I flew Army Fixed Wing active duty (One GS and one RC tour). I got out in 2010 and then flew Army Fixed Wing for two and a half years as a DAC. I still have plenty of friends in the active duty community. Feel free to PM me.

First, if you want to maximize your civilian hiring options or fly for the airlines, apply for the FWMEQC. You'll have RW options and FW options. As a FW guy, hours should come quick compared to your RW units.

When it comes to promotions keep in mind that you are competing against your year group, not the folks one or two or ten years senior to you. Their promotion rates, and the experiences they had to live to be competitive will be different than yours. If you are a PIC, have combat time, have a track, have a variety of schools and your peers don't, and you excelled in your work, you'll probably have a good chance at promoting on time.

Find a couple of trusted senior WO's to mentor you. Since you asked this forum for advice and information, here is my take. I would be cautions about going FW too early in your WO career with cut-throat promotion rates. FW units are typically very senior, with W4 company IP's sharing time as company SP's and W4 company safety officers. If you want to get promoted and retire as a W4 or W5, first you have to make W3. When very senior guys are doing all the hard jobs in the company it may be difficult to build a strong stack of OER's for the board. You want OER's that show you progressed quickly to PIC in your advanced aircraft, flew lots of challenging missions, logged lots of hours, mentored junior aviators. (Keep in mind that Army Aviation is all about the RW mission, FW is a tiny portion and at some point in your career you may have to go back to the RW community). You should want to then focus on tracking, and get a good couple of years excelling in your chosen field. It was very rare to see W2's in my two Battalions, but the ones we got were RW IP's, and stellar aviators.

As far as the units go, expect to fly gray King Airs for 3-6 years. There are very limited GS/VIP slots for active duty folks. The WO's that go FW are almost all phenominal aviators and most are all great people in general. We don't eat our young, we are very professional and skilled, we look out for each other, the units are close knit, and we want everyone to be a PIC as soon as possible. Deployments are't difficult; when you're home, you're really home, not in the field. If you can make it to Germany to fly VIP from Stuttgart or Wiesbaden you'll have hit the first Army FW Jackpot. If you get to the Gulfstreams you'll have hit the last Jackpot. It never hurts to volunteer to fly Dash 7's, as they always seem to be short pilots. It's a good bargaining chip to get a UC-35 or Slick C-12 assignment.