A funny thing popped up while I was reading about F-35s, regarding the Air Force’s labor problem.
I have a confession to make, here: at one point in my life I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Then, I discovered that you are disqualified if you need glasses. But, they’ll take you on as a maintenance tech. Um… No. The Air Force’s ads all feature the combat jets, everyone looking like they are straight out of The Right Stuff but the fact of the Air Force is that it’s mostly maintenance. You don’t get much choice what you’ll be doing, really, but I suppose if you wanted to learn to weld or something like that, it’d be a great start. But most of the people who look at an Air Force career fancy the idea of booming into the sky strapped onto an F-whatever and maybe dropping a few bombs on cowering civilians when they’re not dog-fighting eachother, burning lots of jet fuel, and posing in leather jackets. It appears to me that there was a great wave of propaganda about the myth of the fighter pilot, in order to bolster Britain’s flagging militarism, following WWII – the “Battle of Britain” and Larry Niven and all that, with the long scarves and what what.
If he didn’t stand in that girl pose, he’d be taller and she wouldn’t have to crouch down to put her arms around his shoulders. Just sayin’…
I’m not sure how a career in military aviation translates into being a good civilian pilot, but there’s a lot of crossover – so I suppose we could say that being a pilot in the Air Force prepares one to be a civilian pilot (e.g.: Sullenberger) but it’s probably pretty boring, after all that bomb-dropping and afterburning and such. And it turns out that the Air Force has a labor problem: it’s hard to retain those expensively trained F-35 pilots. At first I thought, “show me one look at that helmet I’d be wearing, and you’d have problems keeping me on the job, too!” but apparently the fighter pilot’s pay is mostly: getting to fly. It’s not seen as the dangerous, boring, activity that it is, the Top Gun marketing has worked. But: [defenseone]
Before the pandemic, the Air Force offered retention contracts as short as three years to pilots completing their initial ten-year commitments. Seizing on the collapse of airline hiring in 2020, though, the service changed the terms of its contracts. Gone are three- and four-year contracts; the shortest pilot contract is now five years, which gets you about 70 percent of the maximum retention bonus. To get the full amount authorized by Congress – $35,000 per year – the Air Force requires at least an eight-year commitment. These are hardball terms compared to past years and are a strong bet that airline pilot hiring will be weak for an extended period.
I think I see your problem, Air Force: you pay your highly trained jet fighter pilots about the same amount as the line ‘cook’ at Chipotle, who wraps the burritos. And they get tips, whereas Air Force pilots do not.
Also, the Air Force understands perfectly well that it’s necessary to lock employees into lengthy contracts because 95+% of those Air Force jobs are going to be shit jobs where you spend a lot of time taking orders from people you think are stupid. I suppose that’s the same in any big business, An Air Force general makes just under $200,000/year so maybe there’s another piece of the Air Force’s puzzle. It’s the usual lop-sided, top-heavy, shit job with an 8-year contract. Oddly, the Air Force doesn’t seem to realize that a contract that forces you to stay in a shit job is a massive liability. Imagine if silicon valley companies started trying to get employees to sign up for 8-year stints, the programmers would be demanding millions of dollars in stock options. If you want me to chain myself to the deck of your sinking ship, damn right that costs extra.
Finally, Air Force pilots are poised to leave active duty, not stay, according to our research. Despite the incredibly dire economic and health conditions in 2020, only 51 percent of the Air Force’s eligible pilots signed retention contracts, a small increase from recent years. Of those pilots who signed retention contracts last year, though, we found that 33 percent signed on for only three years. The rest stayed on active duty without service commitments and are now free agents able to depart on short notice. Air Force pilots are keeping their options open and believe airline hiring will return soon, offering better opportunities.
Of course. I can’t see how the geniuses at the top expect “brand loyalty” when they’re paying crap wages. The old “get training for a great civilian job” scam; the problem being you don’t know what training you’ll obtain. I was a 76-V MOS, which is: “material storage and handling specialist.” I was trained how to operate a forklift. That came in handy in my civilian life exactly twice: once when I used a forklift to move a pallet of stuff (and everything went fine) and another time when the dockworkers’ union was striking during Balticon and I hot-wired a forklift belonging to the convention center and moved several pallet-loads of boxes of books. Then, a lady who thought I was an official forklift driver ran up on me and started cussing me out for being on strike (!) I was shouting back at her that obviously I was not on strike and I was actually a volunteer, when I ran the fork of the forklift right through a steel fire-door. That ended my adventure; I recovered my alligator clips and wire and faded back into the crowd, mission accomplished. Anyhow, the point being that it’s a question whether or not you’ll learn anything useful in the military, though I admit it shows that you can be socialized well, to be part of a group.
But the Air Force is a clusterfuck, as they say: [wp]
To rebalance the numbers, the Air Force rejected far more cadets than in past years. The cuts were so drastic that they swallowed up cadets with excellent grades and high fitness marks, according to current and former Air Force officials, sending scores of families into financial panic after scholarships vanished.
How do you re-balance from the bottom by cutting enrollment? That’s incredibly stupid. The Air Force’s problem, as stated, is a barnacle-like encrustment of senior people who are clinging on for every dollar that they can get – so you cut at the bottom? That’s basically a stupid move right out of the playbook of any corporate capitalist organization: protect the bosses, cut the pay of the line cooks. It’s how and why you wind up with executives (general officers) making $200k/year and a pension, while the F-35 pilots are working for chump change. Basically, “does anyone want this shit job?” is the recruitment call.
They absolutely should open all military jobs to anyone with a metabolism who can pass a physical, and dangle the offer of citizenship, like the Romans did. That approach worked quite well, when citizenship was valuable. But because of its racism and stupidity, that’s the one option the US will refuse to take, no matter what. You know what I think they should do? Give incentive stock options to the military – stock options in the USA. If the pentagon manages to reduce spending, some of that spending is loaded onto the options pool; the more effective you make the military, the more money you get when you become a citizen. And, of course, there needs to be a pro-active retirement program to get rid of the massive overhang of senior officers. Maybe have a war and expect them to actually deploy to the combat zone, and receive a bit of what they’ve been dealing out, or retire.
Congressional representatives, retired officers and a wave of parents and students pressed the Air Force behind closed doors to reexamine decisions to reject 1,000 cadets, an Air Force official said. Policy officials relented Thursday evening, reinstating 400 cadets, about 130 of whom won back scholarships.
This is called “micromanaging the drops in your bucket.”
I can’t get over Cruise’s expression in the movie poster. It’s a combination of “I’m tough and macho but I have heart-burn from the tequila and nachos and I feel like I have to burp.” Amazing what people thought was cool and macho in the 80s.
But the Air Force pilots get free room and board. And exercise training, so that’s like a free gym membership. And time in the simulator, so that’s like free video games.
Reginald Selkirk@#1:
But the Air Force pilots get free room and board. And exercise training, so that’s like a free gym membership. And time in the simulator, so that’s like free video games.
The free room and board are hardly 4 star, until you get general rank. But let’s say it’s worth $15,000/yr or so. That’s way better than working at Chipotle, except for the 8-year contract. And a playstation is a couple hundred bucks. If they were paid more they might be more excited about the job.
To be fair – I cannot imagine the effort level to learn how to operate an F-35. It has to be mind-blowing (I always wondered how an idiot like GWBush was able to flight qualify in jets) (nepotism maybe?) that’s a lot of hard work for what amounts to peanuts for a tech worker. So the Air Force’s shit jobs are somewhat better than working at Chipotle or Amazon, and way less lucrative than doing website coding or database administration, or plumbing.
It’s funny that you mention Top Gun (by chance released May 12, 1986) above this paragraph:
The Video Game Crash of 1983 wasn’t just a result of market saturation, bad games, and the increasing performance of home computers. The programmers, like the pilots, were forced to give up royalties to their work for small salaries, bad contracts, and terrible treatment. Many said, “hell, no” and left to start their own video game companies. I doubt pilots could collectively buy and run their own airline, but it couldn’t be run any worse than the existing ones.
The RCAF is also having problems due to a lack of pilots, leading them to look for pilots abroad.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-rcaf-looking-overseas-to-fill-pilot-shortage-as-commercial-aviators/
Larry Niven?
I seems that if the airlines were looking for pilots with more directly relevant flight experience they would actually want those with experience with the large cargo planes, not with fighters.
re: #5 “Larry Niven?”
Yeah, I assume he meant ‘David’.
@5 chigau,
You remember, Larry David Niven who had a career in film prior to becoming a SF writer.
That thin mustache on his second puppeteer head was unforgettable.
re: Niven, OK.
Also are Cruise’s hands really tiny or are McGillis’s really big?
Isn’t that yearly salary basically the same as the cost of a single Stinger missile?
Doesn’t everyone, at least for a day?
I know a couple of fighter pilots (well, ex-fighter pilots, now), and one thing they’re very clear on is that being a fighter pilot is BORING. Qualification is hard, competitive and takes YEARS, and the vast overwhelming majority of your time is spent in stuffy meeting rooms planning. It’s just that for 1% of your time you get to do something that everyone else can only dream about. And the 99% shit is – to them – worth the shit wages, long hours and endless training and planning. Which I think is fair enough.
When I started a chemical engineering degree in the late 80s, new graduates were fending off competing job offers from petrochemical giants and major chemical companies. You’d need two heads not to get a well-paid job with car as a starter. By the time I graduated, in the pit of the recession in ’92, all graduate hiring had been stopped. Out of 50 people who graduated, 48 couldn’t get jobs, including those with first class degrees.
I eventually found work. Entertaingingly, four or five years later the industry press was full of stories about how the industry was suffering because there was a shortage of experienced recent graduates to replace people moving up into management from technical roles. To which I said – GOOD, fuck you, you wouldn’t give me an interview much less a job five years ago and you’re complaining now that I haven’t got the experience you want? Fuck you.
An aside: I ws amazed when I found out how little astronauts are paid.
Obviously, the people making the decision about where to cut are the people at the top. That’s another one of those emergent conspiracies: Everybody in the room wants to keep their own salary, so they all agree to cut somewhere else.
Tangent: Any comments on the recent pipeline hack or is it just business as usual?
sonofrojblake@#13:
I ws amazed when I found out how little astronauts are paid.
But they get killer frequent flier miles!
sonofrojblake @11:
This is a great summary of my reasoning behind almost getting into the RAF as a pilot. I was in the University Air Squadron during University. I thought I was in paradise – I was getting (slightly) paid to fly a plane! Enough that it cancelled out my mess bills. Life was great until I failed the final medical and was grounded…
@ 1 VReginald Selkirk
the Air Force pilots get free room and board
Do they really? IIRC in Canada both officers and OR’s pay for both though base housing seems subsidized if you can get it. A friend was telling me the other day that there was something like a 5 year waiting list for CFB Petawawa.
@16 jrkrideau
My brother is a US Marine, and they do get room and board. My understanding is that the on base housing pretty much sucks and you have to accept it to get the benefit if it’s available. However, there generally isn’t enough housing for families on base, so he’s given an additional housing allowance to live off base. It’s not really enough to completely cover rent and utilities in anything other than a Jared Kushner-run slum, but it’s a substantial amount. His retirement benefits are also extremely good, though that system was reformed many years ago, making it much shittier for career officers.
My brother was also in pilot training for two years. He would agree with the 99% shit description of the job, and he definitely didn’t think the 1% that was cool enough to make up for it. He’s much happier as a combat engineer. I was also good friends with an ex-Marine pilot for many years. He made an awesome living working as a pilot for a small jet charter company, but had to get a job with a regional airline when the financial crisis of 2008 hit and the charter went out of business. Regional airlines pay even worse than the military.