Originally Posted by
rickair7777
In that case he's basically an off-the-street guard baby who has some really good previous relevant experience.
If you're an O3/O4, getting a transition at the same or similar paygrade would probably be near impossible. IIRC HYT limits are cumulative across all federal services, although that may not apply to the guard? So a 12-year O4 might only have eight years available to train and serve on the new platform before facing up or out... and it might be hard to compete for O5 while flying as a wingman when your competitors are dept head, XO, det OIC, etc.
Yeah, I agree, and I didn't say anywhere that an O4 had any chance at all of either a lateral transfer or a RW to FW transition within branch. I said O3 earlier because I saw it happen with an O3 going RW to FW (in branch) but he was relatively junior and had about a year TIG and about 5 years total commissioned time when he went back to transition. When he went directly to Corpus for intermediate/advanced he was about a year senior in date of rank to the JO's who do their first tour u/w in the fleet then apply for flight school as senior O2's and get winged as first or second year O3's. I remember a few of those when I went through too. Never even heard of an O4 or higher doing it, but that's why I mentioned O3. It definitely also depends on your branch. In the CG, right when I was going in and again a few years ago after I was long gone, they were in a situation where they didn't train enough FW aviators or had an imbalance for whatever reason and offered a few slots for RW aviators to transition. The guys who did it still had to go back and do intermediate and advanced multi-engine on the pegasus but they were already winged aviators and they got to skip primary, obviously. I haven't seen this happen to my knowledge in the navy though the navy also has a much larger pilot intake and can compensate for pipeline/operational imbalances much more efficiently. We also had warrant officers flying E2's off carriers when I first came into the navy and that's long over, so things do change.
About your other point, I don't know about USAF RW training but I think Army RW bros do almost everything on helos in flight school and don't get FW turbine time in primary like we all do regardless of pipeline, so I assume they'd basically be re-starting. With that said, I think if they're a rated RW aviator already, they'll have a huge leg up in UPT and they'll be a more competitive candidate than off the street civilians with a PPL or less because they've already demonstrated they can successfully get through the abbreviated firehose nature of a highly structured/disciplined military flight school.