I remember watching this as a kid in England.. Good old youtube strikes again. 8 episodes, worth watching. Music is a bit annoying, but pretty good insite. I wonder how much of it is relevant today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCrY4Frdgn8 The "having to solo a jet in 14hrs" seems a bit much, unless all you are doing is pattern work I guess. They don't show it, but I wonder if they go from zero hours straight into a jet ? or train in a GA aircraft first..
During my time the pilots went from a jet T-37 to a jet T-38 and then on to a replacement training unit. Now they use T-6 turboprops before going to the T-38, soon due for replacement, if they are on a fighter track. Not sure if they still do T-41 light aircraft training before the T-6 or not. One of the current guys can tell you.
The T-41 Mascalero is what I did most of my training in for my private right before I got out of the good ol' AF. No telling what they're using these days, seems the T-41 would be a little long in the tooth but not any more so than the T-37/38...
About 10 hours in the T-41, 80 or so in the T-37 (with solo around 9-10 sorties of 1.3 hours each), 120 or so hours in the T-38 (with solo around 8-10 sorties of 1.2 hours each), 20 or so hours in the A/T-38, then about 80 hours in the F-16 with solo on the 5th sortie. From memory... Now the T-37 part has been replaced by the T-6 Texan II, and the T-41 part has been doled out to some kind of civilian contract training that I think is more like 20 hours or so, but I'm not certain.
Better deal than us old WSOs got, straight from a T-29 (Convair 240/340) to an F-111D (for me) or other fighter.
They now send people who don't have a PPL to Pueblo, CO where they fly a DA-20. The FBO there (Doss Aviation) has a contract to run the IFS (introductory flight screening, or something like that) program like Hannibal said. My understanding is that it is taught by retired air force guys. Having a PPL, I never had the fortune of attending IFS and went right to T-6's at a UPT base. It might have been an AF Reserve Command decision to skip IFS for people who already had a license. I think there were active duty guys who had to go even though they had a civilian ticket. Anyway, soloed the T-6 in about 12 hours. It was a pattern solo, but the auxiliary field was closed for repaving so there were usually 8 to 12 aircraft in the VFR pattern and wasn't that much fun. The MOA solos on the other hand were a blast, and those came after maybe 25-ish hours.
When you're a student it was kind of like the first time your parents let you take the car out by yourself. You want to try some stuff out, and there's a chance you will scare yourself in the process. Not that I did; I just heard stories from my buddies.
I haven't flown anything similar to compare them to, but they are supposed to greatly outperform the T-37 in all aspects except top speed and are more comfortable because they are pressurized and have air conditioning. Their performance has been likened to that of a P-51. Overall it was fun to fly and the cockpit laid out well.
It's a great airplane. Relatively simple and lots of performance for what it is. I'd love to fly one again. I can't compare it to the Tweet, but as said above, I'd be surprised if the Texan II doesn't outperform it in every category except VMO.
Here is a link to a pilot report for the T-6B Texan II. https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/flight-test-raytheon-t-6-texan-ii-a-better-texan-192072/
Wonder if a dude that trains in that thing can fix-to-fix his way out of a paper bag? GPS/INS/FPM/UFCP...F*#k! In the tweet your FPM was a dead bug on the windscreen, every switch was somewhere you couldn't see it unless looking right at it heads down, it actually had a start procedure, not a start button...I'm laughing...as I contemplate our pu$$!fied world. I used to fuel airplanes at an FBO to pay for my flying lessons as a teen. One ex WWII dude gave me a ride in his Mustang and I was hooked. Flying that plane was like having to hang on to a bull's nuts. The men who flew those in combat, in fact all those who faught in that war, were just amazing. I, on the other hand, never thought I was crap compared to those folks as I trained in the tweet, which was still easy to fly, rather than say a Ryan ST or T-6, then in the dumb T-38 Talon, which was fast but also easy to fly, rather than a Warhawk! We had it easy. Now...push button auto everything right until your bombs land on an MSF hospital...only excuse is "well, the line on the thing lined up with the other thing and I pushed the button because they said I could". Sorry for the rant!
If it makes you feel any better only the Navy has the B model, with the HUD and all that other fancy stuff. We still had to do a fix to fix on every instrument ride. See youtube link which shows what happened when they tried to remove the fix to fix from the syllabus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7-RMQW4WBI
Dude! That is one of the absolute funniest things I have ever seen in my entire life...I'm still laughing and probably will be for days. I feel so much better. I did a fix to fix every time I flew air to air. When I got a target call based off Bull, I could generate a snap-to heading for my flight in a couple seconds by taking my position off Bull and visualizing a fix to fix snap heading to the target by just looking at the HSI. No buttons, no math, no programming. People thought I was some kind of idiot savante...I'm actaully just an idiot...only one step above a retarded monkey!
Taz: We still had to do one on our TR qual check in the F-16 as of circa 2005. Fix-to-fix is a geospatial mathematical exercise that when mastered really has a lot of practical uses even when all modern systems are functioning just fine. I kid not about using it all the time while flying air-to-air and managing targets in the air battlespace. I would have been Hitler in the awesome video above...no doubt about it!
Will- Like you, I can look at an HSI, visualize where I am on the circle and where I need to go, and pick a heading that is really close. When I was a WSO SEFE, the IPs thought it would be fun to give me an instrument check. I passed and even got to pitch out and get her on short final, which is way more fun than instruments. Not as pretty as the IP's approaches, but good enough to land.
Semi-related, have folks here seen the BBC show "Spitfire Ace", in which a group of pilots compete to get 9 hours of Spitfire time - about the same amount of time the average Battle of Britain pilot would have had in a Spit before entering combat. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tk-FtH8Zig[/ame]
