My branch is weird. I love helicopters but there are some days when I wonder why I turned down USAFA...
The memo when I read it makes it sound like the commitment begins upon completion or termination of flight training so no, it doesn’t start counting down once you commission. I imagine that’s to account for differences in lengths of time from graduation/commissioning and actual AD activation dates to start flight school among commissioning sources but yes, sounds like if you drop, you still owe the time. I’m curious how other services handle the flight school commitment? Is it only if you graduate flight school?
Six year ADSO after completing flight school for RLOs put you post command and prior to your first look for O4. Issue there they’ve found is people don’t want to be a MAJ and have been peacing out, leaving our O4 population unhealthy leading to increased KD time requirements
. It evens out at O5/O6 but not fun for the O4s not that I think that rank would be fun even under good conditions. Ten year ADSO will get you to your second look for MAJ.
For WOs, prior to reducing the max TIS as mentioned above, you would see folks coming over and making senior CW2/junior CW3 and being able to retire based on prior enlisted time. Ideally, a WO will have made PC, spent a year or two as an untracked PC in a company gaining experience as a line pilot, and then track as a mid CW2. This gives them time as a CW2 to then learn their specialization at the company level. When they promote to CW3 is when they can then start to serve in staff roles based on their track, but for the most part, will still stay at the company building experience.
Right now, their timeline is too compressed to allow this to happen in a lot of cases, and we don’t have the pilots to let people sit in one place and just build experience.
As a result, we’re promoting folks to CW3 without a track (and in some cases without ever having made PC). When a commander looks to the CW3 for the field grade experience they’re expecting for advice, it isn’t necessarily happening, but since they’ve promoted, they’re in the window they can make sanctuary to stick around until retirement.
Increasing to a ten year ADSO for the WOs means that we’re going to get a better return on investment and build them time to build experience. Couple that with adjusting their rank to not allow promotion to CW2 until after flight school also will definitely help with this.
Most of the fixes in the branch right now are focused on the WO population, not RLO population. RLOs are just going to feel the impacts and we’ll see what second and third order effects happen down the road. I just picked up a new ADSO for some training I’m in so I’m sure I’ll be around to see some it.