Flight Hours

[Brett327]

Pretty much what @Hotdogs said. The Navy has been great and I'm sure it made me (most of us?) a more well rounded person than I might have been otherwise -- but I've always been aware that I was flying for an organization whose mission is not dedicated to flying. Don't delude yourself, the Navy's mission is the ocean and that requires ships. Ships are fucking expensive. As someone currently in the process of applying for Silver Wings, I'm pretty excited to just be a pilot. Yeah, the AF has their own BS, but when you're coming from the Navy/Marine perspective, it's night and day.

Say what? You deploy for 2 months? You get a van ride to the aircraft? You get your own room on deployment? No squad bay? No stank ass JO jungle? No ship food?? (Although the cookies are legit) THERE'S BEER???????????????????????????????????

I think the numbers will tell you the truth. Roughly speaking, USAF, Navy, and Army all get about the same amount of money. It varies year to year, but overall it's about the same. Each service breaks it up in pretty much the same manner as you can see here:



Now while I would love to see the equivalent AF chart that says how much they spend on their infrastructure compared to us, I couldn't find said chart. What we're really interested in for this discussion is the Operations and Mx bit. See below.


So let's keep it simple: The USAF throws 18.6bn at flying and the Navy 11.4bn. The AF has 5,369 aircraft and the Navy has "3700+" (I couldn't find a better number). It's a very simplistic approach, but they're still spending more than us by almost half a million dollars per aircraft. Per ? Aircraft ?. It adds up and if you google for articles about the readiness of Naval aircraft, it's troubling.

I would counter with the fact that the way USAF is organized offsets the some of your assumptions. Within the USAF flight ops category, they do a bunch of stuff USN doesn’t, like transport, tanking, and all the other big wing assets that eat up a lot of their operational costs. Bottom line, it’s tough to compare apples to apples. Let’s set that aside and all just agree that their organizational culture sucks. ?

 

[HuggyU2]

Let’s set that aside and all just agree that their organizational culture sucks. ?

I have no idea what "organizational culture" means... but I'll drink to that!

 

[RobLyman]

I know this is completely irrational, but I have no desire to be in the army/Air Force. I have my sights set on Navy or Marines and though I loved being a Marine, it can be a bit of a cult lifestyle.

Make no mistake, the Army "Embraces the Suck!" I never heard that saying in the Navy, but the Army likes to use it all of the time to explain why you should tolerate stupid ass ideas. BUT... some of the coolest things I've done in a helicopter I did in the Army. Just saying.

 

[Renegade One]

I have no idea what "organizational culture" means...

It means scarves.

 

[kejo]

Several of my USAF co-workers have recieved pretty hefty bonuses just to stay on 4-6 more years, not tied to any kind of career milestone. I guess you can put a price tag on "organizational culture," to a degree...

To the original point, it's kind of useless to ask what community flies the most now, because it could change dramatically in a year, or five years, or six months. I was flying my ass off the first year in my fleet squadron, then we got hit with flight hours reductions and tactical hard deck, so only deployers were getting anything above the 15-ish hours/month