Jetpower

Honestly, with the Reserve taking away the TDART deal I am seriously considering about transferring to active duty Air Force. I don’t have enough hours for the regionals and have a family to feed. However, I already have 8 years of active time as a commissioned guy so might as well do the rest of 12 years in active duty to get the active retirement, then majors? I have also been told that reserve/guard is where you want to be. What do you guys think?


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ItnStln

What's the TDART deal?

tnkrdrvr

The answer to that question is what drives you and what do you expect from the world over the next twelve years. You’ve been active duty. It’s very different from being a Guard/Reserve guy. Afghanistan is over and we seem to be slowly pulling out of Syria. The next twelve years could be a nirvana of training exercises and good deal TDYs or it could be a shooting war somewhere unexpected. It’s a crapshoot and only you know if that’s what you want.

It sucks that TDART was killed right as you were about to slide into it. However, at the rate hiring for airlines is supposed to be, it may be back very quickly. I’d spend a lot of time talking everything over with your wife and come to a consensus decision. You may have a rough year, but everything seems to be lining up for someone in your shoes.

paulcg77

Most likely we'll be in another war somewhere before he gets to 20. I'm not trying to be dramatic; just look at our history. I'll never forget the college history professor I had (who was also a USAR O-6 at the time and retired as a Major General in the national guard) who did an entire lecture on the history of US military intervention since 1783, with a lot of quantitative data points mixed into it. BLUF is that barring an economic disaster, the US seldom goes more than a decade without a major military intervention of some sort that is either on the scale of a conventional war or a major regional conflict. So is it possible he'll go 12 more years without another fight? Sure. But statistically speaking, it's more likely he'll have to deploy to a combat zone in the next 12 years if he's an AD pilot unless he's selected above zone and it either happens at the end of his career when he's reached a certain rank or is no longer flying.

C'est la vie. It's not like he's an E-3 who chose a 3-year enlistment over the fast food industry. It's best to be realistic, and this is what we sign up for. If you're a lifer on either the AD or reserve/guard side of things, you didn't join for just the free degree. The current generation of guys my age hitting 20 years right now literally spent almost their entire careers in a military that was fighting two major wars at once plus multiple side events like Libya and Syria. No one told us in the late 90's/early 2000's that the hippy love fest was going to end so abruptly or that it was going to suck so much for the following two decades, but it is what it is and it could happen again tomorrow if Russia invades Ukraine and China invades Taiwan.

rickair7777

Concur all. But this one time I think we might be taking a break...

The rogue regimes all learned the hard way, or from the mistakes of others. Memory is still fresh.
Iran is facing a tightening gulf coalition that now includes IL of all things... the odds are stacked against them and they know it. Their threat is sea and air obstruction in SoH and NAG... we can remove ALL of that capability in a matter of days with no boots on ground.
NoK is totally isolated, PRC will not go to bat for them if they lash out and junior knows that.

RU might get into the western UA, but then EU/NATO will simply draw the line and re-inforce other Eastern states. I do not see EU or us trying to retake Kiev... there's a reason they are not in NATO (they want to be, bad), while some of their neighbors are. While it didn't get much attention RU announced early this year that their post-cold war re-armament was complete, and they have flattened defense spending. Also if you look at a map and do a little reading you'll conclude that RU and PRC have a long shared border on the RFE. 90% of the RU population is in the west, but the RFE contains a great deal of resources. While RU had some fun poking the US for a few years, they ultimately know that they have a very real and very permanent threat to their security in the form of 2B Chinese who can walk across their border. I suspect they have concluded that the time is right to stop annoying the US and allow us to focus on PRC. US and PRC are competitors, US and RU are sort of competitors... but RU and PRC are potential enemies, and very bad ones at that. I think we'll see a shift where RU is no longer interested in enhancing PRC opportunism because they know that if PRC succeeds in the pacific, the RFE may eventually be on the menu.

PRC and US are still mutually entangled as the two largest economies in the world. PRC does NOT have the ability to take TW, and will not take a chance on failure. They will wait until they're ready, and they are patient. Our old allies (and some significant new ones) are increasing defense spending dramatically and circling the wagons in the western pacific... IMO the calculus is actually shifting against the PRC, at least for a few years. PRC is not stupid, impatient, or prone to impulsive behavior.

Politically the US is in a non-interventionist mode (both ends of the spectrum), I think it would take an attack on the homeland, article 5, or other firm treaty obligation to get us in an MCO right now. Especially boots on ground. The rogue regimes will not sponsor direct attacks on the US, they learned what happens to people even suspected of doing that. So any WMD will have to be independent terror groups acting unsupported. Not only unsupported, but they'd have to hide their presence in the base of operations because nobody wants to even host that sort of activity. The state-sponsored/associated terror groups are strictly forbidden by their handlers from going there for the most part. Might they try to blow up a plane, yes. But I think the rogue regimes don't want to be associated with anything that smacks of WMD (such as crashing planes into buildings). If it happens, I think it would be a very independent, nebulous group acting alone so there wouldn't be anyone to invade.

Always that black swan waiting in the wings, but I could actually see relative stability for 20 years or so.

paulcg77

Fair points - I particularly agree about Taiwan, though of course that is still a possibility. I think the most likely conflagration in the next decade will be Russia taking more of Ukraine. I got a solid 'B' in most of NWC/JPME fleet seminar courses so I don't claim to be an expert on geopolitics or strategy, but I figure if they had the cojones to take Crimea back in 2014, they'll do something again in the next decade. Agree that Ukraine isn't in the EU or NATO pretty much for that reason, and never will be. When the fireworks start the Donbass will go quickly, the Ukrainians will focus on defending Kiev and Shoygu won't stop until the Dnieper, including all of eastern Kiev. The fascinating thing I remember from one of my course tabletop exercises was that Kiev has similar geography to Stalingrad.

I don't think Russia wants to deal with a siege on the western side of the river and for the Ukrainians, Kiev West is the more sacred part of the city so they'll dig in there. Russia probably also doesn't want to go west of the river because then where do they stop? Do they take the whole country and then have another border with the EU at Poland and risk a real confrontation with the US and NATO there? I doubt they want that. At most they'll take everything west of the Dnieper from the Belarus border down to the Black Sea. They'd use eastern Ukraine as a buffer zone and a semi-autonomous republic similar to what Abkhazia currently is, and the rest of Ukraine would end up similar to Georgia right now - a democratic country geographically and culturally part of Europe but left out of all the clubs for fear of provoking Russia.

emersonbiguns

If you're offering over/under, I'll put a paycheck on the under.

Gotta feed the MIC.

Drum

We'll be hot again sometime in '22 NLT. '23

You go to a war college (i.e. some advanced strategic thinking course)

Probably not.


This reads like some trope from a PoliSci Academy cadet.

You should stick to airplanes.

rickair7777

More than I ever hoped to, including O7+ seminars. Also spent way more time than I ever hoped to on major HQ staffs.

You've been reading too many clancy novels.

Duffman

Bruh, you don't have 750 hours? I was in your exact situation, a few years ago.

Go to Sheppard Air to get the gouge on the Commercial conversion. IIRC, it was a really easy written test and maybe an hour at the local FAA FSDO doing paperwork. If you need extra flight time, then just buy it, and you don't even need 750, you need like 700, or maybe even less. Apply to the regionals and they'll pick you up under 750 with the understanding that the sims will count toward some (25 hours, I think) of total time and a lot of them have deals to pay for you to get additional flight time. All of them will pay for your ATP-CTP, and your ATP checkride will be part of your initial training.

Personally, I got my CFI after my commercial conversion while I was flying in the Guard to build time faster. With my very limited civilian flight experience, the CFI was probably 12 hours of studying for every hour of flying because you have to learn the entire civilian syllabus (which you've likely never done) to the degree that you can teach others to be commercial pilots, in an aircraft vastly different from anything you've likely ever flown, under FARs instead of AFMANs and AFIs. Long story short, in my situation it was great to get someone else to pay for my flying, but if time is critical and you don't need more than 100 or so hours, just cough up the money and buy the time. There are other avenues (Cape Air, flying pipeline, skydivers, etc) I just don't know much about them.

Any regional will likely hire you around 700 hours. Even as an FO, you can expect to make about $50k-60k and as a captain you should be making about 6 figures, then add in the extra mil pay on top, and it's a comfortable living. As soon as you hit 1000 hours at that airline (a little over a year if you aren't dropping a lot of mil leave) you can upgrade. COVID messed up the numbers, but it doesn't look like they're going back down anytime soon because all of the airline pilots at the majors trained by the Reagan-era military pipeline are retiring in the next 10 years.

The majors are hiring 9,000 pilots in 2022 and there're only 19,000 regional pilots,19,000 AF pilots (including ANG and AFR), and I think 5,000 Navy fixed-wing (might be off on that number). That may sound like a lot of pilots, but keep in mind the majority of AD are in their 10-year commitments and most of the ANG/AFR pilots are already at a regional/major. It isn't even 2022 and at least half the captains I've flown with in the last two months have been hired by an ULCC, then United, in that order. Jet Blue has been hiring our regional FOs like crazy, and their pay scales, retirement, etc are pretty much price matched to the legacies. I work at a wholly owned AA regional with a very young pilot group, so these guys aren't lifers with 20k hours, they're newly upgraded captains in their 20s-30s. Your biggest issue, will probably be finding a regional that won't go under before you can get to a major because the regionals are struggling to stay staffed. The captains are getting hired faster than FOs can get 1000 hours and go through upgrade. Take away half the captains and you lose half the fleet.

In the airlines, seniority is everything, so your QoL will only continue to improve as people above you leave and new people get hired on, so buying 200 hours today for 6 more months of seniority should be a no-brainer. Captains at the top of the legacy pay scales are making $500k/yr for normal amounts of work. Also, you have to remember that a lot of the O5s in your squadron are stuck in 2009, otherwise they likely wouldn't be there anymore. I saw so many gungho guard pilots go to Delta or United, then I'd see them less and less until they fully disappeared. The process tended to take about a year. I get it. The military doesn't accept half-assery and when you're taking a massive pay cut to commute to a high-stress job, it gets harder and harder to justify. Going to AD for the retirement, in my eyes, is tripping over dollars to save pennies. Financially, passing up 12 years at a major with a 16% 401k direct contribution (the standard), plus the much higher career earnings during those 12 years, and the loss in career earnings at the back of your career at the top of the payscales, just doesn't make sense, especially considering that this hiring wave won't be around forever. The airline industry has downs and some large airlines go BK, fail, etc, but the AF also RIFs and arbitrarily cuts people whenever it's convenient for them as well.

Also, because I'm still in the AFR and I was curious, I used a 401k calculator to figure out roughly how much 12 years of airline work is worth, in terms of retirement. 16% contribution at an average of 150k/yr, starting age 30, retiring at 42, with inflation matching wage growth, 6% growth, life expectancy of 85, it's $1.3M in retirement. So yeah, I'm not gonna pass up on that for the BRS, while being stationed in a rural meth town, for less money than a regional captain.