The other moral of that story is that there are report NLT dates on orders for a reason...
-
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
Pensacola for IFS/API
- Thread starter TxSNA2013
- Start date
John Edwards
Ensign
Been lurking for awhile now but still a total FNG to the site, My NLT report date is the 31st of May to Pcola. How many days does it usually take to lock in a rental agreement on a home/appt? I'm driving down from CT and ill be arriving in FL 2 days before I have to report.
I stayed in the BOQ on base for a few days while I toured apartments, and then signed the lease. It only took a day to get the paperwork taken care of, but I had several options that I had researched ahead of time. If you do some work before you get there, the admin portion doesn't take too long.
Read reviews online
Contact the landlord/office to see if it's available
Prioritize your list
Tour the places when you get there
Pass the background check (normally takes like five minutes)
Sign the lease (make sure there is a military clause allowing you to break the lease when you get orders away)
About as long as it takes to sign an agreement anywhere else in the country. I have no idea how A-pool is these days, but when I was there, we had plenty of time to do random stuff like house hunting and moving in to a place. If you are a pilot, and you don't have specific orders in hand to Whiting right now, I would err on the side of caution and either find friends to room with, or maybe someone who is already in schools command. I moved to Corpus about 9 weeks after I arrived for the first time in pcola, so I basically never unpacked, crashed in an empty room in some NROTC buds' house, and slept on an air mattress.
Yeah that's about how it was when I was there.....I think I was an April check in IIRC. Beat the May/June grads there, and classed up for API 2 weeks later. Still, those were a long 2 weeks, and I did almost nothing aside from coming into work for about 30 mins during the week, and then drinking by my pool for the rest of the time.
Did you not have IFS prior to API or in general?
That's just sad...
I came in with prior civilian flight certs so no IFS for me. That said, in that general annual timeframe, my friends who did need it still finished and classed for API within a couple months. But that wasn't now, so I have no idea what the timeline for IFS is today.
Don't worry sir, I left the house sometimes too. But I remember my schedule as roughly:
1) Go to muster at whatever 0XXX o'clock for 30 mins
2) Go home, enjoy various masterpieces starring girls that can't afford clothes (fiancee was 2500 miles away)
3) Go on AW and complain about how I had nothing to do (I was an idiot)
4) Raid my booze closet and pass out on a floaty in the backyard pool by noon
5) Wake up with 3rd degree sunburns all over my body and move inside
6) Go to dinner with SNFO room-mattes and make up lies from the back seat about how I wanted to go helos so I wouldn't have to deal with their navigation skills anymore (with all due respect.....I can say anything after that right?
).....and in the greatest irony, they are all E-2 hummoles now, and TOPGUN/TOPDOME grads too, so I guess we were all wrong7) Enjoy buying dinner and drinks for quantity one, interval/multiple 0
8) Drunkenly argue with their hot friend about whether her check engine light meant her car was going to imminently blow up, or if it just meant that her O2 sensor was bad
9) Cocktails at our DIY tiki bar by said backyard pool
10) Cannonballs onto a floating dinosaur for about 1 hour straight into pool while yelling obscenities during a local area lightning storm
No written test. There will be a print out in your training jacket listing your civvy quals. Just make sure that it reflects your quals (e.g., instrument, commercial).
You sit around pretending to be in the military.
Like JOTS said, no test, just show them your license or something. I really don't remember how I proved it to them, because I have no idea what happened to my license. It's probably around here somewhere, but at any rate. If you have the PPL, you're a validator, which means you don't have to wait for the bottleneck at IFS, which means you will likely class up for API fairly quickly.
That time between commissioning and starting API is a magical time called "A-Pool," where you get paid full-time for doing almost nothing. You muster every morning in khakis, and then you're free for the rest of the day. Don't let it go totally to waste; stay in shape and do some light reading, and then you won't feel as guilty for getting payed to play GTAV.
A-pool: muster for 15 minutes. Sometimes it would be longer, like if the stash ensigns made everyone awkwardly sit there until they got X amount of volunteers for a random duty. Or the time the stash made us sit there for an hour because he found a couple pieces of trash after a muster.
Then go work out and maybe squeeze in two naps if its a good day.
Then go work out and maybe squeeze in two naps if its a good day.
Don't let guilt overcome, for lo... when you get to the fleet, you'll repay with your due "pound o' flesh"!
Do they really have boot ENSs stashed there that think they're DIs?
BzB