A little background: Got picked up by a guard unit and sent to IFT and UPT with no flight experience and I'm currently in phase 3 with not much to go. Told myself back when I got hired that I wasn't going to think about how to gain flight time after seasoning, until I was almost done with UPT. Well, I'm almost there now and I feel it's time to start figuring out what to do after seasoning is up.

I could try bumming and volunteering, but there's quite a few bums and not that much flying to go around, granted things could change by the time I get through the school house. I won't have enough time for a R-ATP, so the regionals are out of the question, heck I won't even have enough time for 135 gigs. CFI perhaps? I'm just trying to get a feel for what's out there and what it's going to take to get the experience required for a regional. I'm married with no kids and have a very flexible civilian gig. I'd really appreciate some advice and opinions.

Volunteer for a deployment?

That's how a lot of us with strat air background got the bulk of our hours post-9/11. Not necessarily a deployment but TDY perpetually on back to back 2-3 week trips sometimes with 12 hours off in between. Yeah, it sucked but I have a decent amount of flight time to show for it.

Do you have any gouge on your units ops tempo? Number of bums that are trying to build time? Not all ANG/USAFR units are created equally. My unit is a trip machine where the unit 1 state over rarely does anything except locals and deploy. If you can feel this out a bit it would help in the short-medium term planning. In reality you will likely be short time to do anything except fly the herc for a year or two after seasoning. At that point it will be upgrade time and you will probably want to just hang and build PIC.

Enjoy this time. I was you once. All I wanted was to get to the next step. Now that I am at where I wanted to be long term, I would kill to be a 20 something flying all over the world with other 20 something's in the herc. Nothing comes close to those memories/type of flying.

It's not a trip machine unit for sure, and based on what some of the new copilots are telling me, things are a little slow. I'm absolutely willing to deploy with whoever has a spot open. Would I also be able to pick up trips with other units? Or is this just an option for deployments?

Maybe deployments with other units, but that is still hard to do. Most unit are fat with CP's that are in your same situation. Most positions that go unfilled for deployments are tactics or some other BS job that is non-flying. Good for the bank account, bad for the logbook. Unfortunately I think you are stuck until you get R-atp mins. At that point you can reevaluate how close you are to upgrade vs. regional route.