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