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United States Air Force Needs a Few Hundred Good Drone Pilots
The military brass in charge of America's drones say that there's a shortage of pilots.
According to The New York Times, a "significant number" of the 1,200 United States Air Force pilots are "coming up for re-enlistment and are opting to leave, while a training program is producing only about half of the new pilots that the service needs."
Col. James Cluff, commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing, invited the Times along with a few other media onto the decade-old nerve center of drone operations outside of Las Vegas on Tuesday. He told them that the Air Force has pulled instructors from schools to the "flight line." The agency now conducts 65 drone flights a day, a number that is expected to drop to 60 by fall 2015.
With the rise of the Islamic State and other global hotspots, there is increasing pressure on the Air Force to provide more drone flights. But while drone operators get to see their families at night and are half a globe away from their targets, it still takes a toll.
"Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Wal-Mart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home—and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home—all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," Col. Cluff said.
Any takers?
USAF Cuts Drone Flights as Stress Drives Off Operators
The NYT reports that the US is being forced to cut back on drone flights as America's drone operators are burning out and the Air Force is losing more drone pilots than they can train. "We're at an inflection point right now," says Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria. The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. Colonel Cluff says that many feel "undermanned and overworked," sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:20PM
and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home
Posting this on a tech site? If I have a shitty day, none of my family understands what I do anyway.
Worst thing I've ever done at a job. Well, never killed anyone far as I know. Completely knocked out all telecom access to half of a small midwestern state for a couple minutes due to a little conceptual mistake with a SONET ring and some loopback configuration options on a new switch card. Oh I just wanted to loop one T1 not the whole OC-192, sorry bout that, didn't think you'd notice. Knocked out all telephone access to a rural hospital for a couple minutes once by giving a field circus tech the wrong information (ah thats on 18, out of the corner of my eye I see a small cities worth of SS7 links drop, ah that would be 13 repeat 13 sorry). Sometimes its stressful just being there when stuff breaks even if its not my fault, 5% of the NYSE stock trading volume went thru an IBM front end processor I was kinda in charge of when it blew up although there was nothing for me to do but wail to our IBM CE and pray the head sysprog wouldn't kill me, which he didn't, oddly enough I wasn't nearly as worried about the CEO coming to visit. Geeze VLM I leave you in charge of VTAM for one day and ... the CEO being nontechnical wasn't scary at all. The IT director lowered himself to doing hardware work with me one time in the mid 90s and we tried to replace a RAID array drive that died by not understanding one of those "start at 0 or start at 1" issues so we killed the LAN array by pulling the wrong drive, ended up sending most of the company home early that day because back then rebuilding an array, even if there was no actual data loss, took most of a day. In terms of $$$ destruction I below the input of a $50K communications analyzer once, and another time I cracked the fibers in enough ESCON cables that they were worth more than my car at that time. In terms of sheer embarrassment I set off the flooding alarms at a mainframe dinosaur pen by cleaning the floor and then going to lunch and come back to find plumbers and HVAC guys crawling all over my WAN corner "looking for the leak".
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday June 17 2015, @10:01PM
"Aboard a submarine are some black boxes. And there are some quiet men who tend to those black boxes."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @10:57PM
Sounds like fun. Presumably you've had a boss who would insist, after giving you the wrong instructions that he never gave you those, he gave you these (less wrong) ones?
My workplace, a TV station, hasn't had a hardware upgrade in years. Every few weeks, something different will break and of course, being the lowest paid guy there it's my responsibility to make sure everyone knows their jobs and how we will fix it. The part-time mook who comes in one day a week to learn how to do shit gets the same I do, but doesn't have the same level of responsibility. Here's the thing, though: I didn't sign on for this responsibility, it was just given to me for no extra money (I get less than unemployment).
I did have a chat with the boss about it one day, who laughed at me before he realized I was serious, and explained that there was no money for wage increases. A couple days later, he told the reporters that their salary increases were coming through.
The sort of things we have going wrong are tape playback failures (range from the usual dirty heads right on through to "We can't fix this for you because they haven't made spares for it for 20 years!"), equipment failing because of a minor power surge, improperly terminated cables causing reference signal echoes, timing glitches, feedback loops in the audio cabling, incorrect labeling on the labyrinthine cabling mess running along the wall. Fuck, half of our monitors just don't work any more. We still use paper for about half of our processes, which could be automated reducing errors, illegible handwriting, and people not knowing that there are only five workdays in a week not six.
Of course, if I don't know how to fix it, I get a lot of trouble for it - most of these problems are for engineers, and I'm not even a technician. I'm simply an operational staff member.
Now, to be fair to the business, we do have a hardware upgrade coming - one of our core pieces of equipment is being replaced. The only reason for that is that the piece it is replacing is so bad that we shouldn't be using it. It was offline for three months in the last nine, and occasionally breaks even though the staff engineer repaired it. Even our technical staff have volunteered to accidentally damage it beyond repair but of course, if that happened it wouldn't speed the install...
Every day is a shitty day for me, and like you, I can't go home and talk to anybody about it. Hell, I'd be fired if they knew I'd written this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 18 2015, @04:12AM
Dude.
Start looking for another job. Now. You'll find a better job. It might take several months, but eventually you will.
Why are you putting up with that shit? You don't have to take that shit. Don't take that shit.
The job market in the US is good right now. And even if it's not, you won't know if you'd get a better job if you don't start interviewing.
Get yourself a better job.
If you have been looking and haven't found one yet, sorry for the unnecessary advice. But I'm posting in case you haven't started looking.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday June 18 2015, @07:15AM
Steve, is that you?
I told you to quit complaining, there isn't money in the budget to give you a raise. Reporters bring in revenue, you just, uh, fix things I think.
Be in my office at 9 a.m. Monday morning. No, not tomorrow, I'm leaving on my Lear-Jet for Acapulco tonight for a jaunt with the other execs. You think you have it hard, we don't even get the good Champagne anymore, just that cheap ass $92 a bottle shit. And no fucking hookers. These jaunts used to be fun, and on top of it I have to hear your entitled ass whine. Jesus, are you trying to fuck up my weekend?
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2015, @12:44AM
In terms of sheer embarrassment I set off the flooding alarms at a mainframe dinosaur pen
I hated that SGI 3D file browser they made us use when the C*Os visited. How did you like working at Jurassic Park?