Robot mail

AFPC is the Air Force Personnel Center, the folks who manage manning for the whole service. They periodically send out automated emails advertising jobs they need to fill. Lately the most common ones have been 365s to Iraq or Afghanistan for various purposes. Recently I got a couple of interest.

There is a new airframe being spun up by the Air Force, the RC-12 Liberty Ship. This is a light twin engine airplane (a Beechcraft King Air if memory serves) that they are going to slap some sensor balls on and start flying all over Iraq. I wonder if this is because they are having trouble fielding enough UAVs, and/or recruiting enough pilots for them. I flew the T-44 in pilot training, which is extremely similar to the King Air (about 700#s less)...I don't know if I'd want to fly it in the desert.

The other email is a request for pilots who can no longer pass the normal flight physical who might be interested in UAVs. As the "blood from stone" post a few days back noted, the Air Force is suddenly desperate for pilots for this field. This publicity we've gotten is an interesting way to understand how big organizations work. Based on the press, you would expect that the UAV world is a big, up and coming field and it's a great place to be.

Well, it is up and coming. And in a big picture sense, it's a good place to be. I am getting to see and learn things here that not many people get to see and learn. And in the long run, the UAV world, both military and civilian, is only going to get bigger. But...at the tactical level (i.e., day to day), all this publicity and growth makes things very chaotic at my level. We just non-vol'd (sent people who didn't want to go) to Holloman AFB to help set that up. And we are now looking for some more people (volunteers or otherwise) to go to the schoolhouse/FTU squadron. But that squadron is also moving to Holloman next year, so those people will also be moving. So there is very little certainly about where many of us will be in the very near future. That type of uncertainty was the reason I took this job in the first place, but I didn't escape it here.

~
published 8oct08

Financial industry story

A friend sent me the following article which provides a bit more insight into the financial mess, and also contains a link to the NPR story it references.

My absentee ballot

Just thought people might be interested in seeing an Illinois absentee ballot.

http://www.vote-smart.org Voting guides (that is, information about candidates) for elections from the local to the national level.

Blood from a stone

We recently increased our workdays here due to the massive increase in ops tempo we (the UAV world) have gone through. I'm afraid our leadership is going to learn the wrong lesson from this, the wrong lesson being, "They're UAVs, every time we push them harder, we get more back."
This would lead them to believe that they can just keep pushing and just keep getting more back. I watched same thing happen in the desert: They asked for massive increase in ops and got it, then they asked for more, until finally we were all flying 12 hour days praying no one went DNIF or crashed one because it would mean a reduction in ops.

We already don't have any training lines, which is already bad enough. For those with no AF flying experience, most of the flying (60%? 75%?) a squadron does is training, even during a war. In the UAV world, the operational squadrons have zero dedicated training flights in a given day.

The following are a couple of articles referenced in an email from a friend who asked me about it.

Article 2, Air Force Times

-----Original Message-----
From: David Witt
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 15:43
To: X
Subject: FW: Fly opportunity


Yeah, we got a slightly early heads up on this. Big picture, I have no problem with lower level experience folks showing up here.

Small picture, what this means is that they OUGHT to get a lot more training than I got...but they probably won't, which means the already low average level of our experience will get even lower, and we will see a lot sloppier ops. This is your typical AF knee jerk reactions, all about quantity, quality goes straight out the window.

How's things?

-----Original Message-----
From: X
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 1:14 AM
To: Witt, David
Subject: FW: Fly opportunity

Interesting... not that I'd want to fly (or rather: to be responsible for that much $$ with my Murphy's law luck), but some dad's just won't let their dreams die. But it made me think - what are your thought on this, since you've seen two of the three sides first hand? Forgive me if you've addressed this in your blog, its been a few days since I've taken a peak.

-X

~~~
Up and Away: The Air Fo rce envisions building a force of 1,100 unmanned aircraft operators-up from today's pool of about 450-by Fiscal 2012 to support 50 continuous MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper combat air patrols under two new initiatives announced Tuesday at AFA's Air & Space Conference. The initiatives will develop a new cadre of UAV operators that do not have experience operating other combat aircraft, and in some cases, have no real previous flying experience at all, service officials said. "This will certainly be a cultural change," Brig. Gen. Lyn Sherlock , director of air operations on the Air Staff, told reporters during a press briefing.
Previously, the service has drawn its UAV operators from the ranks of more experienced pilots. But with the insatiable demand for UAVs, not only for overhead surveillance, but also for strike and additional roles, the Air Force is taking this new approach. Under the first initiative, the Air Force will select about 10 percent of its next batch of graduates from undergraduate pilot training in October-about 100 airmen-for training in UAV operations at Creech AFB, Nev. The second, more radical concept entails creating a new career field for UAV operators by choosing active-duty officers from various technical and non-technical backgrounds to teach to teach them to fly the UAVs. These officers will get some introductory flight training at Pueblo, Colo, and then go straight into Predator training "to bring them up to fully qualified mission status," said Brig. Gen. Darrell Jones , director of force management policy on the Air Staff. To see if this idea has long-term legs, there will be a two-part "beta test" program, he said. An initial class of 10 officers will start training in January until next fall. A second class of 10 will start next summer and finish before the end of 2009, Sherlock said. If those two test runs prove successful, the Air Force would then start accepting larger classes, Jones said.

~
published 8oct08

How to do a records review

HQ AFPC/PBR4
550 C Street West, Suite 5
Randolph AFB, TX 78150-4707

Email: Records.Review@randolph.af.mil
FAX: DSN: 665-2693
Comm: (210) 565-2693

Read the full description here.

The fiancial crisis...

...means I am getting a lot more calls from my mortgage company asking if I want to refinance. I've gotten at least 3 in the last 4 days.

Politics

Just some interesting links during this political season.

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/ Shows combined polling data. Current projected electoral votes: McCain 261 / Obama 243.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ Similar, a little more graphical though.

http://www.factcheck.org/ Non-partisan fact verification. Sarah Palin did put the state jet on eBay, it just didn't sell there.

the myth of the free market...

With the recent news of the Fannie May and Freddy Mac bailouts, I thought it might be interesting to go over the exact process of a bailout.

So here's how it goes. A privately owned or publicly traded company gets itself into financial troubles, in this case by buying a whole bunch of debt (in the form of mortgages). Unfortunately, they vastly overestimate the face value of these items. (E.g., a 30-year mortgage for $250,000 ought to be worth $250k over 30 years (simplified here by leaving out interest). However, they purchased hundreds of thousands of these and overlooked the fact that many of these new homeowners had no possible means to to pay $250k, even over 30 years.) So they pay a bunch of money for something and actually get nothing in return. When this becomes apparent, everyone who's loaned them money comes asking for it, and the company approaches the verge of collapse. Then, for whatever reason (friends in high places usually), the federal government decides that allowing such a company to go under would be "bad for America" and steps in with a bunch of cash to fund the debt of such a company. That cash comes from tax payer dollars. The net monetary effect is to take tax money from every American and transfer it to a few Americans. (Slightly different this time, see below). It also prevents what free-marketeers say is the upside to a free market, that the company in question (and the people that invested in it) get punished for their poor choices, thus preventing such problems in the future. (This is why Dick Cheney was against the housing market bailout.)

Savings and Loan scandal of the late 80s/early 90s followed the same pattern. Bear-Stearns was similar, and rumor is Lehman Brothers is next.

This type of action, which occurs at regular intervals in America, is the antithesis of the free market.

The new wrinkle with Fannie and Freddy is that for perhaps the first time, the majority of the investors in question were foreigners. Meaning that rather than sending tax dollars to a few select Americans, we sent that money overseas. America is being sold for parts, and it's being done by the very institutions that are supposed to protect it.

~~~
14 Sep: Anne's link: NPR link

Fringe

I heard about this new show coming out, Fringe. I think I'm going to like it as much as I did the first time...when it was called The X-Files.

Cold war

Given the political chicanery and inefficacy I've observed in this country in my lifetime, looking back, I'm actually quite surprised some crazy SOB didn't get us all killed during the Cold war.

Salaama Laykum

I recently saw Traitor, starring Don Cheadle , and it may be the smartest movie I've seen about the GWOT yet. Thumbs up!

Office 2007

The AF recently switched over to Office 2007 at work...am I the only one totally dumbfounded by the new menus (or I guess they are called "Ribbons" now...)? Just when I had learned a bit about the things Office could do and how to do them, they go and change it...