A French Air Force General is under Investigation forusing an Alpha jet as a transport to go from Bordouex to his weekend home in Marseille..
I am not one for streotypes, but please please let him being flying to/with his mistress.:D;)
I was hoping that he was at least covering himself by flying it himself and calling it training/getting his flight hours in. But per the story, the plane dropped him off, returned to base and came back and picked him up.
Since when is that not one of the perks of powser? Why else would anyone want power, except to abuse it?
Two Anecdotes, from opposite ends of my military career.
When I first joined the US Navy in 1992 my first duty station out of boot camp was an F/A-18 squadron in Jacksonville, Florida. Pilots, usually higher ranking ones, used to borrow the jets for the weekend and fly to their hometown. They logged it as Air Nav training, and also Unfamiliar Airfield training.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, for my last deployment in the Navy I was assigned to the helicopter detachment in Naples, Italy that served as executive transport for Commander, Naval Forces Europe-Africa/Commander, Sixth Fleet. The job is a 3-star Admiral billet, and he wears all three hats. The thing was, when I was there, he would rarely use our helicopter because he did not want to be accused of using it for personal reasons. He would rather drive a few hours to a meeting in Rome than have the helicopter fly him there, even though his trip was legit.
ETA: I see now that the billet is being held by a 4-star, Admiral Michelle Howard.
There was a similar scandal back when I was teaching English in Japan. A pilot was using a jet on Fridays to fly at Mach eleventy from Okinawa to California* to spend time with his girlfriend. On Monday he’d fly back. Apparently he logged the trips as training time but someone thought that was wasting fuel.
–G!
*Or maybe it was Hawaii. Japan to the States and back.