Currently have 15.5 years in the CG and been flying Hercs for the last 7 years.

Last I heard from our assignment officer is that if you are under 35 with 10 or less yrs of service and have some Herc experience they would be interested in you as a DCA. Prior C130J guys stand a good chance of picking up a CG C130J slot due to training cost savings.

Force manager projections as of one month ago had us approx. 100 pilots short for the next decade with DCA's being relied upon to fix the gap.

Unless you're a helicopter CWO (we don't have any warrants flying), you will take one reduction in rank when joining the CG. The theory is if you transferred from another service at the same rank, you would not fair well on a promotion board due to lack of Officer Evaluation Reports. We get promoted off of our collateral duty accomplishments, not flying abilities. We just expect you to be a good aviator.

We only have 3-4 Herc's with significant center wing box limitations. They are all in Elizabeth City, NC and will be retiring within the next couple of years as 6 C130J's come online. Furthermore, a fleet of CASA 235's will also be coming online in the next few years to replace our current fleet of Falcon jets. Current HQ study figuring out if it's cost beneficial to upgrade our fleet of C130H's or buy more C130J's.

My unit deploys 11 months out of the year and we average 2-3 two week deployments per year. We usually average 500 hours per year and log approx. 100 hrs on each two-week deployment. However I did fly 630+ one year.

I've done a few DCA/DCO boards and we focus some on flying, but also hit the officer leadership qualities fairly heavy.