You would hope that when they spend a hundred million or more on a movie, that they pay someone a few thousand to attend to these details.
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When I did private pilot training, my instructor told me that one of his instructors had been a pilot in the Danish air force - until they fired him. Apparently because he had flowing his jet under an old stone bridge…
Makes me wonder if the reaction had been something like “You can’t risk half the air force on a stunt like that!”
The CAG is an O-6, and while youi are correct that in peacetime it is mostly an administrative role with the CAG probably only getting enough flight time to maintain flight status, in wartime they would actually lead major airstrike missions. However, I doubt you are going to find a 60-something O-6 as a CAG; the position is a stepping stone to a flag so they’re only going to be in that role for a few years. ‘Maverick’, of course, is the antithesis of CAG officer material.
You might think that but frankly most productions don’t care about accuracy as long as it looks good. A perfect example is the celebrated film Courage Under Fire, which has so many egregious mistakes in nomenclature, unit insignia and commendations, et cetera that even if the essential premise of the film weren’t based on what would actually be a war crime instead of a heroic act, it would be very difficult for any military veteran to take seriously. It is essentially a perfect storm of Hollywood celebration of a highly fictionalized view of the military instead of making the slightest effort to get details correct.
That makes more sense; the Army is perennially short of rotary wing pilots, and the warrant rank pay grades are more or less equivalent to comparable junior/field officer ranks. The timing also makes sense because both services would have been starting to use variants of the S-70 helicopter at that point, so it would be easier to shift over and be qualified on the hardware.
I don’t know the process of transferring over from one service to another as an officer but I assume that you’d have to go back through OCS and be recommissioned, potentially getting a rank reduction and losing time-in-rank) (unlike enlisted where you re-up your contract in the new branch and keep your current rating and all acquired time-in-grade). I would assume an offiver coming from another service could just transfer into the comparable warrant officer rank. Being a WO also means somewhat less officious bullshit since it is a terminal career line that can’t lead to a command or flag/general officer promotion; the few WOs I knew (all Army, mostly military freefall instructors and people with ‘special’ skills) were ‘20 and done” types who were pleased to focus on their occupational specialty and not worry to much about playing politics to move up the ladder.
Stranger
An uncle was a petty officer at NAS North Island. IIRC, he was fixing T-28s (or their props). He wanted to be a pilot, but he did not want a commission. The Army said he could fly helicopters, and he wouldn’t have to be a commissioned officer. He considered it, but then found out about the mortality rate of helicopter pilots in Vietnam and decided to stay where he was.
Even when you are not being shot at whirly-birds tend to have a lot of accidents (loss of thrust in hot air, vortexing, getting caught on low-laying hazards, poor maintenance and mechanical defects, ingesting rain, pilot error). One guy (not a pilot but a shooter who operated out of helicopters for most of his career) told me, “A helicopter is four millions parts flying together in an unstable aerodynamic formation, held aloft by angels’ breath and a ‘Jesus nut’.”
He was slightly more optimistic than the other homily I’ve heard: “A helicopter is a machine leaves the factory with a mission to kill everyone in it.”
I still get more nervous in single engine fixed wing aircraft, but helicopters are still about third or fourth on my list of transportation methods to avoid if at all possible.
Stranger
When I was at Corry Field in Pensacola I passed a guy in a senior chief’s (E-8) uniform then three days later saw him as a seaman apprentice (E-1). That must have hurt even if it was only for a few months before retirement.
I used to love when my instructor would do a throttle chop. On a hot day in SoCal. With two heavy guys in the cockpit. In an R22. And a 2,400 foot ridge we’d need to get over.
I liked autorotations, but the long climb on a hot day with 400 pounds of pilot and instructor and 145 horsepower was a drag.
Oh, absolutely. The point I was trying (and failing) to make was that if Mav was an O6 in one of the usual billets, he would NOT be current and polished on his flight skills- he’d likely be rusty and no longer one of the “best of the best”, because he’d have more of an administrative role. Assuming he would even be a CAG or ship’s captain in the first place in his late 50s as an O6.
Instead the trailers for the movie seem to imply he’s something of a warrior monk, who’s dedicated the last 36 years being this super bad-ass fighter pilot in lieu of being promoted through the usual higher (and less flight-oriented) ranks.
I don’t remember the exact dialogue in the movie, but people kept sending him to places like Bosnia and Iraq. The “admiral’s daughter” (mentioned in the first film) recounts how he keeps pissing off commanders and getting reassigned like that.
The real-life Hawkeye mentioned above was supposedly still theoretically flying missions at age 59, though by then he was also well-established as a civilian airline pilot in parallel to whatever he was doing in the Israeli Air Force.
Dad told a story about being in Hong Kong. His Captain assigned him to escort the Admiral’s daughter and keep her entertained. Dad ‘borrowed’ the Captain’s gig and took her waterskiing. The Captain was none the wiser… until the Admiral called to thank him for having one of his officers show his daughter such a wonderful time. ‘Lieutenant [L.A.], report to the bridge!’ The Captain chewed him out and stammered something about there being sharks in the water, but didn’t do anything because the Admiral was happy.
I don’t have personal experience with this, but given the many airline pilots who are / were affiliated with all 4 services’ Active, Guard, & Reserve components I’ve heard a lot of stories told in the first person by one coworker or another.
Upon separating from the actives of one branch, it’s actually kind of easy & convenient to transfer to the guard or reserve of another branch. The key thing is that if the guard/reserve unit you want to get into has a need, and the boss there takes a shine to you, there are lots of bureaucratic chutes and ladders that can be activated to make that happen. It’s more common to take a more administrative, non-command role in your adopted sister service, because you’re definitely a sheep of the sorta-wrong color and always will be, but if your goal is just 20 “good” years as an O-4 or O-5 & a pension, you’re mostly just looking for an easy part-time job close to home. Which the “dead-end” non-command billets are in spades, and may not be as popular with the folks natively from your adopted service.
Typically there’s very little training beyond the immediate technical stuff of whatever your new specialty will be. In the case of aviators staying within either the fixed- or rotary-wing world, it’s just the usual transition course someone from the parent service would attend. Redoing OCS is definitely not part of the program.
At the limit case I know one guy who’s been an officer / pilot in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Only 1 active duty, the other services were/are in the reserve / Guard. His story is definitely an outlier, but it’s not because he’s some super hot aviator, some Admiral / General’s pet golden boy, or even a slick bureaucratic underground operator. Just somebody who noses around for opportunities, has a sense for bureaucratic adventure, and believes in “Don’t ask, don’t get. Do ask, might get.” He asked, and he got.
When I was in Nuke School in the mid-80s (a few months after Top Gun came out, as a matter of fact) I had a few O-5 pilot classmates. As they explained it, they’d had to make a choice:
The gamble paid off for the one I used to study with, but not flying drove him crazy when I knew him.
CAG is not the most favored step to promotion to flag officer but it does happen, especially with increasing focus on aviation (and the growing costs of aircraft), and in general all of the services have become a little more permissive about promoting officers non-traditional career paths to general officer/admiral. It used to be that special operations was also a dead end but there have been at least a few including most famously Adm (ret.) William H McRaven who went immediately to BUD/S after commissioning and came up through the SEAL teams. Of course, this paralleled the increasing command focus on special operations but things have changed since the ‘Eighties and the Cold War mentality that was still largely fixated on WWII-type wide-scale conflicts.
I kind of wonder how an O-4 or O-5 who came up as a flier would do in transferring into a shipboard command role; aviators are kind of the ‘princess of the prom’ in terms of how they are treated and secondary duty assignments, and having to go from that into having to oversee the tedium of general shipboard operations seems like it would be a massive suck. Also, getting from O-5 to flag is basically a couple of hopeful leaps that even really proficient officers often fail to achieve a flag before having to retire out. That would suck to give up flying only to be stuck commanding a frigate in the North Atlantic as your terminal command.
Stranger
My brother is no longer with us, alas, or I would ask for clarification. But he said something along the lines of that as ROTC grads they got only reserve commissions that were not the same as the commissions Air Force Academy grads got. That as long as they were on active duty, the had an E-grade as well as their O-grade and that the Air Force could administratively reduce them to their E-grade without any court martial or even adverse finding.
As a USAF officer who came from ROTC that was certainly NOT the way it worked in my era, the 1980s.
Yes, there is a difference between being an officer on active duty who came from ROTC (or OTS) vs. from the Academy. Which difference was entirely about abstruse federal personnel law and had no real day-to-day relevance absent major cutbacks in personnel headcount.
Further, typically at the 4 year point every (non-fu**up) officer who entered via ROTC & OTS was offered a “Regular Commission”, which made them legally indistinguishable from the Academy grads who had held their Regulars from graduation as a shiny new 2Lt.
It was still the case the the Academy guys had a slight inside track on the best jobs and promotions, but real quickly that advantage faded vs individual performance. You would not have Academy-grad idjits moving ahead of ROTC-grad stars. You would have Academy ordinary C+ performers moving ahead of at least some of the ROTC/OTS C+ performers. So once everyone has been out of school a few years the [Academy vs not] factor can be a tiebreaker, but it was (is?) not worth much more that that.
IME / IMO.
I think there is something lost in translation there because I don’t know how that would even work. As @LSLGuy indicates, ROTC candidates who successfully complete the program and graduate from their school receive a commission either in the Active Duty, Reserve, or National Guard component. There used to be subtle differences in Active Duty and Reserve commissions but I believe those have been eliminated (for sure in the Air Force) and they are completely interchangeable with the same promotion system and mandatory retirement ages. National Guard is different because they are technically separate organizations from the Active/Reserve components of the US military but they essentially become part of the Reserve component when called up by Presidential order and receive time-in-grade/time-in-rank, time-in-service, et cetera in the same fashion while on Active Duty.
In no case would an officer hold an enlisted grade simultaneous to their rank, be entitled to pay or other enlisted benefits, get any promotion or retirement status based upon enlisted time-in-grade, et cetera, nor can an officer hold a reserve position as enlisted in the Reserve component of another service. (Not sure if you could be in a National Guard unit while on Active Duty in another service, or in two different service Reserve components simultaneously but I would expect that you could not because of the conflicts that could create.) Reduction in rank or revocation of commission would at least require intervention by the Secretary of the pertinent service and normally only occur due to a court marshal or other criminal conviction.
In fact, most officers in all service are either OCS or ROTC graduates, not graduates of the respective service academies. Other than making connections and the camaraderie of having survived plebe life I’m not sure there is really even an advantage to going to a service academy instead of to a civilian university and getting a commission through ROTC or OCS.
Stranger
I think what he’s talking about is something a friend of mine told me about attending a service academy.
Basically when you sign up to go to West Point/Annapolis/Colorado Springs, you’re signing up for a term of military service. If you wash out after your first couple of years, they’ll require you to fulfill that term of service as an enlisted person.
Sure, that can happen, but a cadet doesn’t hold a commission; they are technically above enlisted but almost never into any positional authority over anyone but other cadets. If they fail to graduate from their service academy, they end up serving their obligation by starting out as a private/airman/seaman and work their way up. I can’t imagine that is a good time because that history is going to be on their 201 file (or for the Navy/Marines whatever is equivalent) and every NCO they serve under is going to know they’ve got an Academy dropout and make their military life a living hell for the duration of their obligation.
Stranger
It’s been years since I was conversant in the detailed numbers, but IIRC at least in my era that was somewhat a consequence of the service being bottom heavy with lots more O-1s than e.g. O-7s. Yes, the Academy was maybe only 30 to 50% of the total headcount in any given year group, but it was biased towards the lower grades.
As you move upwards from O-1 to O-5 and even more so farther up the food chain, the percentage of Academy folks at that level increased pretty inexorably. It was not like there was a glass ceiling above which ROTC could not rise, but the “old boy’s network” was not fully dead yet either.
Yes. This.
The advantage pre-graduation is a full ride scholarship with all living expenses paid, plus a decent paycheck twice a month. For what is, in many academic specialties, a very high quality undergrad education with a good reputation.
The advantage post-graduation is entirely that you had a 4-year awesome high density hothouse networking opportunity with the folks who are just senior enough to you to ease the way for you, and with those just junior enough to you that you can pass along the favor in turn. For much of your career each job you enter will be being vacated by somebody you had an opportunity to know & connect with, and simultaneously each job you vacate will be occupied by somebody you also may already know. It’s not quite like the whole damn school is one giant frat house and they’re all frat brothers (now frat sisters too), but it leans a bit that way.
The disadvantage was explained to me very succinctly by an Academy grad a year older than I shortly after I reported to my first real squadron. He said it’s like this:
Valuable, but painful.
Things may have changed but a friend of mine was at West Point in the early 80s. He told me that one could quit at or before the two year mark and it was no harm no foul which is exactly what he did. He had no obligation and didn’t even have to pay back any money. He ended up getting an engineering degree at a regular university and worked with a few years later.
Or the unusual case of David Robinson, who maxed the Annapolis entry height limit at 6’6” then shot up to 7’1” and was released from his obligation to go play pro basketball.