What do pilots do when they're not flying?

[thegoodsgt]

From what I can gather, most pilots in the USAF fly 10-15 hours each month on average. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that leaves 25-30 hours of downtime. How does the average pilot spend that time? I'm most curious about the first lieutenant or captain who doesn't have the extra responsibilities that a more senior pilot might have.

Maybe someone can walk us through a typical week for a young pilot.

Thanks in advance!

[drhornii]

From what I can gather, most pilots in the USAF fly 10-15 hours each month on average. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that leaves 25-30 hours of downtime. How does the average pilot spend that time? I'm most curious about the first lieutenant or captain who doesn't have the extra responsibilities that a more senior pilot might have.

Maybe someone can walk us through a typical week for a young pilot.

Thanks in advance!

I bet briefings before flights and after flights take a good chunk of the day.

[Lenny]

I can't speak for the AF but in the Navy we had a ground job. A young Junior Officer (JO) is normally given a branch officer job. It may be Powerplants or Avionics. Each branch may have up to 50 sailors and a Chief. The Chief can make or break you. The job can be painful at times. Calls late at night to bail someone out of jail, Trips to Court and Captains Mast.

On top of all that you still need to study to get all your quals. Simulators and Briefing training flights. You stay pretty busy overall. Flying is a very small part of Squadron life.

You're an Officer first then an Aviator.

[Cobrahistorian]

You've always got additional duties. I'm our unit historian (for obvious reasons) among other things. Definitely keeps you busy!

Jon

[Waco]

...

Edited March 26, 2008 by Waco

[ikar]

When I was in operations the pilots always had something to do. Besides the additional duties, the pre-flight briefing, flight, and post flight briefing, they had trainingof various types that had to be done. Simulators, cockpit emergency procedures, weapons and tactics knowledge (ours and theirs), medical, records, and various other appointments, playing host to a visiting unit or people, physical training in the weight room, personal weapons qualification, and more. The rarely ever just sat around doing nothing andeven then it was more than likely they were getting ready for the next thing on their schedule.

[phantom]

Well lets see.....Pilots are officers......so .........Eat chips, golf and make silly command style rules. Like painting all the toilets sea foam green. :)

(kidding.....kidding!!!!!)

[jai5w4]

I sleep a lot and drink copious amounts of beer.

:)

-John

[Spongebob]

I sleep a lot and drink copious amounts of beer.

Ah, the life of a flight student. That was so good, the best tour I ever had was in K-rock as a student after being in the fleet for 4 years doing the helo thing.

Just remember padawan, it's all down hill after the FRS.

Back to the original topic...my last ground job sucked; I was the squadron Admin officer, which for those that don't know is essentially the HR director for a 250 person squadron. Throw in the previous guy getting fired (I think on purpose to make the pain stop) and a CO that was an *** to work for...not a fun job and I either looked forward to flying to get away from it for a while or was so busy that flying interfered with me getting stuff done I needed to. About 50/50 on that.

To add onto the chief comment..it's all the folks below you who can make or break you. Talented/smart E-3's can be worth their weight in gold, as are good JO's. I had one JO who was "the man"..got stuff done, on time, right, could manage his people, always eager to learn, could step up to cover my butt and overall just got the work done with no supervision. Then I had another (if you've seen the special on the USS Ronald Reagan on the National Geographic Channel, you've seen her) who was my PAO and Education officer who was just a nightmare. She wouldn't do anything unless she found it interesting or had a boot lodged in her posterior. She found working on a screenplay interesting...promoting the squadron (key to drawing good enlisted folks as the senior ones have some control over where they go) and ensuring we got our troops the schools/training they needed while hooking them up with college programs...not so much. Frustrating because there is too much work, too few people and too little time to deal with people like her who create work for others. Ughh.

Sorry, time to build a model!

Spongebob

[VFA-103guy]

Well, from what I know, Wednesday happy hour at the Oceana O'Club is $1 beer and free tacos, and there's a ton of JO's there from about 5-7pm.

Seriously, the JO's I know of stay pretty dern busy.

I think Lenny pretty much nailed it though.

[Karl Sander]

I can't speak for the AF but in the Navy we had a ground job. A young Junior Officer (JO) is normally given a branch officer job. It may be Powerplants or Avionics. Each branch may have up to 50 sailors and a Chief. The Chief can make or break you. The job can be painful at times. Calls late at night to bail someone out of jail, Trips to Court and Captains Mast.

If you're REALLY lucky, you could spend your first 14 months in the squadron as the Legal Officer, thereby second guessing every life decision you made up to that point, until the new legal officer showed up and you could actually have a job that ALMOST had something to do with airplanes. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that after my RAG graduation, it was 14 months before I got back in the tactical/technical pubs and started learning more about how to fly and fight my airplane, because the navy, with it's institutional fetish for putting the cart before the horse, apparently thinks it's better for nuggets to worry about Airman Timmy's legal issues and Airman Bobby's government travel card delinquencies, than it is to learn how to fight and win the nation's wars.

The twisted part for me is, all the "ground job" BS is the "work" part. The flying is part of the compensation.

Which leads to two corollaries - 1) when the flying stops, my days are numbered, unless they let me live someplace REALLY cool. And 2) I don't know how SWO's and submariners put up with it.

Edited December 21, 2007 by Karl Sander

[Su-34]

[OT] What do they..?

[/OT]

[Cobrahistorian]

[OT] What do they..?

:D

[/OT]

No, the question is what do we do when we're NOT flying. Everyone knows that the multi-million dollar sensor equipment on our aircraft (OH-58D pictured above) is used for observing scantily clad females!

Jon

[Floyd S. Werner, Jr.]

You have no idea how hard it was not to include this picture in the new Warrior Walkaround book. LOL

What I do the other time when not flying four hours a day is check the modeling websites and surfing *********. That is in between eating and helping maintenance with runups and contacting Eurocopter. Oh don't forget the Class I downloads, always a highlight of any day. Then there is interviewing new pilots. Surf more *********. Then there are the other paperwork duties that have to be done to generate the data to justify our existence. Occassionally I'll find time to use the gym at work to make sure I can pass a flight physical once a year. then surf more *********. Finally call it a day and go home to surf more *********. That is about it for the day. LOL

I'm serious on all that, except for the *********, at least at work. LOL

Floyd

[OT] What do they..?

:D

[/OT]

[Spongebob]

Which leads to two corollaries - 1) when the flying stops, my days are numbered, unless they let me live someplace REALLY cool.

My thought process exactly about 18 months ago...and I didn't consider orders to a carrier as ships company cool..anywhere.

Spongebob

[Karl Sander]

My thought process exactly about 18 months ago...and I didn't consider orders to a carrier as ships company cool..anywhere.

Spongebob

Well, orginally it was a bit more black and white - when the flying stops, so does my service.

But, only partly caving to the fetish for meaningless joint staff jobs the navy seems to have, I'll LET them post me at whatever command it is in or near Colorado Springs. Because I can ski. I'd also LET them put me in Europe for a year or so (though I'd have to find a trustworthy person to hang onto my guns, since the EU doesn't have the same view of my birthright as I do...)

To the original question, here's a rundown of the ground jobs I had in the fleet:

Legal Officer - totally sucked. 14 months wasted. Though I got to fly, I made no progress out of "nugget" status, because I spent all my time with report chits, NJP's, courts-marial, etc etc. All a bunch of feces that could not possibly be further from what I joined the Navy to do. They kept telling me "this will make you a better officer" or some such garbage - time will tell, but I highly doubt it.

TEAMS Officer - TEAMS=Tactical EA-6B Mission Support. It was a unix based system that was the soul of mission planning. Hornet afficianados would know it was TMPS (both of which since replaced by the windows-based Joint Mission Planning System - which may or may not actually be joint, depending on who you ask). Kept all the databases and libraries up to date, made sure the "bricks" in the airplanes had all the right loads, etc etc. This job didn't suck so bad, because it was at least RELEVANT. Plus, it afforded enough free time to get back in the books and make up for the 14 months WASTED (professionally speaking) as legal O. As the more experienced dudes here can tell you (and as the young padawans are about to learn), the education doesn't stop when you finish the FRS/RTU/OCU.

NATOPS Officer- kept and maintained everyone's NATOPS (ie training) jackets. Any qual that wasn't strictly speaking tactically related (that was a different program) I kept track of. Yearly instrument, CRM, etc etc quals. Swim/Physiology quals. This again didn't suck SO bad, aside from the stooge of a department head I happened to be working for. Different story.

Personnel Officer - Sucked hard, and would have been totally miserable but for the fact I had a great yeoman senior cheif working for me, who I totally trusted to keep track of all the yeomen, personnelmen, et al. Lots of proofreading here - memos, instructions, awards, etc etc - and NONE of it remotely related to aviation (which is the part that sucked hard). What's worse, you end up working for the admin O, who often is a brand new hinge (O-4) who thinks he can set the world on fire in his first Dept. Head job.... what this means is on top of everything else, I spent an inordinate amount of time keeping the Admin O from bothering the YNCS and the petty officers who were actually taking care of business. All that being said, I could have done without this job.

Assistant Ops Officer - actually the best ground job I ever had, because I had it long enough to truly OWN it, know it, and tell the Ops officers, XO's and COs I worked for what was what. Basically, every three months a navy squadron gets a grant of money to go fly. I would figure out how many hours this bought, stack it up against the readiness milestones we were expected to reach, and flow out a schedule of how to get there. I'd also be the dude who wrote, and had the skipper sign, SORTS messages (basically, how we stacked up readiness-wise). Three ops O's came and went - the turn over with me went like this: "OK dude... every three months, you're going to get at least a million and a half dollars. I'm going to figure out how to spend it. You're going to pitch it to the skipper, and you'll come off looking good."

So... at best, ground jobs are necesarry to keep a squadron running, and sometimes can even be rewarding. At worst, they're a unique brand of torture because the navy lacks the money and/or manpower management skills to spin some of the garbage off to people well suited to taking care of it - what another service might call JAGs, adjutant-general officers, etc.

Edited December 22, 2007 by Karl Sander

[Collin]

Well, orginally it was a bit more black and white - when the flying stops, so does my service.

But, only partly caving to the fetish for meaningless joint staff jobs the navy seems to have, I'll LET them post me at whatever command it is in or near Colorado Springs. Because I can ski. I'd also LET them put me in Europe for a year or so (though I'd have to find a trustworthy person to hang onto my guns, since the EU doesn't have the same view of my birthright as I do...)

To the original question, here's a rundown of the ground jobs I had in the fleet:

Legal Officer - totally sucked. 14 months wasted. Though I got to fly, I made no progress out of "nugget" status, because I spent all my time with report chits, NJP's, courts-marial, etc etc. All a bunch of feces that could not possibly be further from what I joined the Navy to do. They kept telling me "this will make you a better officer" or some such garbage - time will tell, but I highly doubt it.

TEAMS Officer - TEAMS=Tactical EA-6B Mission Support. It was a unix based system that was the soul of mission planning. Hornet afficianados would know it was TMPS (both of which since replaced by the windows-based Joint Mission Planning System - which may or may not actually be joint, depending on who you ask). Kept all the databases and libraries up to date, made sure the "bricks" in the airplanes had all the right loads, etc etc. This job didn't suck so bad, because it was at least RELEVANT. Plus, it afforded enough free time to get back in the books and make up for the 14 months WASTED (professionally speaking) as legal O. As the more experienced dudes here can tell you (and as the young padawans are about to learn), the education doesn't stop when you finish the FRS/RTU/OCU.

NATOPS Officer- kept and maintained everyone's NATOPS (ie training) jackets. Any qual that wasn't strictly speaking tactically related (that was a different program) I kept track of. Yearly instrument, CRM, etc etc quals. Swim/Physiology quals. This again didn't suck SO bad, aside from the stooge of a department head I happened to be working for. Different story.

Personnel Officer - Sucked hard, and would have been totally miserable but for the fact I had a great yeoman senior cheif working for me, who I totally trusted to keep track of all the yeomen, personnelmen, et al. Lots of proofreading here - memos, instructions, awards, etc etc - and NONE of it remotely related to aviation (which is the part that sucked hard). What's worse, you end up working for the admin O, who often is a brand new hinge (O-4) who thinks he can set the world on fire in his first Dept. Head job.... what this means is on top of everything else, I spent an inordinate amount of time keeping the Admin O from bothering the YNCS and the petty officers who were actually taking care of business. All that being said, I could have done without this job.

Assistant Ops Officer - actually the best ground job I ever had, because I had it long enough to truly OWN it, know it, and tell the Ops officers, XO's and COs I worked for what was what. Basically, every three months a navy squadron gets a grant of money to go fly. I would figure out how many hours this bought, stack it up against the readiness milestones we were expected to reach, and flow out a schedule of how to get there. I'd also be the dude who wrote, and had the skipper sign, SORTS messages (basically, how we stacked up readiness-wise). Three ops O's came and went - the turn over with me went like this: "OK dude... every three months, you're going to get at least a million and a half dollars. I'm going to figure out how to spend it. You're going to pitch it to the skipper, and you'll come off looking good."

So... at best, ground jobs are necesarry to keep a squadron running, and sometimes can even be rewarding. At worst, they're a unique brand of torture because the navy lacks the money and/or manpower management skills to spin some of the garbage off to people well suited to taking care of it - what another service might call JAGs, adjutant-general officers, etc.

There are plenty of flying jobs for NFO's out there...just have to go look for them (hence, the flying never stops...just changes hats). I was in the same boat... no more flying the S-3 (plus it was getting boring anyway). I stumbled into another world and have done more flying/green ink than I could have imagined. As a Pre-DH/Post-DH, you can feel less guilty wanting to get some of the blood back that was taken during your JO years. Tell Topper when he gets back to send you where you want. Topper and I went to college and flight school together.

r/

Atis

Edited December 22, 2007 by Collin

[Murph]

Drink heavily.

Regards,

Murph

[GEH737]

Hmmm -

Seems like when we're in the air, we talk about stuff on the ground...

When we're on the ground, we talk about flying...

Go figure <_<

[Waco]

Drink heavily.

Always a valid option.

[Karl Sander]

There are plenty of flying jobs for NFO's out there...just have to go look for them (hence, the flying never stops...just changes hats). I was in the same boat... no more flying the S-3 (plus it was getting boring anyway). I stumbled into another world and have done more flying/green ink than I could have imagined. As a Pre-DH/Post-DH, you can feel less guilty wanting to get some of the blood back that was taken during your JO years. Tell Topper when he gets back to send you where you want. Topper and I went to college and flight school together.

r/

Atis

By the time Topper gets back, I'll already (HOPEFULLY) have recieved my orders

I'm good for the next 4-5 years. THEN is where I start to get worried about "them" telling me "You really need to go do a Pentagon tour." Any kind of job I'd actually want to do would be one of those things they'd feel obligated to counsel me against.... but, I'll jump off that bridge when i get to it.