Originally Posted by
hindsight2020
Go FAIP, it's the best deal going out of T-1s. Get your 3 years in, and hence avoid the inexperienced poolie status for the UAV, work for an AETC ops to ops if you can stomach it, and ride out the current administration and AF policy on palace chase. Do your networking with your Guard/Reserve units of interest and once you get the up and up from AFPC pull the trigger and attempt the palace chase. Worse thing that can happen is you burn bridges which is not that bad considering you're not looking into putting in 20 (although be careful, that active duty paycheck is addicting, I don't care how many SWA/FDX types say otherwise, you can't beat govt cheese and IMO the airlines are not to par pay wise with the stability of that AD paycheck).
I can tell you the ARC lifestyle is much better, my AD counterparts are not a happy bunch, granted I have my own financial hardships as a bum but I'm happy with that opportunity cost. I'm not interested in pursuing the airline (noooo thanks) but if that rat race floats your boat no better way to supplement it (as long as you don't double commute) than being a Guard/Reserve guy. Don't listen to the AD pay your dues "got the T-shirt" crowd, you can pull as much "volunteer opportunities" to the hell hole locales as you want in the Guard/Reserve, to check that container. Rack up that TPIC in AETC, have fun flying your tail off, and try to get picked up by the Guard/Reserves, if you are interested in flying consistently past year 10 of wearing a bag. Good luck.
Exactly what I am thinking. I do have to disagree with you on the the pay argument...
During my casual status I worked at the Airman Family Readiness Center on base where a lot people go to when they are separating from the military to get help on transitioning to the civilian field. Well a lot of our "customers" were VSPers coming in to do mock airline interviews with our interview guy. Anyways I was shocked at how many dudes were getting out and really had no idea if it was a wise financial decision that they were making so I did some research and my research is actually what led me to this site.
As you may or may not know a casual LT has A LOT of time on their hands working at their casual job so I began to develop this excel file to analyze the different career scenarios that are presented to a military pilot in hopes our transition office could use it to provide further guidance to those seeking separation from the military.
Well I spent a lot of time on this excel file and it ended up being a very elaborate file that analyzed many different possible scenarios using pay charts from many different airlines. What I found was that it was definitely a lot smarter financially to get out at 10 years if you were able to get picked up Southwest, Fedex, or UPS(go figure
). That's without even taking into account a possible guard/reserve job. Unfortunately for most of the other airlines it was pretty much a wash most of the time and didn't really matter whether you got out at 10 or 20.
Anyways I'm sure what I'm telling you probably is already common knowledge, but I found it interesting. Ultimately like you said nothing can replace the security of that government pay check though so then it comes down to what makes you the most happy and that's something all of us will just have to answer when the time comes I guess.