This is so wrong, USAF UAV Pilots to get Flight Pay; almost as bad as awarding PresBO the Stanely Cup, you know because he was hoping to teach his two daughters how to ice skate. Anyway, come on now, is not the flight pay there as an incentive to get people to do things that are kind of dangerous? I mean why bother if you are going to give it to people who never leave the ground. And they are going to give it to the sensor operator as well. What a mistake. Makes a mockery of it all.
When I was in the NAV I received Hazardous Duty pay for working on the flight deck, and it truly was hazardous. In 1978 onboard the USS Dwight D Eisenhower we won the "Safety E" for being the safest carrier in the Navy but we averaged 80 eye injuries a month out of a pool of maybe 100 men that worked the flight deck. I remember that number because I accounted for two of that 80 in one month alone. In the worst of the two incidents a piece of super heated non-skid (from an F-14 in afterburner) hit me in the face, right in the goggles I was wearing. A small piece came all the way through the plexan and shattered my glass glasses underneath. A small sliver of glass went into my eye. The good doctors on the Eike removed it and I was back to work a day later.
All for the $55.00 per month extra. Before Taxes. The take home was a mere $44.
H/T to Alert 5
BT: Jimmy T sends.
3 comments:
I see this as almost an insurmountable problem for the AF. Unlike the other branches who have a long history of using non-rated and/or enlisted types as Fighter Duty officers/controllers (FIDOs); gnd FACs, etc., the AF has always insisted on Rated Officers for anything & everything having to do with controlling aircraft.
How they now back down from this limb is going to be a sight to see. And while this pay deal involves only officers--it also exposes the farce that giving "wings" to newly trained UAV oper--excuse me--"pilots" who have never gone thru real pilot tng is . They are only just beginning to see all the morale, promotion and manning in terms of flexibility of assignment (i.e., there IS NO Flexibility for the new UAV niche-trained guys--there's nowhere else for them to go.)
The AF is still burdened by all the Sr. Navs that were back-seat F-4/15C types that once achieved rank of Major were jerked and shoe-horned to Maint, Intel, Logistics etc., ahead of the non-rated, more experienced career JO types in those fields/specialties who were awaiting their own command positions--with much hard feeling all round.
I'm thinking this won't stand coz it's just too frickin' stupid... even for today's oh-so-PC Air Force. But, like Virgil, I think watching the Powers That Be back away from this is gonna be right amusing.
Virgil, funny how that works, when they were Decommissioning S-3 Squadrons where we had two NFO's per aircraft and a single Pilot, the Pilots all got flying jobs but the NFO's were all out looking, most got those IA's out to Quatar or Saudi or even in country in Iraq. This was another reason they wanted to accelerate the P-8 program, to capture some of them NFO's but that did not work.
Buck, yeah it's a mess and it won't clean up without a stain!!
BT: Jimmy T sends.
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