eb wrote:
trail wrote:
...
I even see it with aviators. For whatever reason they seem to like to spend all day in flight suits, even when they're not flying that day. Just more comfy and easier to manage?
5% comfort
5% ease of management
90% "look at me, I'm a pilot"
Not that I blame them - they're rightfully prood of being the tip of the spear.
Some truth in all of this. A big deal for me was that flight suits, flight jackets (one for summer, one for winter, and later they gave us a leather jacket), black wool socks, flight boots, and even the long underwear that we'd wear in cold weather were all issued, free of charge. We had to pay for our "blue" uniforms. During the Reagan years, they gave us five flight suits. (We were only issued two flight suits in the late 70's, and I could sit on a dime and tell you if it was heads or tails because both of them had gotten so threadbare.) Once all of the Reagan money poured in, if you said one of your flight suits, jackets, or pair of boots had worn out, they gave you a replacement and you could keep the one(s) that was/were "worn out". (Handy for changing the oil in your car, etc.) So you always had at least a couple of flight suits that had been washed, and they didn't require any sort of special laundry/dry cleaning/starch/etc. And I've still got them, along with the jackets, socks, boots, and long underwear.
In a flying squadron, we wore flight suits just about 100 percent of the time. You might only be on the flying schedule a couple of times during the week, but we'd wear them for flying, meetings, giving briefings, going to the gym, you name it.
But when I went to Fighter Weapons School, they'd had a few flying accidents in the 57th Wing. Their commander made the instructors wear their "blues" unless they were flying. Talk about guys feeling like they were being whipped and beaten.
When I was on the USAFE staff at Ramstein, we wore blues most of the time, but on Fridays the aircrew would wear flight suits and everyone else would wear fatigues. (This was in the mid-80's before BDU's came along.) Then, one of the generals thought it would be a good idea to have everyone wear fatigues on Friday. Almost none of the aircrew owned a set of fatigues, or if they did they were a set they'd worn 10+ years ago during some level of basic training. The first Friday with everyone in fatigues was a clown show. Shirts and pants that were too small, rank and other items sewn on incorrectly, hats that didn't fit, wrong belts and belt buckles, you name it. It took a few weeks before everyone got their fatigues sorted out, by which time the general gave up and he let the aircrew go back to flight suits.
"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.
