I didn't say it was the USAF. I said there is no "the Air Force." When you hear "how could the Air Force make him a pilot", or "why would the Air Force promote him", etc. They speak as if the Air Force is a single entity. There was a case where the Eagle community sent a weak player off to an AETC assignment. After said AETC IP had to endure an FEB, it was heard "the Air Force will never send him back to the Eagle." As if there is an over-watching power that screens all decisions and ensures that they are made in the interest of the service. It doesn't happen. The assignments personnel sent him back to the Eagle when they 3-yrs were up, just like they did for all of the other AETC IP's. The majority of the decisions made in the USAF are made with a very localized point of view, we can't even get generals to make their decisions for the good of the Air Force - even (especially) they have agendas.

In that regard, the analogy stands. When flight management makes a decision, they make it from their very localized point of view. When they determine who gets excessed or awarded a bid, they do not take into account the desires of flight training. Anyone who has spent any time in flight training knows that training and ops might as well be in separated companies. When flight training decided to put half of every class in the front seats of the Boeing in '06 because they couldn't train them all in the back, they did so without regard to the millions of dollars it would cost the company in passover pay for no added productivity. When the aircraft acquisitions people were working the 737 buy, then the 757 buy, they put no thought into ensuring the cockpits of the aircraft were standardized amongst the fleet, they made a localized financial decision (at least flight ops got to make some input into that one and change the results).

Just as they did in the Air Force, people talk about FedEx doing things and coming up with all kinds of conspiracies. In reality, they are giving the decision makers too much credit. There is no conspiracy, just bad decision making.