Originally Posted by
CX500T
Navy hinders themselves with no "guard" equivalent, so Naval Aviators are basically 10 years from the day you walk in the door to OCS, to can go start your civilian job. (8 years post wings, hard to do OCS and flight school in under 2 these years, although I did it in 18 months in 2001-02)
I say this as a Navy guy, if I could have changed anything I did, I would have gone and flown either heavies or fighters out of the MA or close by ANG.
I wouldn't go back and change anything, I wasn't at all airline oriented when I joined the Navy, but in retrospect guard/USAFR would have been far more conducive to a flying career and ultimate airline seniority position.
I'm 90% sure the Navy did actually have reserve OTS pilots maybe as recently as the early 80's. But today's USNR really isn't in the wholesale business of providing operational force structure to the AC, they prefer (or more accurately AC prefers) that the reserves just provide staff augmentation.
The "Naval Reserve" name was changed to "USNR" about a decade ago... the AC did that because congress had earmarked certain funding and hardware for "Naval Reserve". When that ceased to exist, those resources largely defaulted to Big Navy.
This year the USNR is being re-focused from "operational support" to "strategic depth", which from my perspective will mean less involvement in current ops and more schools and local training, which will inevitably be a bit out of context with the real world. They're doing it for two reasons...
1. Bench strength for MCO (PAC AOR obviously).
2. So the AC doesn't have to deal with RC as much.
But in my experience, operational support allowed RC personnel (some but not all) to be well spooled-up to drop right into an MCO. At the HQ/MAJCOM staff level, which is where the majority of the RC is assigned anyway. Rant off.