I would really appreciate some insight as to the daily regimen of a USAF fighter, bomber, heavy pilot.  I will use this information to try to make a sound decision when going for my own slot.  Thank you in advance for the info!

I'll answer for the bomber guys.

Our days are more or less divided into "flying" and "non-flying" days. Bomber guys fly about 4-6 times a month, give or take, depending on experience level. Younger guys and instructors fly more often and mid-level and senior squadron guys fly less often. Our average sortie duration is anywhere from 6.0-10.0 hours, depending on mission/training requirements. Ground ops tack on another 2.5. Brief and debrief add another 2-3 hours, so on flying days you're looking at an 10.5-15.5 hour average work day. The day prior to a flying day is usually a mission-planning day, and you'll be scheduled for an 8-10 hour block to get all the planning, paperwork, mission briefs, etc done.

On non-flying days, the hours are pretty much 7:30-4:30. Besides flying, you'll have an additional duty. New guys are usually snack-o- they keep the snack bar stocked. Other guys work in training, scheduling, weapons, etc. You'll get scheduled for periodic academic classes and ops desk duty, too. Other than that, the time is yours to read and study manuals, go to the intel valut and study up on threats and tactics, complete USAF-level training (mostly computer-based), and do whatever other stuff you need to get done.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have other questions.

Thank you very much for your insight into this matter.  I will use it to my advantage.

 

Pell

Here's what Herk gusy go through when we fly tac.

If we're flying day tac, we show at 0500 (for a 1000 takeoff) at which time we sign in and take care of our formation duties (flight plans, weather and NOTAMS, route sticks, etc).  We breif as a formation at 0615.  That lasts about an hour or so.  After that we brief as individual crews going over our routes for the day and if we have any extra time, we do ground training.  At 0815 we step to the jets.  Once you get out to the plane you gotta rush.  You've got to load radios, do the SKE checklist, check your instruments, and build your nest.  Before takeoff we have comm check-in, engine start and taxi (all per a timeline).  We fly for 5 hours (unless we break, weather forces us down, etc).  We fly tac (vis low level and SKE formation) and cover 3 routes with 3 airdrops.  This usually gives us around an hour to do pro until our land time (5 hours after takeoff).  Debreifing lasts around 1-1.5 hours.  We pretty much have the same type of day as USAFAstriver has when we don't fly.

I got a buddy who is torn between whether or not to try and fly. He is a Junior and has to turn in his Categorization dream sheet today and was asking some questions maybe you guys can answer:

He wants to do anything besides sit behind a desk...he is a real tactical type of guy....doesn't want to sit in an office and he is trying to decide b/w flying, OSI and possibly putting in for CRO.

He has some good questions that even I am interested in hearing the answers to:

1. How long can you fly in your career before they make you fly a desk?
2. Does the 12 year commitment seem like too much once your on AD ,or does it fly by b/c you are on the tip of the spear, really busy, etc?...

You're always going to have some aspect of deskwork to your job in the USAF. As a pilot, I fly about once a week, and when I'm not flying I have additional duties to take care of. There's a lot of office work that goes into running a squadron, and someone has to do it. But the opportunity to fly more than makes up for whatever desk work we put in each week. The guys who fly the most are the instructors (senior Captains and Majors). Once you get past Major you fly about twice a month to stay basically qualified in the jet because your staff job takes up the rest of your time.

If your buddy really wants to do nothing but fly for his whole career, he should seriously consider changing branches and becoming a Warrant Officer in the Army. Have him talk to a recruiter about how that whole process works.

When you fly, you're only "guaranteed" one flying tour. After that it's all luck of the draw. There are a lot of guys who fly their whole careers, but you have to take a "career broadening" (read "staff") tour eventually. A lot of guys in my squadron are being picked up for ALO tours right now, and a lot of fighter guys are being picked up for UAVs. After a few years playing Army, ALO guys will come back to their airframes; the UAV pipeline is still up in the air right now.

I'm still a new guy, but the time is definitely flying by. Whenever you start getting comfortable with something, the AF makes you learn something else; it keeps things new and exciting. The commitment is pretty much irrelevant to me right now because I love my job and I'd want to fly even if I was a civilian with no commitment (except the ENORMOUS amount of debt from all that flying time) to serve.

For your buddy, if he doesn't want to sit behind a desk then drop OSI. That's 99% desk stuff and doesn't live up to the hype. CRO would be a cool job but as an officer it would be a lot of desk stuff, as well.

Striver laid out the career progression for the typical pilot. After your first ten years it becomes harder to stay away from a desk. If you're in a flying position, which is doable, it's likely not your "main job". Your main job will be some ADO position or Chief of Queep or something along those lines and you'll fly enough to stay current. But most of your time will be behind a desk.

Unfortunately, the Queep (non-flying desk job bullshit that usually doesn't really add anything to the mission) is startling. Young guys don't know any better but for FGOs like myself that can remember pre-911 operational flying life...it's getting worse and getting worse quickly. I know all the old guys always talk about how it's gotten bad but I really think it's true. The current Air Force Times cover hosts an article about disbanding the Air Force. Civilian leadership is calling the Air Force a bankrupt institution and the GOs are predicting gloom and doom. We have two wars ongoing with objectives not met, old equipment, and we are continually cutting our own throats by kicking people out of the military.

On the operational side of the house, we flyers find ourselves having to do everything! There is no support anymore. Finance is being disbanded and finance functions have been put into a software program which is run by pilots. I am one such person and I spend a large part of my time as a finance officer approving travel vouchers and orders and adding and subtracting and asking for money etc etc. A large part of time is spent doing this additional duty even though I'm a line flyer. Much of the daily business stuff that was done by a support staff and by a support group has been converted into some software and given to the individual flyers to do or for a flyer to do as an additional duty. Unfortunately, the software often sucks and doesn't work which is pretty painful. You'd think you could get your computer support people to fix these issues right? Wrong. They aren't in your squadron and are "consolidated" for the base some place that isn't convenient and they are so busy as to be pretty much useless. Hard working warfighters are told, "Been fighting for years in Afghanistan and Iraq in the worst ops tempo in the entire Air Force to the detriment of your family? Fuck you, move to Clovis so we can gain a base that only hinders our mission fighting ability a little bit but scores some nice political points for GOs and politicians. Your wife refuses to put your kids in the worst schools in New Mexico? Well, she didn't sign a 10 year after wings commitment so she can leave but you're stuck." Now you may wonder about the legality of posting this kind of opinion online. Don't ask Colonel NumNuts the JAG though because that fuck-stick was disbarred and the Air Force didn't even know and let him do an entire career illegally. You'd think the GO JAG in charge would have been able to find this out about his people but he was too busy banging enlisted women when he wasn't kicking two stripers and Capts out for fraternization to know about that. Now that he's retired with a full military pension he probably has more time for such stuff.

There is so much queep it's fucking retarded. "Leadership" that can't say "Sorry, boss, but I can't do more with less" answering to leadership that only cares about the big paycheck they'll make when they go through the revolving door into a fat contractor position with Boeing or Lockheed Martin ("sure, let's buy some more Ospreys - that's a great idea!!")...and you have an Air Force where nukes can go unaccounted for probably because somebody wasn't able to log their "Don't Let Nukes Out of Your Site Training" on AirForcePortal.Com because their fucking CAC card reader didn't work. UNCLE!!!

The Air Force is all kinds of fucked up right now. It's a clown show from the word go because the culture is all fucked up. "Perception is reality"...."perception is reality"....repeat that to yourself and one day you too will believe it, live it, and get promoted. And you'll also only work for perception knowing that reality doesn't actually matter. So it doesn't matter if the Air Force is actually broken as long as your powerpoint presentation gives the perception that it isn't. For those crusty bastards that won't "drink the kool-aid" and refuse to keep their mouths shut and instead raise their hand and say "this is stupid....timeout...knock it off" they will get the "choose your battles" speech by spineless leadership that never ever battled or risked anything for their worthless careers.

While we have this culture nobody will challenge the stupid ass "do more with less" slogan even though it's common knowledge that the Air Force is broken. Nobody will tell the emperor that his weiner is showing and the queep will continue to build up until we UAVs are in full effect and we can do queep 99% of the time and leave the UAV flying to others.

I hate to be that guy especially with you young dudes but the truth is....it'll be fun for the first part of your 12 year commitments because it's new.....then get ready for the suck. There are few good deals left in the Air Force and it's only getting worse.

Just my crusty bad attitude opinion...please challenge it.

Actually I take that back about it being fun at first. You'll pretty much walk into a meat grinder and get spit out. I've seen it several times with sharp motivated top of their class new LTs that walk into the squadron beaming. Within a year they walk through the hallways like ghosts as everyone else does. Of course this all depends on what airframe you go to, etc etc.

I'm making generalizations which I think fit. There are exceptions. There are good leaders in leadership positions and there are good decisions coming from the top (smaller OPR for example). And there are plenty with it much worse than we've got it (ie Army).

The good news is it has to change. The Air Force can't continue this way.

Wow Ryno you should come be a AFROTC Recruiter after your current assignment...or make rank and fix this stuff before I commission...Thanks for the depressing yet real world description.

ROTC instructor isn't open to pilots according to the last message I saw advertising that job....and there is an even less chance of me making rank. One of the side effects of being an O-4 that refuses to get a master's degree while doing 12 hour days at work and won't do ACSC by correspondence for the same reason. If the Air Force wants to give me actual time to educate myself instead of, AGAIN, dictating the "perception is reality" approach to education (ie a Bullshit fake degree from Embry Riddle), then I would be more than willing to get a masters degree. I'd even pay for it myself. But the Air Force doesn't care if you're actually more educated and smarter...they just want you to check the box. But I can't check the box without my job suffering at work and making LtCol just isn't worth it.

Fixing the system and changing it from the inside? I'm good at identifying problems that need to be fixed (bitching) but the actual fixing part requires somebody much more talented than myself. I'm just not that good. ROTC Recruiter? Yeah I could handle that one.

There has to be somebody out there that's been a pilot for awhile that disagrees with me, though. Somebody express a different opinion and give us all hope...PLEASE....

Haha I thought of this thread while doing research for a Political Science/Communication course. Sounds like we should all be voting for Mitt Romney cause he wants to fix the 'broken' military. He wants to increase troop levels across the board and raise military spending to at least above 4% of the GDP. There is some very interesting/motivating stuff here:

http://mitt-tv.mittromney.com/?showid=47221
http://www.mittromney.com/Issue-Watch/Defeating_the_jihadists

BTW Ryno looks like we might as well PM each other cause no one else has an opinion...

Actually one young operational pilot PMed me and unfortunately had the same thing to report on the Air Force's misplaced value system (queep taking up 99% of the priority in an operational flying squadron during two wars with objectives not me). He's one of the young sharp Lts that this screwed us system is going to try to beat down. He brought up the guys hiding in the back to do master's and PME work. I thought that was funny. I see that all the time. Guys closing doors to try to get time to work on some queepish paper for ACSC and I can only think of all the lost man hours and how that "education" isn't going to pay off at all for the Air Force.

I think we might need some Marine GOs to spend time running the Air Force and getting it back in gear. The Marines have an outstanding warrior culture and unshakeable integrity. They haven't been corrupted by the money politics. "Your multi-million dollar system doesn't help my boys get the mission done? Cut it." They do what makes sense and they kick ass in combat. We need to give up our money contracts and big budgets and trade it in for whatever they got.

Ryno,

Unfortunately, I see the same things you see in the Air Force.  I was one of those beaming new Lts, but now I see the truth.  The topic of switching jobs comes up too much in our group of CGOs.  We constantly talk about how good things used to be.  People talk about the good deals they had (of course before 9/11).  However, there are a few people out there that really enjoy their jobs and this can rub off on other people.  But then you get VSP and force shaping and then these people leave.  Being a younger guy, at least I can enjoy the flying (but that gets ruined from time to time).  Anyway, the Air Force is in a sad shape and I doubt anything will ever be done to fix it.

It's not too much different in any other career field either.  The "do more with less" mentality is very prevalent in my job.  I'm a nuclear weapons officer at Minot, and it sucks really bad.  Our leadership does not care about us at all, and morale is horrible.  I agree with Ryno on this one, but for just about every career field.  I'm going for pilot in the USAF, but also in the USN.  I'm not really diggin the Air Force mentality anymore, even though they already paid for two degrees so far.

Beast

I’ve spoken to quite a few Guard pilots (most were former active duty AF) and they all seem to echo that life in the Guard beats the hell outta life on active duty. One Capt I talked to flies full-time for the guard on counter-drug ops and he said it’s the best job he’s ever had. Can anyone else elaborate on the administrative / operational differences between the Guard and AD AF??

Ryno, would flying full-time for the Guard be one on the "few good deals" left (i.e. like winning the lottery), or is this pretty common?

I don't think full time Guard jobs are common. They're competitive from what little I know. Is it a good deal? That depends on the unit, the mission, the people, and the location I guess.

I think part time Guard at a location you like with an aircraft you like is the way to go. Then pay the bills with a normal job that allows you to make good money for your 12-14 hour days and allows you the flexibility to quit or move if you don't like it. That way you can fly because you enjoy it and want to kill bad guys when there are bad guys that need to be killed...but you don't find yourself stuck with a 12 year committment, a UAV or some other job you "didn't sign up for," and no good options.

Things have changed boys. I can no longer in good conscience recommend people go active duty to become a pilot. In my opinion it's not a good road anymore. I can remember the days when it was good but those days are gone. Sucks to come to this conclusion but there it is.

Sure is a lot of bitter floating around here.

The BS
It's everywhere. Always has been, always will be. I was in well before 9-11 and it was there too. Maybe not as noticeable, but given my job as SELO, I saw it everyday. I was actually taken on off the flying schedule for a full week in 2000 to get our master pubs up to date for a SAV. I'd much rather deal with the BS and get to blow shit up than deal with the BS and fly a bus (civilian) or a desk. I'm sure there are many jobs in the civilian world I'd enjoy, but flying fighters just can't be done out there.

As for the schools/education... doing it, don't like it. Much like most everything I do in the AF, I work to find the efficient way possible to accomplish the mission and then proceed, so these tasks (Masters/ACSC) become just another drop in the bucket, almost unnoticeable now. Words of wisdom to the young: get your Masters while you're a Lt. You probably have more time available to you and the AF will pay for it without adding any time to your ADSC, and it leaves more options open later on.

The Flying...
What can I say. Much like everyone else in the AF, I've deployed my share of times, to several different countries, though they all seem the same color to me. Unlike many pilots, I got to see it from the cockpit of a fighter. A few hundred hours and 50,000 rounds of 30mm CM (fired in anger) later, I wouldn't have given up the experience for the world. I get asked all the time by visiting cadets, young enlisted (hoping to be pilots), etc. about whether they should fly fighters or heavies. It comes down to this: You can fly a Cessna whenever you want... You can fly heavies when you get out. You only get one chance to fly a fighter.

The Guard...
I was stationed at a guard base for three years. The lifestyle was amazing. Four day work weeks, endless TDYs (airshows/CSAR/SnowBird, etc.) and an amazing wealth of knowledge and experience in the old dudes. Full time jobs are few and far between. Even getting one of those doesn't guarantee that you'll fly what you signed on to fly. The guard squadron I flew fighters with now flies C-21s. What's the word to guys they hired that are currently in the pipeline? "You can fly C-21s, or you can look for another job. Let us know what you want to do." And the guys currently in the squadron? You can fly C-21s or get out. What do you want to do? Guard/Reserve are getting hit just as hard as the AD for resources/training. Life isn't all that much better anymore, though you do normally have the option to get out whenever you want.

The glass is half full...
I tend to be optimistic. Kinda sorta being part of squadron leadership lets me see what effect I can have on the future of the AF. Right now, I'm helping to create those shiny happy LTs roaming the halls of fighter squadrons around the world. They see the BS from Day 1. I don't blow smoke up their ass about it either. You can control how miserable you become in the AF. I know I can't change the AF, but I can have a great effect not only on the morale of the squadron, but on how we accomplish our mission. When we do it right and do it well, everyone's happy. The reduction of funds/resources to accomplish the mission has been a fact of life for decades. It's nothing new to the civilian world and certainly nothing new to the military. We'd love to have unlimited resources to accomplish our mission. We complete it with what we have and what we can acquire. If we cannot complete our assigned mission, we tell our bosses why and how we can fix it. It's amazing what you can do with a little creative thinking and some motivated guys. It's not going to change the world, but it does make life better for the locals.

I can't say I disagree with everything you've said, but here's the countering perspective you've asked for. I've been around the AF since '93. It sure as hell hasn't been great times for myself and my family all the time, but we make do with what we have and we're proud to be a part of our nation's defense. I'm not on the front lines anymore, but I will be again soon (PCS). I can't wait to get back out there and make a difference in the lives of those I'll be working with and the mission of my new squadron.

Thanks for the been-there-done-that perspective. You make good points and I really like your statement "if we cannot complete our assigned mission, we tell our bosses why and how we can fix it." If there were more people with your attitude in leadership positions I don't think we would have gotten to this low. I hope that realist perspective becomes more prevalent and I think it will now that we've gotten some new leadership. The've stopped the drawdown and I'm sure they're investigating just how broken the system is. Once they do so I think we'll see support functions get built back up again. I'm feeling more optimistic these days myself.