Any former CAP members?

MajTbird

MajTbird

Filing Flight Plan
Joined
Mar 5, 2018
Messages
10
Display Name
Display name:
MajTbird
Greeting all,

I'm a CAP member. Five years ago at a wing conference I attended a breakout session on recruiting and retention. After listening to much discussion I asked the question, "Why do people quit CAP?"

I got no answer except one (seriously): "Well, members die." I haven't received any better answers since. I am told that sometimes CAP does survey exiting members--but those surveys are only shared with a few command people.

So, I've worked with some researchers to construct a survey for former members. It is short--only nine questions--and takes about five to eight minutes to complete. But it will give me (and anyone interested) insight into why CAP loses members.

The survey was built with the help of academics who do this sort of thing all the time and have at their disposal powerful analytics tools. Thus, this is an academic effort that will become part of a research project studying non-profit organizational leadership and strategy. It is hosted by Auburn University. I've uploaded a copy of the survey if anyone is curious.

It is an anonymous survey; there is no login required and it in no way tracks or identifies respondents. So, please, to protect the integrity of the responses please only take the survey if you are indeed a former CAP member or if you have been inactive for at least six months.

Survey link: https://auburn.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1MRXH7sLqO9SgUR

Many thanks!

MajTbird


P.S. Great aviation forum! I've lurked for a long while and just recently joined.
 

Attachments

  • CAP Member Exit Survey.pdf
    100.7 KB · Views: 9
MajTbird said:
P.S. Great aviation forum! I've lurked for a long while and just recently joined.
Click to expand...

Welcome. As a lurker, surely you'll know there are a few here that are very anti-CAP so gird your (internet) bullet-proof vest.

I'm a current CAP member, so I probably shouldn't do the survey, but I'd be really interested. Judging from the average age of most of the adult aviators in CAP, I'd saying dying off is a strong reason why CAP is losing members. I have other working theories as well...
 
labbadabba said:
Welcome. As a lurker, surely you'll know there are a few here that are very anti-CAP so gird your (internet) bullet-proof vest.

I'm a current CAP member, so I probably shouldn't do the survey, but I'd be really interested. Judging from the average age of most of the adult aviators in CAP, I'd saying dying off is a strong reason why CAP is losing members. I have other working theories as well...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! And I'm more interested in honesty and survey integrity than my personal feelings--and I see lots of chinks in CAP that I hope can be improved.

As you can see if you open the link to the attached survey questions, half are open-ended. I am fortunate to have access to excellent tools for clustering and measuring sentiment based on open-ended responses. Those can be mapped to the ordinal responses to confirm significance. So I am pretty confident it will reveal a good look at why CAP loses members; I expect undeniable patterns will emerge. The larger questions is whether CAP would be interested or not. My experience and research (so far) shows similar organizations generally are not interested until it's too late. The line by Danny Devito in "Other People's Money" comes to mind: "We're dead alright. We're just not broke." Government money can cover up a lot of sores.
 
I would guess that it comes down to the people that are not in the "click" or haven't been around forever are kinda shunned.. You get that, with self run organizations like this.. I have thought about doing it but haven't yet..
 
MajTbird said:
Thanks for the reply! And I'm more interested in honesty and survey integrity than my personal feelings--and I see lots of chinks in CAP that I hope can be improved.

As you can see if you open the link to the attached survey questions, half are open-ended. I am fortunate to have access to excellent tools for clustering and measuring sentiment based on open-ended responses. Those can be mapped to the ordinal responses to confirm significance. So I am pretty confident it will reveal a good look at why CAP loses members; I expect undeniable patterns will emerge. The larger questions is whether CAP would be interested or not. My experience and research (so far) shows similar organizations generally are not interested until it's too late. The line by Danny Devito in "Other People's Money" comes to mind: "We're dead alright. We're just not broke." Government money can cover up a lot of sores.
Click to expand...

Have you coordinated this with the Wing? I find it's often easier to grease the wheels if it's "their" idea...
 
Indiana_Pilot said:
I would guess that it comes down to the people that are not in the "click" or haven't been around forever are kinda shunned.. You get that, with self run organizations like this.. I have thought about doing it but haven't yet..
Click to expand...

As many others have said, it's really more about the squadron than the organization. My squadron is very laid back (almost too much) and I don't have problems getting access to aircraft despite being a fairly new member.
 
I was a cadet in the 60’s, a great time in my life as a kid. I had a love of aviation and CAP only increased it. Flying on weekends at 15 years old was special at that time. Once I started college things and priorities changed. I never became a senior member, although I did continue flying and have owned several aircraft. Waiting on number four now.
 
I'm former CAP. I was a cadet for 5 years 1963-1969. Rose through the ranks to be Cadet Commander of the Squadron.
In those days CAP was an Air Force Auxiliary organization. You wore a uniform to all functions, everyone turned out for drills and ceremonies, even the adults. We did practice rescue ops every other week, all year long. We represented the US of A at the International Drill Competition, and won, 2 years in a row. Glider Encampment, Powered Encampment, Jet Encampment, trips to DC, the Redstone Arsenal, exchange programs with Air Cadets in Canada, England, Turkey, Germany and a bunch of other countries. And competition rifle and pistol teams.
I did a lot REDCAP missions, I think it was around 276 in all. Got some medals, 2 Presidential Unit Citations, then went into the Air Force.
When I got out of the Air Force in 1973, I was a little gun shy about volunteering for things, and I was working full-time and back in college full-time.

Back in 2000 I turned up at a local Squadron for a meeting.
My impressions.
1. It was a good old boys flying club. No one wore a uniform, and they really didn't want to have to share their shiny new airplanes with another guy. They made that very clear.
2. They hadn't flown a REDCAP, or done ANY kind of Search and Rescue in a decade or more, and it was obvious they had no interest in doing any.
3. The Cadets would show up for meetings in uniform, and with one or two exceptions, the "Senior" members ignored them. The Cadets would volunteer for events and more often than not the Seniors would never show up.
4. As far as I could determine not one of the Senior members had ever served in the military, and were damn proud of it.
It was not the CAP I was involved with as a teenager.
 
I enjoyed my time in CAP with the following caveats.

(You should convert the PDF to a real survey for free on something like SurveyMonkey.)

- I am a radio guy. I don’t mind helping out but Comm is hated by all pilots generally and we were always short staffed.

- I got sucked into Wing level Comm which was fine and specifically the Wing Engineering Officer under the DC for all of the repeaters and radios. The paperwork was insanity. The audits were worse.

- I got sucked into a National level panel discussing digital radio and linking. It turned out to be a useless excercise in futility between multiple people who understood we had no budget and those who thought they could get multimillion dollar systems “donated”. We turned in our report after a year and very little of my economical solutions were in it, thanks to the chairperson. Useless waste of time.

- I brought those economical solutions back home to our Wing and defined a way to digitally link over 20 repeater sites with a budget of $20K. Anyone who knows APCO P-25 knows this is a steal. A Motorola Zone Controller costs about half a million bucks for just software. I had leveraged various relationships to ride on someone else’s and kept the hardware needed to the bare minimum that would work and be reliable but CAPs systems at the time (and probably still) were cast off Phase I P-25 gear that didn’t have the correct configuration of accessories or system cards. Anyway, can’t go into too much detail but it was denied.

- DC resigned for personal reasons around the same time as I moved 40 minutes from the nearest squadron meeting let alone commuting to Wing functions. Seemed like a good time to “exit stage left.”

If... I were to go back I would go now as a CFI and work Stan/Eval. Comm would inevitably try to suck me in and I would have to say NO firmly and clearly if it encroached on the CFI duties and responsibilities. With the long drive it probably still isn’t worth it.

Side notes: WMIRS has changed since I was in, but it was an enormous pain in the butt when setting up remote mission bases. An organization that requires internet access to get things done and doesn’t PAY for cellular data and access points isn’t organized properly. Not that I’d want to have to deal with inventory and audits on yet another piece of Comm gear. That was literally the worst. One time we almost had to call the Sheriff to go get a radio from a former member. Radio was depreciated to zero on the books but it couldn’t be “missing” or the Wing would get dinged by the USAF liaison. Problem is... USAF liaison was a full time job, telling volunteers with limited time to fill out their mountains of online and offline paperwork. There’s a serious problem there. They have 40+ hours a week to task a couple of people who can literally only spend 5 hours a week, to do things. That crap was immensely annoying. And only Comm has piles of gear that need tracked. All the other specialties had the gear in a locker near the airplanes or in the airplanes for the most part. Not tracking hundreds of radios.

It was better in the 90s when member owned radio gear was allowed. The switch to digital and the cost of the radios pushed CAP into having a massive “fleet” of radios for scattered volunteers. Dumb considering we never used digital mode even once in a live mission in all the time I served. Analog is still the lingua franca of radio and ineragency interop. Maybe they’ve worked on that more since then. I have not kept track.

Thank goodness we had a working relationship with the State here who would do repeater and site maintenance for a number of our sites. We had nowhere near the number of Comm volunteers who knew that equipment well enough to do all self-maintenance. Big State too. We often had to fly to near a site and hitch a ride in a personal 4WD to get anywhere near the few sites we had to maintain. Beats the hell out of personal vehicles driving mountain forest service access roads to mountaintop radio sites. No real way to recoup the damage inevitably done. A freaking 14 passenger van isn’t going up those roads. The Expeditions weren’t great for it either.

Don’t even get me started about the uselessness of the HF radio system. Can’t talk about it anyway but putting up an HF antenna on an airport or in a state where no neighborhood has been built without restrictive antenna covenants in decades, is ludicrously stupid. The only members who could do it, live as far away from the population center as I do now. Tossing long wires up at less than a quarter wavelength high temporarily is not a communications system, it’s slap dash.

To get to the good stuff... around here CAP picked up a mission helping fire spotting in summer and that was a solid mission. Good funding good work. SAR was done but it’s gotten spotty with GA numbers in the tank. Most of it was finding ELTs on ramps.

The 70s thru 90s quarterly SAREXs are long a thing of the past. Annual was maybe it for funded SAREX.

SARCOMP has been dead for three decades. Would be great to see the competition aspect come back.

Orientation rides seemed solid. Good mission, good funding, always going on. Lots of kids in line for those. Funding would come and go in strange fits and spurts which always felt like the organization wasn’t really committed to it 100%. (This was true of all funding, really.)

Various other missions were kept alive by very busy individuals. AE, etc. They were often as overworked as volunteers as Comm was.

Tying higher rank in ES to you-pay-to-travel training at Region level as well as FEMA training, I get why, but it could get really expensive if you needed “that one class”. I got lucky and the State had some openings in FEMA training or I wouldn’t have bothered. Still, that was a multi day weekday thing. Volunteers with non-flexible jobs can’t do that.

And that leads to flying. The retired and those with flexible schedules and good incomes could figure out how to stay current. Anyone with a weekday 8-5 job would be hard pressed to do currency stuff for flight crew ratings but it could be done if you did nothing but CAP every weekend and also tossed in some weeknights on non meeting nights. The time necessary to do the missions right was very high. Add a 40 minute one way commute and dogs and a wife’s schedule to work around? Forget it.

That’s my story. Liked it. But can’t do it. I’d need to retire from my day job or dive back in headfirst into CFI stuff and do ONLY CAP. Which could happen. But somewhat unlikely. We shall see. Not holding my breath.
 
denverpilot,

It is an online survey! So click here and please tell your story. Copy-and-paste should work just fine.

https://auburn.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1MRXH7sLqO9SgUR

- MajTbird


denverpilot said:
I enjoyed my time in CAP with the following caveats.

(You should convert the PDF to a real survey for free on something like SurveyMonkey.)

...snip...

That’s my story. Liked it. But can’t do it. I’d need to retire from my day job or dive back in headfirst into CFI stuff and do ONLY CAP. Which could happen. But somewhat unlikely. We shall see. Not holding my breath.
Click to expand...
 
Completed your survey. Told it like it is (for me). I had high expectations that CAP was the right fit for me as a volunteer.
The good ole boys running the show had other ideas. Oh well,,,,
 
Howdy - did the survey; I was a Mission Pilot for 12-13 years, and dropped out 4 or 5 years or so ago. There was (is?) a very, very heavy load of bureacracy in the organization, and it was (is?) "ethically challenged" - plenty of good folks, but also way, way too many not so good people. Also some very public, and very embarrasing, revelations, as well as some shoddy treatment of whistle blowers.

Mostly I left because my time was being wasted on adminstrivia, and the steadily declining pool of meaningful missions went largely to the inner circle. I spent a lot of time on very low value tasks, and it wasn't unusual to invest a very long, frustrating day in getting 1.5 Hobbs. . .the "coordination" effort for flying became a grim chore - after gacking with some really bad web-based management apps, multiple emails and phone calls were required, and there was always one more form, phone call, or petty annoyance to deal with.

I was constantly "training" new, non-pilot guys to be scanners and observers, knowing they'd get qualified and then never be called on to fly for real - they'd invest a considerable amount of time, then realize it was pointless, and stop participating. Rinse and repeat.

It could/could be a good fit for some folks, if you find a good squadron, and your personal threshold for tolerating bureacracy is higher than mine. I thought briefly about going back, as I near retirement, but decided against it - not enough meaningful work for the time it takes.
 
I can't even blame anything on a good-ole-boys network. The organization is just standing in its own way. Rather than 'meetings', the effort should be on mission related training. If there is a 3hr training session on saturday morning, the plane should be in the air for two of those hours. CAP has one unique capability, and that is to mount a coordinated air and ground search, most of the training should be focused on developing and demonstrating that skill. Every month, there should be a joint exercise with whoever in the region has jurisdiction for ground SAR. If the sheriffs department has done training with CAP and knows what we can do for them, they may call if they have a missing snowmobiler or ATV. If the county fire chief knows he can get a plane in the air with a 60 minute lead time, he may call to get a set of aerial images of a brushfire that has grown beyond what he can see from an ATV.

Instead, we have a pre-plan to an ops-plan which is revised 8 times over the course of 2 months before the 'Sarex' ends up getting cancelled because the clouds are below some arbitrary level chosen by a buerocrat at NHQ.

I am also a member in a fire department. If I am at the station and one of the training captains is around, we load our gear in a truck go to work on something that I need to get signed off. Sure, there is a mandatory monthly business meeting where the admin BS is taken care of. After the meeting, the junior members are training hose evolutions behind the station. There aren't all that many fires, but the department is 90% mission and 10% admin BS, not the other way around.
 
weilke said:
I can't even blame anything on a good-ole-boys network. The organization is just standing in its own way. Rather than 'meetings', the effort should be on mission related training. If there is a 3hr training session on saturday morning, the plane should be in the air for two of those hours. CAP has one unique capability, and that is to mount a coordinated air and ground search, most of the training should be focused on developing and demonstrating that skill. Every month, there should be a joint exercise with whoever in the region has jurisdiction for ground SAR. If the sheriffs department has done training with CAP and knows what we can do for them, they may call if they have a missing snowmobiler or ATV. If the county fire chief knows he can get a plane in the air with a 60 minute lead time, he may call to get a set of aerial images of a brushfire that has grown beyond what he can see from an ATV.

Instead, we have a pre-plan to an ops-plan which is revised 8 times over the course of 2 months before the 'Sarex' ends up getting cancelled because the clouds are below some arbitrary level chosen by a buerocrat at NHQ.

I am also a member in a fire department. If I am at the station and one of the training captains is around, we load our gear in a truck go to work on something that I need to get signed off. Sure, there is a mandatory monthly business meeting where the admin BS is taken care of. After the meeting, the junior members are training hose evolutions behind the station. There aren't all that many fires, but the department is 90% mission and 10% admin BS, not the other way around.
Click to expand...

I love this idea. The problem is the Sheriff's dept has to justify those jet rangers so they'll use them every chance they get. But I love the idea of teaming up with state agencies. Right now in the KS wing we were notified of a pretty cool mission working directly with USAF and US Army forward controllers.

There are fires all over Kansas right now (Feb-March is fire season here), CAP should have birds in the sky doing fire spotting IMHO.
 
labbadabba said:
There are fires all over Kansas right now (Feb-March is fire season here), CAP should have birds in the sky doing fire spotting IMHO.
Click to expand...

Should. And every incident commander on the ground should be able to receive geo-referenced aerial pictures of 'his' fire on his iphone after each pass. He should also know which mutual aid channel to select for a direct link to the bird. I am sure there are states where some of that already happens, the process I have seen is far less streamlined.
 
I'm still in it, but I can tell you what's making some of our members restless.

Lack of funding. And it's not even really CAPs fault. There is funding for proficiency flying and training when Congress manages to pass a spending bill that lasts for 12 months. These 2 week, 1.5 month, etc. extensions mean no funding and no flying for CAP.

We actually have several younger people in my CAP squadron. Most of the younger people are the actual pilots (when I say younger, I mean 30s/40s) while the older guys seem to do more ground stuff.

At the end of the day, CAP flying can be overly complicated, but when you are getting 3 hours of funded proficiency flying a month as a MP or TMP in exchange for a once a month meeting, it's worth it. When the funds dry up, there's very little motivation to keep jumping through hoops.

BUT, my experience doesn't seem to be typical. Our squadron commander isn't trying to play military, many of our pilots are also professional pilots so they aren't looking to hog things, and we were getting funded flying every month. We also only meet once a month, not once a week, and that meeting is only 45 minutes or so.
 
Last edited:
I filled the survey out, thanks for taking the time to put that together and collect some intel. It is appreciated and good to see that there are CAP members that are looking to collect this data to help their club. I'm sad to see it shrinking, as it's just one more GA related item that's dwindling in numbers. I joined CAP originally for the two biggest following reasons: to be around more local pilots and to fly cool missions where my flying was actually helping the local community, law enforcement, and to help with SAR or natural disaster relief, etc. Basically, it was a way to put my rating to good use.. win/win

I stopped going, and generally wouldn't recommend, for these reasons:
*the general atmosphere seems more interested in filling out reams of paperwork with a highly bureaucratic organization style. In additional, fully qualified pilots can't actually fly a CAP plane without jumping through dozens of hoops... the fun, thrill, and satisfaction of being part of an aviation organization that helps the community quickly wears off and you realize you're just sacrificing 3 hrs a week to sit in a room and fill out paperwork for months on end, while the more seasoned members have "their club" and you look in from the outside. There also seem to be a fair amount of people that are more interested in their "rank" than actually growing or helping the club succeed

Honestly, if they want to make the CAP attract more new people and actually retain members then an easy way to do that would be
-organize more flying opportunities.. I think a lot of people would be willing to pay more to be in the air. Why wait for a mission to come from "central command" - let's use the club members to plan out different exercises and various missions, etc. It's volunteer, so people know they're on their own dime. Blaming "the budget" is a cop out.. I gladly would have paid more money if it made actually being in the air and flying missions more accessible. There is a great club out here and they organize frequent fly outs.. there's never a shortage of people looking to go on those
-remove about 95% of the paperwork and bureaucratic entanglement.. how about just a background check, a check out flight, and some routine currency requirements. Your rating is a government issued document.. so it seems gratuitous to have so many extra forms to fill out, to, ultimately lets be honest, fly a small single engine plane you could checkout from a club after 30 minutes and fly for $150/hr
-make rank advancement offer more perks and benefits..
-don't always send the same 5 people on missions... let's have the pool rotate to get new people in the mix as well

Also, realize that today's younger generation of pilots may not be all people with military in their blood.. the club can feel alienating to someone who isn't currently enlisted or spent 30 years in the military. There's nothing wrong with having the club carry national pride and have a disciplined culture, I get and appreciate that 100% (frankly we don't have enough of that), but the club can feel very foreign and not really welcoming to someone who isn't from a military background
 
I've never been a member but my son was a CAP cadet through junior high and high school. He enjoyed it and made friends. He became part of the color guard and they volunteered at many activities in the community. He was quite proud of that.

However,...

Once he out-grew being a cadet, CAP held nothing for him. There were zero members in their early or mid 20s. Everyone seemed to be 40+ (make that 40+++) years old, and too many were wannabes playing military. A couple of the leaders I knew were on power trips and over-awed with their own self-importance. There was simply no meaningful role for a young man and no members he could relate to, and the clique-ish nature of the organization makes it unappealing to an old fart like me.
 
Tantalum said:
Honestly, if they want to make the CAP attract more new people and actually retain members then an easy way to do that would be
-organize more flying opportunities.. I think a lot of people would be willing to pay more to be in the air. Why wait for a mission to come from "central command" - let's use the club members to plan out different exercises and various missions, etc. It's volunteer, so people know they're on their own dime. Blaming "the budget" is a cop out.. I gladly would have paid more money if it made actually being in the air and flying missions more accessible. There is a great club out here and they organize frequent fly outs.. there's never a shortage of people looking to go on those
-remove about 95% of the paperwork and bureaucratic entanglement.. how about just a background check, a check out flight, and some routine currency requirements. Your rating is a government issued document.. so it seems gratuitous to have so many extra forms to fill out, to, ultimately lets be honest, fly a small single engine plane you could checkout from a club after 30 minutes and fly for $150/hr
-make rank advancement offer more perks and benefits..
-don't always send the same 5 people on missions... let's have the pool rotate to get new people in the mix as well
Click to expand...

Yeah, they should make it more like a flying club. That'd keep more money flowing in from people renting the airplanes to maintain them and keep the pilots proficient. The self-funded rates are actually good. A new G1000 182 for about $110 an hour is hard to beat if you just want to go beat around the sky for an hour or two.

Obviously, you couldn't take the planes overnight in case they were needed, but at least operate it like a rental outfit where C12 (self-funded) flights are easy and simple to execute.

WIMIRS isn't really a big deal to me. I can fill that out in 3 minutes for a flight. It's the 10-15 minute interview to get released for a VFR flight and having to fill out the stupid log in the plane that adds the most time to operations.
 
I'm retired from the Air Force and was looking possibly into joining a few years ago. Hearing the paperwork crap alone was enough to discourage me, even though they said "ooh you're a CFI, we can use ya". Saw enough paperwork during active duty so I wasn't interested in more of it. So I was chatting with the head honcho at an airshow, and glanced over at the 182 w/ an old dude sitting inside the plane about to doze off. Gave me the impression of 'hey this is mine, stay away'. He should have been outside the 182 with the doors open so potential newbies could ogle the panel and ask him questions.
 
I went to two local meetings and never went back. does that count?
 
These are some great answers and observations. Well-reasoned and clearly reflective of dedicated efforts. And I sincerely appreciate the feedback of former and inactive members on the survey. As of now I have 59 responses. I am hoping for 378 "good" responses to get to a 95% confidence level with a 5% margin of error.

With the comments here in the thread and in the survey, would any of you current members be interested in a similar survey for current members?

Again, this survey--and if one for current members is developed--will become part of academic research about organizational effectiveness (particularly not-for-profits). I will offer to share what is learned with CAP and I will share it herein if y'all are interested.

- MajTbird
 
Done.
 
Last edited:
I'm technically a current member, though estranged from the flock and trying to work my way back. My son is 4, and since he was born I have been pretty much inactive, including a 2 1/2 year stint when I didn't participate at all. I joined CAP when I was 14 and got a lot out of it, and re-joined as I was finishing college. Most of my time as a senior was quite rewarding, but those rewards have dwindled over the last 5 years or so.

It's interesting to see some of the comments because they are much different than my experience. There are some similarities, though... the cliquish, old-boys network certainly applies to most squadrons I'm familiar with. I'm sure I had a part in creating that impression for some of the people who tried to join our squadron. The flip side of that... we would have new members and try to bullishly push us into new ways of doing things, without taking the time to get to know the people and the organization. Much of what we did at the squadron and group level was driven by the wing and NHQ, so there's never much flexibility. Those of us that had put the time in to build up a good unit weren't real thrilled about people who thought they'd change everything around after a month or two. The former military people were always the worst about this. They always seemed to believe that they could get a staff position and start issuing orders to make things happen. That doesn't work with civilian volunteers, so it never worked well.

For me, the biggest reason I lost interest was that there were few challenging or rewarding missions left to do. In NY, the state police are the first call for a missing aircraft so CAP rarely gets a call. ELT missions are all but non-existent these days. I've participated in the counter drug mission, but I think it should marijuana should be legal so my heart isn't in it, and most of the growers have moved indoors anyway. 15 years ago we'd have multiple finds every week and would count several thousand plants every season, just in my group. Now we rarely have a find and the season's total is probably in the dozens. 15 years ago we'd have an ELT weekly and be involved in a missing aircraft search a couple of times a year, plus DR missions every year or so. Most of that seems to have dried up.

I was my group ES officer for about 8 years, starting when I was 24. I lobbied my wing ES officer to work with NHQ so we could start doing what we call "On Demand Training." My reasoning was that we didn't need to staff a mission base to send a single plane out to practice an ELT search (or whatever training task needed to be done). To his credit, he didn't make me argue that hard for it, and he got it done. In the years after that, we did an awful lot of training this way, and it was better training, too. In addition to that, I'd run a practice mission every quarter for our group, as did wing. So, on average, there was a big training opportunity every 6-ish weeks and any crew could request a training flight whenever they wanted. NY wing also set aside a certain amount of the training budget for MPs to do proficiency flying (following the approved profiles).

So the comments about training money not being available make me scratch my head. NY did not receive much money from sources other than NHQ for training and we rarely spent it all by the end of the year.

The thing that did get in the way of a lot of training was volunteer availability. In the 90s, my group would have people showing up at the mission base at 6 AM and we'd have more people than we knew what to do with. When I was last active, we'd barely be able to staff a base and could rarely find new people to act as trusted agents.

I don't understand why it would take a 15 minute phone call to get a flight release. It should take less than 5 to verify that all the entries have been made in WMIRS and that the pilot is safe to fly.

The biggest turn off for me as a senior member is the way some members try to use their rank as if it meant anything. I consider it monopoly money, but we see far too many people who try to take it seriously. One year at our encampment (on an active-duty military installation), a CAP senior member tried to insist that an active-duty enlisted person needed to salute him. You can't imagine the ****-storm that followed.

We see far too many people who seek rank and authority in CAP because they are in no way qualified to seek it in their personal or professional lives, and then they try to throw their weight around as if it means something. New people who encounter that tend to leave with a bad taste in their mouths. It stands in the way of good operations more than it helps. CAP would be far better served by

I do still enjoy cadet flights and hope to do more of that this year. As far as I can tell, that's the only truly worthwhile mission we have left. If I could afford to fly more on my own and had better access to planes, I probably wouldn't bother with CAP.
 
Eric Gleason said:
I don't understand why it would take a 15 minute phone call to get a flight release. It should take less than 5 to verify that all the entries have been made in WMIRS and that the pilot is safe to fly.
Click to expand...

Because the new 70-1 added a bunch of risk management stuff and questions. Flight releases are much more complicated now.
 
Bonchie said:
Because the new 70-1 added a bunch of risk management stuff and questions. Flight releases are much more complicated now.
Click to expand...

Our company has something like that, all done with apps and in the background, I'd also imagine our grown up company costs less than the government bloat CAP
 
Bonchie said:
Because the new 70-1 added a bunch of risk management stuff and questions. Flight releases are much more complicated now.
Click to expand...
To amplify: The FRO checklist requires that the FRO determine whether the PIC is aware of airplane squawks. To do this the FRO must go into WMIRS himself and review the squawks to make sure the PIC is aware of all of them. Then, if there are squawks, the FRO is asked for a determination of whether the airplane is airworthy. (The FRO is NOT asked whether the PIC considers it to be airworthy.) So to make this determination the FRO must either have a copy of the FARs available or have memorized the critical requirements (TOMATO FLAMES, etc.). The FRO must also have at hand the POH for the airplane, which can add airworthiness requirements to the basic FAR requirements. C182T/G1000 "Kinds of Operation Limits" for example.

The FRO checklist also generally treats the air crew and the PIC as if they are ignorant and impetuous children. It's quite insulting.

It's really pretty hopeless. As AOBD I have been used to releasing 40+ sorties a day on a mission. If I actually follow the new rules, it will probably be half that. Probably, though, I will just bail on the whole program and refuse to work missions. I haven't flown a CAP airplane in several years because it is just too much of a hassle.
 
eman1200 said:
I went to two local meetings and never went back. does that count?
Click to expand...

Sure - you cared enough to show up and then quit. If CAP got even 25% of the people who showed to join, they couldn't handle how many people they'd have.
 
airdale said:
To amplify: The FRO checklist requires that the FRO determine whether the PIC is aware of airplane squawks. To do this the FRO must go into WMIRS himself and review the squawks to make sure the PIC is aware of all of them. Then, if there are squawks, the FRO is asked for a determination of whether the airplane is airworthy. (The FRO is NOT asked whether the PIC considers it to be airworthy.) So to make this determination the FRO must either have a copy of the FARs available or have memorized the critical requirements (TOMATO FLAMES, etc.). The FRO must also have at hand the POH for the airplane, which can add airworthiness requirements to the basic FAR requirements. C182T/G1000 "Kinds of Operation Limits" for example.

The FRO checklist also generally treats the air crew and the PIC as if they are ignorant and impetuous children. It's quite insulting.

It's really pretty hopeless. As AOBD I have been used to releasing 40+ sorties a day on a mission. If I actually follow the new rules, it will probably be half that. Probably, though, I will just bail on the whole program and refuse to work missions. I haven't flown a CAP airplane in several years because it is just too much of a hassle.
Click to expand...

You can't just ask the PIC "Have you checked the squawk list?"

Honestly, this seems like someone's reading too much into the rules. Where does it say that the FRO is responsible for determining airworthiness?
 
Eric Gleason said:
You can't just ask the PIC "Have you checked the squawk list?"

Honestly, this seems like someone's reading too much into the rules. Where does it say that the FRO is responsible for determining airworthiness?
Click to expand...
Well, the FRO checklist doesn't ask that question. It says "Is the pilot aware of the discrepancies, if there are any. If not, review them." So the way I read that I have to independently check for discrepancies, then determine whether the pilot is aware of what I found. Same problem with airworthiness -- it asks "Is it legal to fly with these discrepancies?" It does not ask "Does the pilot think it is legal to fly with these discrepancies."

Is it reading too much to read the items literally? If the bureaucrats just want me to quiz the pilot and take whatever answers I get (which would be fine with me) then that is what the checklist should ask.
 
"I'm technically a current member, though estranged from the flock"

So am I. I haven't been to a squadron meeting in over 2 years - I teach at the local university 4 evenings a week. Makes for the perfect excuse...er...reason.

I have no interest in flying redcap missions, but I'd like to fly ORides. I'm very active in EAA Young Eagle program and it's the most fun with an airplane. But trying to get trained in the 182 is a nightmare. Denverpilot & I were in the same squadron (I still am) . The same people do all the redcap missions and many of the SAREXs. (Search & Rescue practice). Money for flying the SAREXs runs out by lunch time on Saturday, so the people who signed up for the afternoon and Sunday flights have been sitting around all day, waiting, then finding out they've wasted a day or more of their time with zero benefit.

There's been more than one complaint that this violates the published CAP rules on non-discrimination (one of the many complainants is a rabbi) because certain religions will not participate Friday pm/Sat am. Went up to the region, may have gone to National (dunno) but it got shot down. I actually asked one of the senior pilots if he could run a training flight on Sat instead of Sunday, and he replied "I go to church on Sunday morning, I don't fly". Well golly gee, Uncle Bob, not everyone is of the same fabric.

Now let's talk about gender. Back when I was attending meetings, there would often be one or two new women interested in CAP. They'd last perhaps 3 meetings and never be seen again. Some were pilots, too. This means we lost a member and more critical, they left with a bad opinion of CAP (which is rightly deserved). Right now I think our squadron has 4 women, two are pilots but neither have qualified as CAP pilots out of 75-80 members.

Why do I remain a member? Because I have nothing to do with the squadron but lots to do at the Wing level (State). I'm the unofficial/underground External Aerospace Education officer. Unofficial because I don't want the title, but the Wing AE and I have an agreement that I can use the title when I go to conferences, schools, etc.

CAP is suffering recruiting but doesn't understand that AE is the best recruiting, nay marketing, tool around. I've gotten 3 high schools involved with CyberPatriot program. Spoke at the regional CyberSecurity conference about the CyberPatriot program, which garnered a great deal of interest from some of the vendors. I teach the ground school for our Young Eagle program and talk about scholarships for flying and other ways of flying, such as CAP cadet programs. I'm in contact with 3-4 local drone companies about coming to my YE ground school for demos. But is the local CAP squadron interested? Nope. They're trying to do it by themselves.

oh well, rant off. I'm off to class. Time for another exam in computer science 2. College students who think it's easy to get a CS degree without studying. Afterall, everything can be found on google. But going back to the security clearance thread - there are places where google isn't available, which is why I still carry books with me.
 
Why can’t WMIRS just track squawks and airworthiness? That was my problem with their computer systems. They didn’t know how to really USE computers to make the job easier, they just moved the 1990s paperwork into the computer and then keep adding to it.

And I know part of the reason. Bad squawks. More than once I was told something didn’t work in the airplane and I’d go check and the well documented switches added by STC with a manual right in the airplane explaining them. Were set wrong.

Besides all of this... other volunteer ES agencies have standards that have to be met PRIOR to joining which leads to many problems. Also those agencies have dedicated on call staff for all jobs on any given day. There’s no mad scramble to find out who’s driving the fire truck if the pager goes off today. It’s a known thing. CAP always does it with a single MC on call and then a mad phone scramble to find crews. This is just plain dumb. It’s ES services not weekend training. It should be a known quantity who’s responding to each aircraft if a call comes in. That always drove me batty watching crews scramble to assemble. Which helps the good old boy club stay, really. People would have their own call lists. “You ready to go? Yep. Okay I’ll call the MC and tell him we have a crew.” Ridiculous.

Hell, if you use the computers right they should spit out crew assignments for anything in a week and if someone can’t do it they need to flip their availability off in the software. Not that hard.
 
I haven't been to a CAP meeting in over a year and haven't flown a CAP plane in over 5 years though I am still a dues paying member. In fact I just paid my annual dues this past week. At one time, I was a Transport Mission Pilot and was working on becoming a Mission Pilot but getting necessary training and signoffs was painfully slow. It seems to be a common issue everywhere. This is odd because on one hand, they make it so difficult to qualify and on the other hand they complain when they can't staff a mission. I am planning to reengage soon and push hard to fly and qualify so that I can actually contribute to missions but if I do not make any headway, this will be my last year as a member. I do agree that in many ways it is like a good ol' boys flying club and many members are not the least bit interested in the actual mission. They just want the free and cheap flying. Meetings are frequently a joke and end up being nothing more than a bs session where no real training happens. I just don't understand it.
 
I was in the cadet program in the PA Wing from 68 to 76 and it was a really valuable experience. Out i it I got my first plane ride (in an Ercoupe), a few rides in a T-34 owned by the wing, first ride in a helicopter during a SAR Mission, got to fly gliders in Great Britain as part of the Air Cadet Exchange, and went to the Hawk Mountain SAR school. I did a week-long solo encampment and I got to solo for only $50. Later, I went to Space Camp before it was Space Camp (it was called Space Flight Orientation Course) in Huntsville. I did four or five SAR missions: we found one, guarded another crash site, and came up with nothing on the others. Bad example: we did a search based on some information from a medium that the crash was just outside Johnstown (the plane was later found in New Jersey I heard). It was the 70’s so I guess some silliness could be expected.

I think we went overboard sometimes on the military regimen, but at the same time, asking a 14 year old boy and girl to simply move 20 of his peers from point A to point B (and have them listen to you) instills confidence. I was in an inner-city squadron in Pittsburgh where most of the cadets and all of the senior members were African American and they set an example of fairness and transparency that was remarkable, considering there were race riots happening during that period. I made friends I would never have made otherwise and that squadron sent a large number to the military (some academy selections, some ROTC (like me) some as enlisted. The senior members weren’t hung up over rank and they really sacrificed their time and money to run the squadron.

Over the years I’ve been tempted to pay it back. When I was in the Army, I was too busy (or deployed) to look into it. Now in my civilian career, I checked out local squadrons in but nothing matches my work schedule so far. I was at a fly in last year where I talked to a few CAP cadets and they all seem to think it was a good experience. I saw one senior member in slacks and a polo shirt that was mentoring them and he seemed decent and there to support the cadets. Later, I saw a few CAP folks fly in with flight suits that were way too small and I had no idea what they were doing.

In the end, I think the cadet program is where the goodness lay. It’s there someone can make difference.
 
denverpilot said:
Why can’t WMIRS just track squawks and airworthiness? That was my problem with their computer systems. They didn’t know how to really USE computers to make the job easier, they just moved the 1990s paperwork into the computer and then keep adding to it.
Click to expand...

It does. It'll show you the squawks and whether they've been deferred.
 
Bonchie said:
It does. It'll show you the squawks and whether they've been deferred.
Click to expand...

I’m talking about the flight release questions. Automate those. They just want another throat to choke in the FRO. It’s PIC responsibility and on the PIC in any other flying gig.
 
Stepping back, bigger picture - CAP is probably slipping, slowly, into irrelevancy; not paricularly credible with most state SAR elements, and likely seen as an unwelcome competitor by some, its usefullness has also been eroded by the 406 cutover. CAP, and its employment methods, are ponderous and slow - not always, but often enough to drive bad opinions. There are niche areas where it can be useful, but probably not sustained, not as now constituted and managed. Aviation has matured much faster than CAP, and it trails culturally, as well. The cadet program is useful, in the better run squadrons, but not such a unique experience that other youth organizations couldn't fill the void. Aerospace education also has some, but diminished, value - it's not as necessary as it was a few decades back. With SAR missions greatly reduced, and often taken on by state and local entities, that aspect of CAP is also diminished - not gone completly, but definitley shrunk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top