I tend to agree with
@nittany03, but RLSO's point is also valid. The hell of it is, IMO Navy Air does a much better job than the rest of the Navy at choosing and using instructors. I've even heard a Shoe 2-star say the same. The admiral in question praised aviation for "picking their best to send back to the schoolhouse". I think the disconnect is in the follow-up question - who
are your best? The good stick behind the Boat who'll make a great skipper someday isn't necessarily the best guy to fly two FAMs a day with ENS Knucklehead in P'cola. Conversely, your Fleet Average guy who just kind of muddled through his ground job and has one eye towards FedEx might be a fantastic instructor.
A partial solution, I think, might be structuring the FITUs more like LSO School or the Weapons Schools - stand-alone units with permanent instructor cadres and the authority to weed out dudes who don't have the patience or skill set to be effective IPs. I also think IPs burn out after about 12-18 mos...you can only see the same mistakes made so many times before you start having seizures. Monitor their grading trends just as you monitor students' and watch for signs of burnout.
The program is a production line, but that doesn't mean you should leave good students by the side of the road just because their on-wing loses his shit when the stud's too slow with the trim.
And sometimes one person's frustrated kvetching starts a conversation where someone else chimes in with a good idea.
Warning: rambling and mildly ale-fueled thoughts ahead; it's Friday.
Your followup point is exactly the source of my frustration. But then again, those best sticks behind the boat, or those dead eyes on the platform, are the guys who will save your bacon on a shitty night behind the boat.
In the current construct, it comes down to a "know your people" thing by the CO, because right now, the CO is really the only person to make that decision. The timing aspect doesn't help. Perhaps, if we could loosen up the tyranny of the YG like certain bigwigs have batted around, we may bias the system less to the person who learns the quickest, as opposed to the person who learns the best in the end. We tend to anoint the people who learn the fastest, because they're the ones who get to keep and use whatever "keys to the kingdom" quals the community values for the longest time. Changing the FITREP is one of RLSO's hobby horses which is worth a ride around the track; I'm partial to the Marine method of ranking every officer against all officers you've known, and getting two sets of (hopefully) independent eyes on a FITREP. Stack racking against summary groups is a pointless exercise, amongst arbitrary groups of people. It stifles communication from the CO to the board, and needlessly fucks over 1 of 1s.
There is also a cultural aspect to this argument I made. To paraphrase my first fleet CO, the people who succeed in Naval Air are the people who play along with the "frat party" atmosphere to some degree. But the successful ones also realize that ultimately, it's an act, and you do have to be a commissioned officer. The culture also (rightly) values taking on board blunt and unvarnished criticism, whatever your rank. The dark side to this is a certain subset of people short on empathy, and who see little problem in crossing the line into flat-out assholishness. To some extent, as I said above, this assholishness is the impatience of really talented people who see "average" performance as something more impressive that it typically is, because they're so far above it.
It's also due to our culture being able to be weaponized very easily, especially when you're on month 7 of a 6-month cruise, and everyone is on edge already. It's possible for people to land some truly dickish psychological blows, intentionally or not, and then turn around and hide behind "suck it up; I'm just busting on you." We prize taking the blunt criticism, and we should. But we need to be wary that when the "suck it up" bar is set high, leadership needs to really look hard for signs of "kiss up, kick down." I would be interested in seeing if any psych has ever studied the incidence of the so-called "dark triad" of personality traits in our business. Business executives, surgeons, and lawyers are known for attracting those types . . . are we? Might be interesting to find out. Again, this is ultimately a CO's job to police, and stop those people from getting the paper that will cause them to advance, even if they've got the stick skills. Some of the worst times I've had in this business were under a CO who did not exert the force of personality to pull the "I'm the boss" card and knock some figurative heads together. This let certain personality conflicts fester amongst the ready room. It sucked.
The culture of Navy Air itself is not a bad thing. But once you've put JO shenanigans aside, it's time to make sure that that culture is being used in a healthy way. That's not a plea for BS millennial trigger warnings, or for what the blue suiters call Sensitive New Age Pilots. But I can steal a march from our brethren in powder blue; my current boss is a former USAFWS staffer. He's a good dude, and proud of the credo they use: "Humble, Approachable, Credible." They're onto something there. Ultimately, it behooves those of us in a position to do the picking to pick replacements that are like that, and whose shenanigans are cheeky and fun, not cruel and tragic.
