Rand study on USAF pilot retention

[Pags]

Oh, 100%. There were no illusions about that seminar. I simply used that story as an example of the nebulous "senior leadership doesn't care" concept that some people don't seem to hear over the sound of their silver oak leaves and eagles.

Even if that USNR Captain did care an awful lot there's not much he could do about it.

 

[A Day In The Life]

I'll further that argument by adding my astonishment that the Navy is completely satisfied with spending the amount of money they did to get 800 hours out of me. Sure, they'll get some ROI out of me as an instructor but almost anyone can go to Meridian and teach. They're gonna spend a hell of a lot more money teaching someone else to be a Division Lead. I'll furthur that with the fact you don't get good at something until you've been doing it a while, so who knows how long it'll take that person to actually be proficient.

The Navy's current answer is to start throwing as many guys as they can through the pipeline. My personal opinion is we need to address career milestones, especially in VFA, and change our up-or-out career timelines in order to retain the professional knowledge we paid for and increase our professional experience as a community.

I know, everyone is gonna saw that's how we've always done business or those changes have to be made at the congressional level. Doesn't mean they don't need to change. Our mission sets are too complex and too expensive to train to for us to keep turning over every three years.

That's one of my biggest gripes.

When I was up for orders, with the backing of my skipper I asked the detailer about doing back-to-back sea tours or heading out to CAG-5 for a year. I got told no and that manning production billets was more important.

 

[wlawr005]

Same.

 

[whitesoxnation]

I got 555 harrier hours through the RAG and two deployments.

How I feel about Navy or Air Force dudes complaining:

I left my first fleet squadron with around 630 total Hornet hours and <100 in the last 365 I think, and I know some guys that were way below that total #.

Like someone said, it’s comical that the ANG flies more capable aircraft and does more of the fighting than active units.

 

[whitesoxnation]

Those were also the days when there was no credible threat and the most complex thing you had to worry about was BFM and basic intercepts by today's standards. The sheer complexity of our tactics and wide spread of mission sets these days make it impossible for aircrew to be good at their primary job, FLYING, with the hours they're getting. When guys have been struggling to get THD and they get their asses kicked during workups, I'm not surprised that they leave disgruntled, especially after hearing every O-4+ in the O Club talk about the "glory days." You can't tell me with a straight face that there is a severe lack of opportunities to "see that one again" when aircrew don't meet the bar, and many get a pass when they shouldn't.

Yep. Sparrow shooter level of training and mentality.

 

[HooverPilot]

I’ve seen them all, but the S-3 bubbas that didn’t get a pointy nose jet were the most disgruntled . . . .

I was disgruntled for about a week. The rest of my career I was thanking my lucky stars. Long live the Hoov!

 

[Spekkio]

At risk of sounding like a complaining millennial... a few years ago my squadron went through a safety workshop/seminar. We were in transition to our neglected Rhinos at the time (which I should probably add some stories about in the "Should I take that aircraft" thread for you guys) and my Training Officer brought up a question to the O-6 running the event. "How can we expect to be tactically proficient on cruise when our jets are barely flyable, we regularly face in-flight emergencies, and we're unable to achieve the tactical hard deck?" The O-6 essentially said "deal with it." Well, this Captain was wearing a 3000 hour patch and had been in the reserves since he was a JO. He proceeded to tell us how his reserve squadron had little notice that they were deploying and that they made it happen and they did well on deployment. He looked at our TO and said "you need to figure it out." Nevermind the fact that his squadron was filled solely with O-4s and O-5s with tons of experience and flight time. The complete disconnect was appalling, to say the least.

This is not an isolated event, and I bring that story up to highlight the tone-deaf approach of senior leadership...

A little devil's advocate here...

1) This reserve O-6 is doing a safety seminar. His job isn't to solve fleet manning/maintenance/funding problems. He's probably heard this "question" (in quotes because it's really just a gripe to a senior officer) a billion times over, there's very little he can do about it, and he doesn't want his seminar to become derailed into a griping session.

2) Somewhere along the lines in his career, an O-4 should have learned that you don't pass problems up to your chain of command, but solutions and communicate any shortfalls you need addressed to succeed. I emphasize the word need because needs are things like manning shortfalls that make the mission unachievable, insufficient hours to maintain pilots proficient (proficient in terms of established fleet standards that keeps you authorized to continue flying, not proficient in terms of what a JO decided what it should be), etc. I would expect any senior officer to be a bit testy toward me, at the very least, if I just threw a bunch of problems up at them.

3) When the details of what you need to maintain proficiency or get aircraft fully functional are not communicated, gripes about flight hours come across simply as complaining to your superiors that you don't fly enough as you'd like to, particularly if there are other options available like simulators to maintain that proficiency for a fraction of the cost. I suspect that any good senior officer wants you to fly and train in the cockpit as much as he can afford, but at the end of the day if you have met the fleet standard that someone above his paygrade decided is "good enough," then there's no magic wand he can waive to get you more than that.

I highlight these for two reasons: first, because it's easy for a relatively new officer to view the interaction like you did when there's probably more going on than another "tone deaf senior officer," and second because if you want to get traction on flying more or maintaining aircraft in better condition, there has to be a lot more of starting with an end state that solves a problem based on objective data (more flight hours are a means not an end), layout a few paths to get from A->B, and in there show how more [insert resource] is imperative to achieve that goal. There also has to be the understanding that if the problem you are trying to solve is not a requirement, you are probably going to get told no to getting more resources. Otherwise, it's all going to sound like another officer complaining to his boss that he doesn't fly enough.

When an O-6 says "figure it out," he means all of the above, and he expects that the O-4 knows that without a lengthy explanation.

 

[Brett327]

Appreciate the sentiment, but in this case, there isn’t much the O4 (or O5) can do to figure this out. These issues go way beyond their ability to do anything about it.

 

[Gatordev]

2) Somewhere along the lines in his career, an O-4 should have learned that you don't pass problems up to your chain of command, but solutions and communicate any shortfalls you need addressed to succeed.

That's also not the point of a Safety Survey (or as you put it, "Safety Seminar"). The audience isn't just O-4s, but the whole ready room. If you sat in on one of these, you'd understand this is one of the few times you can push stuff up, regardless of rank. And multiple data points of complaints about the same thing is a data point. Unfortunately, the O-6 can't do a whole lot either, other than report it up.

 

[SlickAg]

A little devil's advocate here...

1) This reserve O-6 is doing a safety seminar. His job isn't to solve fleet manning/maintenance/funding problems. He's probably heard this "question" (in quotes because it's really just a gripe to a senior officer) a billion times over, there's very little he can do about it, and he doesn't want his seminar to become derailed into a griping session.

2) Somewhere along the lines in his career, an O-4 should have learned that you don't pass problems up to your chain of command, but solutions and communicate any shortfalls you need addressed to succeed. I emphasize the word need because needs are things like manning shortfalls that make the mission unachievable, insufficient hours to maintain pilots proficient (proficient in terms of established fleet standards that keeps you authorized to continue flying, not proficient in terms of what a JO decided what it should be), etc. I would expect any senior officer to be a bit testy toward me, at the very least, if I just threw a bunch of problems up at them.

3) When the details of what you need to maintain proficiency or get aircraft fully functional are not communicated, gripes about flight hours come across simply as complaining to your superiors that you don't fly enough as you'd like to, particularly if there are other options available like simulators to maintain that proficiency for a fraction of the cost. I suspect that any good senior officer wants you to fly and train in the cockpit as much as he can afford, but at the end of the day if you have met the fleet standard that someone above his paygrade decided is "good enough," then there's no magic wand he can waive to get you more than that.

I highlight these for two reasons: first, because it's easy for a relatively new officer to view the interaction like you did when there's probably more going on than another "tone deaf senior officer," and second because if you want to get traction on flying more or maintaining aircraft in better condition, there has to be a lot more of starting with an end state that solves a problem based on objective data (more flight hours are a means not an end), layout a few paths to get from A->B, and in there show how more [insert resource] is imperative to achieve that goal. There also has to be the understanding that if the problem you are trying to solve is not a requirement, you are probably going to get told no to getting more resources. Otherwise, it's all going to sound like another officer complaining to his boss that he doesn't fly enough.

When an O-6 says "figure it out," he means all of the above, and he expects that the O-4 knows that without a lengthy explanation.

I very much hope you ARE solely playing the Devil's Advocate here. Because if you're not, I bet you were a LOT of fun in the wardroom, Chester.

Your post(s) seem to reinforce a lot of the reasons why the surface Navy is finally trying to, smartly and rightly so, copy a lot of Naval Aviation's business practices.

Lastly, I don't know how much you've dealt with Reservists, but this dude was probably just trying to get his points for a good year. And he probably wrote his report up, sent it to his boss, and thought to himself the whole time "Thank God I'm not part of this dumpster fire".

 

[navyterp67]

Words

I fully realize a reserve Captain does not have the ability to change anything. The capacity for change lies far beyond that rank, as others on this board have said.

As for responses:

1. It's not a "question" as in a JO gripe, as you state. It's a legitimate question. How can we be combat effective with the lack of training and shitty aircraft that we were given? Can I work a 7-10 hour CAS flight? Sure. A DCA against a peer adversary? A completely different question entirely.

2. If a senior officer is "testy" towards me when I ask for more flight hours to be truly tactically proficient, then he/she has their head buried in the fucking sand. Some of this is about manning shortfalls. Some of this is about the quality of aircrew we retain (former non-flying staffer vs patch-wearer DH). What matters to the people who are in the moment is getting more hours to be ready for a peer threat. If you think "fleet average" is enough, as you stated above, then you are sorely mistaken. That very line of reasoning is what drives us up the fucking wall when we see aircrew get their asses kicked by red air in every workup event due to lack of experience.

3. Gripes are communicated, but not received well. I have personally told the Air Boss about the issues I faced in my squadron. The two dual bleed warnings, one in combat. The hypoxia. The dual generator failure. The drastic split in my feed tanks after BFM, only for maintenance to find a URS contractor's pen lodged in a fuel valve. Air Boss didn't care, and simply stated that "we were out of the Charlie business, and had to work with what we had." I get it, but what the hell are we doing to ourselves? As for simulator proficiency, you CANNOT build tactical proficiency from sims alone. What are you going to do when your systems and weapons don't work perfectly like in the sims? How can aircrew survive at the merge when they haven't done an AGSM and "felt the jet" for real in weeks, but they've practiced merge mech in the sim? It's complete bullshit that anyone thinks we can trade flight time for sim time and maintain the same proficiency, all in the name of saving some cash.

The end state that you mention is not what we have now, as in bombing assclowns in adidas track suits and sneakers. The end state is being ready for a peer fight, which like it or not, is a very real thing. If senior leaders think that the aircraft we fly and the hours we're getting are preparing us for that, then they're in for a very rude awakening when we finally go "check tapes, master arm."

 

[Recovering LSO]

The Marine Corps Needs Warrant Officer Pilots - April Proceedings


Posting this link is not an endorsement of the idea. Also, standby for thread split

 

[Jim123]

^^^

 

[ChuckMK23]

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/april/marine-corps-needs-warrant-officer-pilots

 

[cfam]

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/april/marine-corps-needs-warrant-officer-pilots

This was posted two posts ago.