Here is your chance...

Just saw this:

https://www.military.com/dodbuzz/2018/05/24/air-force-could-recall-many-1000-retirees-active-duty.html

Best regards,

Robert

 

Wow! I'm a pilot and I was in the Air Force. I didn't retire from the Air Force but I was in for a while back in 1944. Maybe I could re-up and fly a big jet or a fighter. I'm 92 but I still learn things but one of them is to keep my mouth shut, I guess. This situation is parallel to what is going on in the blue collar work field now. We are running out of people who can work with their hands with actual tools. This has been demoted to something less than working the thumbs on an I Pad.

 

Yes Bob, but airplanes changed dramatically between, say, the last biplanes (1935?) and the F-16 (1975, Paris salon) in shape, performance, capabilities...
I was 15 in 1975, and when, at that time, I was looking at what airplanes were forty years before, in 1935, evolution has been dramatical from that date: if some Airforces had still had Boeing P-12 as a front line fighter in 1975, that would have seemed ludicruous.
Whereas as for today, when I look back at 1975...43 years later, some Airforces still have F-16 as front line fighters; more or less the same F-16 than forty years ago. Not to say anything about the c-130, for instance; an airplane that I admire a lot, but which has been in frontline service for 60 years now.
Now I know, of course, that the F-16 of today are more capable than the F-16 of 1976, but it's still the same shape, just like things that are evolving much slower.
So if they recall retirees, these won't probably disoriented by the airplanes, which will probably be the same that those they left a few years earlier...

Rgds

 

And maybe the epitome of aircraft performance (still) is approaching 60 years since it first flew (A-12/SR-71) and has long since retired... obsolete.

 

I always considered it to be in a special category, all alone by itself. That plane is "something else"...fascinating.
Rgds