Originally Posted by
bschref
3) It is true that having flight experience will help give you a slight advantage through Solo... after that everyone is esseintailly equal.
I don't know about that...
solo comes real fast - and up until then, it's just a matter of learning the local procedures and getting used to the airplane. I've found that later on, previous experience gives some guys an edge of varying degrees when suddenly faced with a non-standard situation in the "canned" UPT environment. i.e., more "Situational Awareness" and "Airmanship" (both are graded items on every flight.)
I agree. We had 3 guys in my class with CFII's (me included) and another one with an instr/comm ticket. Together we had about 4000 hours of experience. We wound up 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the class at the end of Phase II. I don't think that was a coincidence. The ones with experience started out strong and continued that way till the end. UPT is definitely a firehose and the more brain cells you can free up for learning new Air Force stuff, the better. Having 4 students with a lot of prior experience was pretty rare. There is usually one or two in a class, but we ended up with a lot.
As far as the Air Force PT standards go, I think they're a joke. Take a look at the charts.:
http://www.af.mil/news/USAF_Fitness_Charts.pdf
I do some running here and there, but don't consider myself a frequent visitor of the gym and I haven't scored below a 95 since I've been in. There are some fat people in the Air Force. I'm sorry, there is. I often wonder how they pass the PT test. This is the "Chair Force". Not the Marines. The Marines do their PT test every 6 months. We do them once a year. They do dead hang pullups, crunches and a 3 mile run. We do pushups, crunches, a 1.5 mile run and have waist measurement, which I think is the most rediculous thing ever.