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The Naples incident/how to ruin your career before it's started/make others suffer

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BurghGuy said:
I've never heard of this Tatics II game. What is that .... ??
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*sigh* .... kids.

Board games -- old school. Remember, we were only one generation removed from the slipstick .... in fact we still used 'em in school.



Board games were a lot of fun, even if they took up too much space and required some level of dedication. We only used computers to navigate & drop bombs in those days ... :)

 
My firt computer was a souped up LC II. My first video game console was a Coleco.

FWIW, the offenders were working the StuCon desk today...and they weren't chained to it. Guess they made life better for whoever else was supposed be working it.
 
Come to think of it, maybe they were all just prepping to go to corpus. Killing a bird a day seems pretty average... the two turbo salad shooters out there on the wings of a c-12 will do some mean work to an egret
 
My favorite board game growing up was Risk. My dad had an old-as-balls version where the pieces were just painted blocks of wood. It's probably from around the Tactics II timeframe (1959 according to Wiki). It was awesome, our games used to last for weeks. As I got older I eventually graduated to Axis and Allies, but it just wasn't the same. Global domination just got too boring, so we set our minds on conquering more difficult things. Like girls.

risk.JPG


axisallies.jpg
 
BurghGuy said:
I've never heard of this Tatics II game. What is that, Atari 5200? ColecoVision? The allegedly portable Apple IIC??

appleiic.jpg
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I think this is the same computer they were using at the Escambia County elementary school I volunteered in while I was stashed...
 
HAL Pilot said:
I loved that game. This one too:

34552.jpg
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Avalon Hill, Oh how I miss thee...

I played these quite often:
tobruks.jpg

flightleader.jpg

Ambush.jpg


I had the first module for Ambush, Move Out. I also had Battlehymn, with the Leatherneck Module. I always wanted Advanced Squad Leader but as a kid growing up, it would have eaten up all of my allowance/savings. I wonder if eBay's got it...
 
Has there ever been a proposal made to the Navy and other services to hire retired military pilots on a GS payscale to instruct at the primary stages of flight training(not just sims) and then have the fleet seasoned instructors complete training thereby making more instructors available for Advanced and the Rag. Any safety issues with this?

If what I hear is correct, we are training less pilots today than we did back in the day. I would imagine the training syllabus is more comprehensive today than say 20 years ago. Has the Navy and the other services ever applied Lean Six Sigma or something to their production?! There has to be some smart retired Navy pilot with some understanding of how to fix the problem.(This might be a good gig for a Reserve O-6 Aviator)
I think alot of money is lost having junior officers sit around during training. For instance stagger accession programs so that the summer bunch does not affect the A-pool(I think the Airforce is already doing this).

If the amount of money(basic pay and BAH) is calculated for every junior officer that should be in the pipeline vice awaiting-pool, how many training aircrafts could we possibly get?

I know this issue has been raised at some point on this forum. Cannot seem to find one in the midst of all the multiple API threads. Those with STUCON experience are more than welcome to jump on this. Can things be changed around or the old way just works fine?
 
Clux4 said:
words, good words
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In about 10 years ago the Navy paid the Thomas Group a big wad of money to figure out, among other things, that a bloated A-pool was wasting money and it was caused by a a glut of butterbars checking in every June and January. Therefore, maybe OCS should access 137x and 139x designators in other months to even things out for the Academy and ROTC. I never really figured out if the other non-aviation pipelines had any input on this.

In the late 1990s military aviator shortages and flight school production was a really big deal in all of the services. In the coffee mess on the second deck of the NASC schoolhouse there was some neat memorabilia, including some strangely current newspaper articles about post-drawdown pilot shortages, but those articles were dated around 1980...


Off topic-
About three or four years ago Thomas Group's stock tanked, then went up, went down, up, down, up, down. I pondered why the company name seemed familiar and then I made some good beer money on daytrades :)
 
cfam386 said:
Yeah, the whole "active duty" thing for us didn't extend to pay either...only a couple hundred a month till we got commissioned, so we definitely weren't pulling down any active duty pay at USNA. Not really sure what the thought process behind having us be considered active is. Regardless, active or not, there are idiots everywhere, unluckily enough for USNA it was academy guys this time.
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I know I'm jupming in late on this one, but as a sidenote, we do get "Active" pay - which for "active duty" MIDN, is 35% of O-1 base pay. The deductions come by the loads I'm sure if you ever checked your LES, but what's left over is the infamous "held pay" at the Academy that they generously release every now and again...
 
usmarinemike said:
1) O-1s need guidance. We need an example to follow because we're all making a transition whether it's from civilian to officer, enlisted to officer, or midshipman to officer, or whatever.
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Again, I know I'm jumping on this one pretty late - but by the time you've made O-1, especially after coming out of USNA/NROTC, where you've had 4 years to prepare to become an officer, should you not be ready to lead day 1? Are SWO's that take their division on the day they report not expected to do the same? Sure, there's a lot to learn, but saying you're in a transition mode, in my mind is a fallacy. If you can't prevent yourself from making blatantly illegal decisions after 4 years of preparing for a commissioning, you should never have been comissioned in the first place in my mind.

Look, I agree that O-1s need guidance. Hell, so do O-5's. You're going to promote and take on more responsibility, but by the time you take that position you should be ready and prepared, if for nothing else, to just learn your job and make good decisions based on the information you have. I just get the feeling that you feel O-1s are a bunch of incompetent idiots, which I think is not the case for the vast majority. I know I'm just a Mid, but I think if you've been prepared well and are ready to soak up knowledge and leadership experience from other O's, Chiefs and the like like a sponge, you ought to be alright by the time you've made O-1. Navy Ensigns and Marine 2nd Lt.'s need to be competent and trusted. These guys were clearly neither.
 
Clux4 said:
Has there ever been a proposal made to the Navy and other services to hire retired military pilots on a GS payscale to instruct at the primary stages of flight training(not just sims) and then have the fleet seasoned instructors complete training thereby making more instructors available for Advanced and the Rag. Any safety issues with this?
?
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The Army already does this at Fort Rucker.

You don't pay them at GSs (now THAT'D be a waste of money), but as contractors.

The Nav/MC think the mentorship of other officers instructing has more benefit, and I tend to agree. However, for entry-level flight instruction, i.e. non-tactical, there little reason, flying-wise, why it couldn't be done.
 
phrogdriver said:
The Army already does this at Fort Rucker.

You don't pay them at GSs (now THAT'D be a waste of money), but as contractors.

The Nav/MC think the mentorship of other officers instructing has more benefit, and I tend to agree. However, for entry-level flight instruction, i.e. non-tactical, there little reason, flying-wise, why it couldn't be done.
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I know the Army does something similar but I did not know to what extent.
Any contractor associated with miltary always seems to start up someone elses kid's trust fund. It seem there would not be much company cake going around if it all GS. There is also the contractor mentality that comes with everything. I only get paid for X number of hours and so I will only instruct for X numbers of hours. (I guess you could cajole a government worker !:D)

For the Army aviators, what is your take? Is the quality still the same or degraded? Also comment on the wait period if any. Lawman, feel free to chime in.
 
phrogdriver said:
The Nav/MC think the mentorship of other officers instructing has more benefit, and I tend to agree. However, for entry-level flight instruction, i.e. non-tactical, there little reason, flying-wise, why it couldn't be done.
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Well, that's pretty much what we do with IFS now.
 
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