

It was...different.
 
Personally, I like Swayne's videos. Yeah, he comes off as smarmy to me, but that may or may not reflect what he's actually like in person. The videos have a good production value and videography, and I enjoy watching the flying scenes. Some of it is cheesy (like the scenes filmed while sitting in the cockpit of an empty airplane sitting at the gate, but while wearing a headset), but I'm also not Swayne's target audience for his videos.

The backlash against the dude, though, strikes a chord very close to home. As most of you know, back 20+ years ago when the internet was still in its infancy, I had a website where I kept what we'd now call a blog where I detailed my experiences going through USAF pilot training as a student (still on archive.org if you want to gawk: www.militarypilot.net). It sounds like a commonplace thing today, but so far as I know there was only one other guy who'd done something similar at the time (a Navy guy whose journal I found, and who I shamelessly copied).

My reasoning was that, prior to starting training, I had been searching for information all over the place about what USAF training was like in order to prepare (plus I was just plain excited about what I was going to be doing). I'd bought and read literally dozens of books written by USAF pilots, and gotten little nuggets in each book: a couple sentences, a couple paragraphs describing training. One or two books had complete chapters about USAF training, but they just didn't provide any granular detail. All that money and effort spent book-hunting in the pre-Amazon days, and very little to show for it.

So, I decided I'd create the resource that I had originally wanted, in order to help those who would follow in my footsteps. Like the airlines, the military had policies about what you could and couldn't say in public (mostly related to operational security issues), but there was no such thing as "social media" in the 90s, so there was thus no social media policy for me to follow (or break!). I was careful to keep in mind what the actual rules were, and I kept things as anonymous as I could those days (I used my name, but didn't use the names of any of my classmates or instructors, etc).

The best I can tell I was pretty successful at the objective. The number of USAF pilots over the years who've met me and said, "I read your journal, man! That was great, thank you...I'm an AF pilot because of you" is significant. Probably greater than a hundred that I've personally met, and way more than that who sent me emails or whatever over the years. Mission accomplished.

BUT

The amount of crap that I received from people for keeping that journal over the years was crazy. When I say "people", I mean other USAF pilots (my future peers and bosses) who were already out flying operationally. I received every criticism in the book: that I was arrogant, that I was some sort of attention-hound, that I was trying to glorify my feeble training flying, etc. Those criticisms also usually had punchlines like, "I can't wait to see you fall on your face", and "I know some of your instructors...they've got your number, boy", and "when you get to my squadron, we're gonna eat your lunch," and the like.

Obviously none of that was true. I'd started and written that blog with a most non-arrogant/self-aggrandizing intent, and I couldn't understand why other folks automatically attributed such a negative motivation to my work without knowing me at all.

Some of that attention resulted in me being scheduled to fly with supervisors in my training squadrons: the Director of Operations and the Commander. They never told me explicitly that they were putting themselves on the schedule to fly with me to check out what kind of a pilot and officer I was, to follow up on whatever "tips" they were receiving about "the guy with the journal on the internet", but it was obvious to me. None of my classmates were getting these guest instructors from the Commander's office, hehe.

There were other things, too. Later on in my career I had a buddy tell me that my name had come up reference one of those secret jobs flying secret things at a secret location, and that my public profile on the internet from years before had disqualified me from further consideration.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I see a disturbingly similar reaction to my man Swayne and his videos, and I'm struggling to understand the negative reaction. Can any of you who are mocking or criticizing what he's doing actually articulate why you are being critical? It all just comes off as sour grapes to me, but I know that's because of my past experience of being the object of such criticism.
 
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There were other things, too. Later on in my career I had a buddy tell me that my name had come up reference one of those secret jobs flying secret things at a secret location, and that my public profile on the internet from years before had disqualified me from further consideration.
So, you're saying MIL aviation is as full of a-holes, if not more, than the airlines.

In all seriousness, I disapprove of your experiences with respect to receiving extra attention and so on. If nobody has the stones to give you a direct order to knock it off, then there's no reason for you to knock it off, and ALSO no reason to receive any extra attention for extra-curricular activities, even if they are somewhat related to the job.

"Knock it off, that's an order" is much more satisfactory than passive-aggressive horsehockey.
 
Me when I see pilots complaining about Swayne or really anybody's blog:

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He seems like a nice guy trying to help and mentor the future generation. When I was starting out with aviation I don't know what I would have done without Jetcareers which is where I found the same thing, only in it's earlier days. It doesn't help that we kind of speak our own acronym filled language...
 
So, you're saying MIL aviation is as full of a-holes, if not more, than the airlines.

In all seriousness, I disapprove of your experiences with respect to receiving extra attention and so on. If nobody has the stones to give you a direct order to knock it off, then there's no reason for you to knock it off, and ALSO no reason to receive any extra attention for extra-curricular activities, even if they are somewhat related to the job.

"Knock it off, that's an order" is much more satisfactory than passive-aggressive horsehockey.

"Knock it off", like the call in the military to stop flying a specific maneuver?
 
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