Rand study on USAF pilot retention

[Python]

Nah dude... nothing’s your fault... the point I’m making is that flight hour sums have not been what we’ve all heard of for decades now. I get it man, the admiral with 1,000 traps and 4,000 hours talking about how great Naval Aviation is today is an out of touch clown. His bag-ex’s are why we have fewer jets now. I get it, but there are a lot of dudes around here, and up and down your local flight line that really believe 40 hour months in mx phase w/ all the x-country’s, BFM, low levels, and airshows they can imagine should be what they’re getting, and if it’s not, then fuck this place. If that’s not you, move along, but those guys exist - lots of them. As I posted earlier, they didn’t get what they wanted. The problem there is that what they wanted doesn’t exist.

I'm sure those guys are out there. But most of the guys that are voting with their feet and doing so because of low flight time, do NOT have those expectations. They just thought it would be what their leadership had. Or at least more than tactical hard deck. I had a 6 month extension in my JO tour, and still left 1 in 6 / 2 in 14. As @wlawr005 said, 40 hours is a lot. I'd have taken 15-20. THOSE are the expectations, not the 40 you think we're expecting.

 

[Treetop Flyer]

Crappy relative to what, Jim? What’s your metric? I didn’t say ‘that’s a great number!’ I said it wasn’t that bad. I’d be interested to know what you consider adequate for hours for hornet pilots. Do you like their T&R matrix? Also, I agree with @wlawr005 that the number of hours matter less than the training contained in those hours.

So again, I ask what deviation am I normalizing? Btw, attached are the number of sorties and flight hours for all the VF and VFA squadrons for the last 17 years.

Source: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1046296.pdf

That graph ends almost three years ago

 

[UInavy]

That graph ends almost three years ago

Yep. I took what I could find. Fully aware it’s worse now. I also knew guys leaving with 5xx total at the right side of that graph. Totally unsat.

 

[UInavy]

I'd have taken 15-20. THOSE are the expectations, not the 40 you think we're expecting.

And that should be the expectation. It’s very rare that there’s someone that does a career out of that basket, above or below (of the senior folks now). My quick math shows wlawr005 is in that basket.

 

[Python]

And that should be the expectation. It’s very rare that there’s someone that does a career out of that basket, above or below (of the senior folks now). My quick math shows wlawr005 is in that basket.

Below the basket is less rare these days than you think or realize.

 

[UInavy]

Below the basket is less rare these days than you think or realize.

Are you saying there are senior folks that are at less than approx 2k hours at the end of their O-5 sea tour? Those and above are the ‘career’ folks I was referencing.

For JOs, I know and understand it’s less. It shouldn’t be that way. I wasn’t trying to generalize his experience as that of all JOs. Apologies if it came off like that.

 

[Python]

Are you saying there are senior folks that are at less than approx 2k hours at the end of their O-5 sea tour? Those and above are the ‘career’ folks I was referencing.

For JOs, I know and understand it’s less. It shouldn’t be that way. I wasn’t trying to generalize his experience as that of all JOs. Apologies if it came off like that.

No problem. I apologize as well as I was referencing a different group (JOs). Mea Culpa.

 

[UInavy]

No problem. I apologize as well as I was referencing a different group. Mea Culpa.

Eh, whatever, nbd. This is why my older brother always calls and never texts- to easy to misinterpret.

 

[Short]

Bump. I'm leaving my JO squadron with just over 800 hours in gray jets. That includes an entire work up, a full deployment, and 18 months in maintenance phases as well as a seven month extension.

During our eight month transition to Supers I whored myself out and ended up adding another AWF and C2X. Watching guys walk around with 1000 hour patches makes me laugh considering the nature of air wing deployments over the past 15 years. We turned our F-18 fleet into dust so CAGs and Skippers could write "combat" on their FITREPs when all a significant number of people did was fly around in circles.

I'd disagree with that assessment for FACTORY's last deployment, but see your point (at the COCOM vice CAG) level for other periods.

 

[wlawr005]

That graph ends almost three years ago

I'd also add that the one or two deployed air wings greatly skew the data against the rest of the Navy who isn't deployed at any one time. And to bring matters back to the original post, there is a vast abyss between the haves and the have nots (be it Air Force or deployed air wings). That metric needs to stabilize across the masses.

If we can't all agree there is a problem with an AF Guard unit having more capable platforms and better training assets, then the problem has consumed us and we've resigned ourselves to the fact that this is now "normal" for Navy units.

 

[wlawr005]

I'd disagree with that assessment for FACTORY's last deployment, but see your point (at the COCOM vice CAG) level for other periods.

Well yeah. We were bombing shit every day. And we flew about 2/3 of the combat sorties of air wings responsible for Afghanistan ops.

We were home for rats every night.

 

[Gatordev]

800 hours (counting FRS time) in a 3 1/2 year tour is pretty crappy.

If you or your peers believe those stats good, in the grand scheme of things (they're pretty lousy), or that taking whatever you can get is as good as it gets, then I say that is just because that's all you've ever known.

While not as high as what we saw during our JO tours, 800 hours wasn't abnormal by the end of (at least mine) our JO tours. And that was 15 years ago (for me). Would we all like more? Of course, but I'm not sure it's normalizing deviance (see what I did there?) when it's been a thing for so long because of "smarter" scheduling (read: T&R) requirements.

I'm not trying to take away the elephant in the room that is Hornet FRC issues, or how the VFA community plays musical airframes to make CVWs, but from the micro/JO level. 800 isn't terrible for any given fleet T&R-bound community.

 

[wlawr005]

Those 800 hours sound nice, but when you consider 400 of them came in 12 months of workups and deployment (plus extra stuff I volunteered for) the daily math doesn't equal the aggregate math.

There were quite a few dry spells in the middle.

 

[Python]

And there were many (if not almost all?) who did full workups and cruise and didn’t get 800.

 

[navyterp67]

@Python1287 I had about the same flight time as you. I did 1.5 deployments (both OIR) and a full set of work ups and left my JO tour with ~770 total FA-18 hours. We were clearly the have-nots as we transitioned from legacy Hornets to... legacy Super Hornets. Around 180 of those hours are mostly sitting at Max E and tagging tankers (with the occasional drop). One of the more frustrating times in the squadron was when it took 6 weeks to get a Level 3 DBFM attempt out because we had zero up jets. There are several months in my logbook with 5 hours or less.