Originally Posted by
breakfall35
No guarantee unfortunately. You roll the dice coming out of OCS or the Academy. You may find yourself steering a ship in the Bering sea. You can always keep applying though.
That is what I remember. You are definitely rolling the bones and hoping to perform well enough to get that flight slot out of the Academy or OCS. that is a big chance considering you can go to the other DoD service (
) with a guaranteed flight slot.
By wrong, I think he is incorrect. He stated his opinion on what he thought the heirarchy was on the chances of getting a FW slot, and I disagree. From my observation as a former flight student, I saw lots of Navy and Marine studs end up at S. Whiting who had no desire to fly helos. I saw 0 Coasties in that situation. If you wanted FW, you were sunny S. Texas bound! The fact USCG didn't even make his list is another thread all together
.
If the CG needs to force students to go FW to put enough butts in FW seats, to me, that seems a good indicator that you got a pretty darn good chance of getting a FW slot if your dead set on going FW, and not getting stuck in a helo. It has everything to do with it.
Times change for what is available and what the slots are then (well...we know they do). When I was going through, my fellow Coastie buddies said that getting fixed wing was very competitive - relating it to the getting jets out of the pipeline for the USN/USMC SNAs. If your experience is different and they are practically forcing people to go fixed wing then that is good for the time while it lasts - but I'd place a safe bet that the cycle will continue and timing plays a major factor in the outcome.