#Interview copilot

[interviewassistant]

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[interview-intelligence-platform]

The AI interview copilot is designed to assist interviewers throughout the hiring process. By providing a structured interface and ready-to-use questions, it simplifies the organization of interviews, ensuring a smoother and more efficient experience for both interviewers and candidates.

[auroraamor123]

co-pilot creation

[lockedinai]

Refine Skills Using AI Interview Copilot Tool

Gain a competitive edge with the AI Interview Copilot Tool, a powerful resource for interview preparation. Powered by LockedIn AI, this tool offers real-time coaching to improve your responses and confidence. Use the AI Interview Copilot Tool to simulate diverse interview formats, receive instant feedback, and refine your answers. Ideal for professionals across industries, it ensures you're fully prepared for technical, behavioral, or panel interviews. Embrace this advanced tool to excel in interviews and secure your dream job. Elevate your preparation with personalized support designed to help you succeed.

[withahappyrefrain]

This made me giggle so I’m sharing it with you. I know you’re riding the Bob Reynolds train rn (lord knows I am too babe) but seeing all the delicious photoshoots and interviews Lew is doing for Thunderbolts had the wheels in my little brain turning. It specifically had me thinking about his gorgeous long locks. AND that somehow got me thinking about Bob Floyd (a natural tangent at this point tbh) and the dagger reaction to him having long locks. Like maybe Bob is on a family leave for one of his babies and the day before he’s due back to base he meets up with the Daggers at the Hard Deck for a little welcome back party and maybe they don’t even recognize him when he comes in or something. I can picture Bob making a little witty comment about how his wife likes the long locks though cuz it gives her more to hang on to

"This is what? Child number five?" Jake asks as he adjusts the banner.

"Three. Though considering how quickly they had this one, we'll probably be doing the same thing around this time next year," Bradley snorted.

"For a guy who isn't Irish, he sure loves having Irish twins," Javy remarked, having given up on the balloon arch.

"Can we stop talking about my copilot's breeding habits and go back to making sure the banner is straight? Thanks in advance." Natasha rolled her eyes. One would think after doing this two times, the third would go off without a hitch. But apparently a 'welcome back from paternity leave' party for Bob Floyd couldn't occur without a failed balloon arch and a discussion over the WSO's enjoyment of having children.

Bob had been gone for three months, taking care of his wife and new daughter, Matilda. His presence had been sorely missed by the Daggers. After all, who else could subtly put Hangman in his place?

Not Bradley, that was for damn sure.

"I told you all, we don't need the balloon arch." The voice was familiar, but when they turned to the source, the squad was stunned.

The man looked so much like Bob, but also not. Same build, same voice, same cornflower eyes. But there was also stubble dusted across his face and long dark locks that curled at the end. No glasses.

It was Bob. But at the same time, it wasn't.

Jake was the first to speak, since he had no filter, "You're not our baby on board."

"What's he trying to say is you look different," Mickey explained after elbowing Jake in the ribs.

"Huh?" It took Bob a second to realize, "Oh yeah. I plan to cut it off and shave tomorrow. Just didn't have time today."

"You really let yourself go during this leave Bobby. That bad?" Jake joked, despite no one finding it funny.

Bob's eyes narrowed, lips forming into a tight line, "No. My wife just likes it when my hair's long. Gives her something to hold onto."

Jake promptly shut up. The rest of the squad were thankful Bob was back.

[lsunstreakerl]

1.2k of the pacific rim verse! again, trying out a different style of writing here.

[Harsh lighting clicks on, shining down on the white interview table.]

Specialist: Introduce yourself, please.

D. Ricciardo: Daniel Ricciardo. Retired Senior Lieutenant, Jaeger Copilot for HB-333, now retired. Temporary Emergency Solo Pilot for Jaeger 01, active.

Specialist: Describe the incident leading up to your emergency piloting of Jaeger 01.

D. Ricciardo: *Laughs*

D. Ricciardo: How far back do you want me to go?

Specialist: Just the day-of, please. We'll go over the history later.

D. Ricciardo: Alright.

D. Ricciardo: I was trying to achieve drift with 01's primary pilot—

Specialist: I understand your extenuating circumstances, but if you would state the name of the primary pilot?

D. Ricciardo: *Winces*

D. Ricciardo: Max Verstappen. Former Copilot of HB-333, Primary Solo Pilot of Jaeger 01.

Specialist: Thank you. Continue.

D. Ricciardo: I was on the third attempt to drift with him. Still hadn't found anything, due to the format of the mindscape he'd left behind.

Specialist: Describe the mindscape.

D. Ricciardo: Barren.

D. Ricciardo: I've never seen anything like it. Cause normally with a mindscape, it's a representation of the pilot, yeah? It's their history and their personality, and that's how you achieve drift, is by finding the things in common and merging them.

D. Ricciardo: His was empty. Or— maybe not empty, is the right word. It was fragmented.

Specialist: Fragmented.

D. Ricciardo: Yeah.

D. Ricciardo: I'd get maybe two or three seconds of a memory, and then it was gone. If you think of a regular mindscape being like seeing the bright, internal core of a person, then his was like seeing a shell of it.

D. Ricciardo: You could tell that someone had been there once, and that they weren't anymore.

D. Ricciardo: Extremely unsettling.

Specialist: You're pale. Do you need a water brought in?

D. Ricciardo: No, it's fine.

D. Ricciardo: We can keep going.

Specialist: You stated you were on your third attempt at achieving drift. What prevented the first two from succeeding?

D. Ricciardo: He just wasn't there.

D. Ricciardo: I hit the maximum time limit I could stay in the gel with him, and I wasn't able to find anything more than a scrap of memory.

D. Ricciardo: I mean, obviously we know why now, but at the time it was also unsettling. I felt like I was trying to drift with a dead man.

Specialist: What made the third attempt different?

D. Ricciardo: Nothing.

D. Ricciardo: I failed that one too. I got pulled out cause the boots— sorry, infantrymen— were removing him from the gel. So they could take him to 01.

Specialist: Video footage shows you following.

D. Ricciardo: Yes. I went into the pilot locker rooms and borrowed a suit.

Specialist: To be clear, at this point in time you had not been given any orders to follow or to pilot.

D. Ricciardo: Correct.

Specialist: So why did you?

D. Ricciardo: I was suffering memory retrieval headaches at the time. Debilitating stuff, if you've ever had one.

D. Ricciardo: I had this, like, tug. In my chest.

D. Ricciardo: I didn't even consider not following him, honestly. Even if I thought about it, my feet were already moving.

Specialist: Do you feel that had anything to do with the history between yourself and Verstappen?

D. Ricciardo: I mean. It'd be hard not to.

D. Ricciardo: Obviously him and I were very close prior to the memory removal procedure, that's part of being copilots. You know everything about each other.

D. Ricciardo: Looking at the success rates for HB-333, he and I were even better copilots than most. But that's part of the memory removal process, yeah? Even if they blocked out my memories of him, the body doesn't forget. Too much muscle memory of being inside each other's heads, I'm sure.

Specialist: Records state you only obtained clearance to attempt the drift and subsequent piloting of Jaeger 01 after you'd suited up.

D. Ricciardo: That also sounds correct. We'll call it preemptive planning from me, how's that?

D. Ricciardo: I got clearance from a General right before I went in. That's also when they told me I would have to pilot solo if we couldn't drift.

Specialist: Our readings on Jaeger 01 show a fluctuation in your drift readings from when you initially strapped in, with an 11.63% from Verstappen.

D. Ricciardo: That didn't last long. We connected as soon as I tried to drift solo.

Specialist: That matches with what you claimed immediately after the incident, yes. Our readings never jumped above 15% for Verstappen, but your drift reading was at 98%.

D. Ricciardo: Yeah.

Specialist: That's not possible. A drift can't be uneven.

D. Ricciardo: You were reading the wrong thing, mate. His physical drift reading was low, because he wasn't present in his own mind. His body was there, but nobody was home.

Specialist: Elaborate.

D. Ricciardo: It's exactly what I said when we got back and I got out of the cockpit.

Specialist: Your exact words were, "He's the fucking Jaeger." correct?

D. Ricciardo: Affirmative.

Specialist: Lieutenant Ricciardo, I'm just trying to understand.

D. Ricciardo: Retired Lieutenant.

D. Ricciardo: I've never felt anything like it. As soon as I made the solo drift connection, he was there.

Specialist: What do you mean by "there"?

D. Ricciardo: In my head. Around me, piloting with me. I thought I was going insane at first. He said he'd been waiting for me to come back.

Specialist: You communicated with him?

D. Ricciardo: Correct. He was managing the psychological effects of the drift, and the memorial retrieval process my brain was going through. I never would've been able to focus otherwise.

Specialist: To be clear, you're implying that despite no longer being mentally present in his physical body, you communicated with Max Verstappen in an incorporeal manner?

D. Ricciardo: Correct again. Never experienced anything like it— I'm sure it shows in our Jaeger response speeds.

Specialist: Your stint as Emergency Pilot beat out every other record 01 has set.

D. Ricciardo: Credit where credit is due mate, I've got no idea how he was piloting it on his own. It may look like I was flying solo on paper, but trust me, I wasn't.

Specialist: Was it difficult to step out of the cockpit?

D. Ricciardo: Extremely.

Specialist: For the record, we still have no physical response from Verstappen outside of the Jaeger.

D. Ricciardo: I tried to convince him to go back to his body, actually. Didn't go well.

Specialist: Are you implying he's still in Jaeger 01?

D. Ricciardo: Yes.

D. Ricciardo: Which is why I've requested a reinstatement of my piloting credentials.

Specialist: You think you can pilot 01?

D. Ricciardo: It's a win-win for all of you.

D. Ricciardo: Either I pilot solo and you get more use out of 01— and let's be honest here, you've gotten all the use you can out of Max, and then some.

D. Ricciardo: Or I'm able to bring him back from the drift in the Jaeger, and you'll have two talented pilots back.

Specialist: Memory removal procedures make soldiers ineligible to be pilots.

D. Ricciardo: Like you said. Extenuating circumstances.

Specialist: Thank you for your time, Lieutenant Ricciardo.

D. Ricciardo: Retired.

Specialist: As of one hour ago, you are once again an active Lieutenant.

D. Ricciardo: [beep]

[mariacallous]

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a “confabulation” or “hallucination” in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached “human level robustness” in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

The fabrications pose particular risks in health care settings. Despite OpenAI’s warnings against using Whisper for “high-risk domains,” over 30,000 medical workers now use Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits, according to the AP report. The Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are among 40 health systems using a Whisper-powered AI copilot service from medical tech company Nabla that is fine-tuned on medical terminology.

Nabla acknowledges that Whisper can confabulate, but it also reportedly erases original audio recordings “for data safety reasons.” This could cause additional issues, since doctors cannot verify accuracy against the source material. And deaf patients may be highly impacted by mistaken transcripts since they would have no way to know if medical transcript audio is accurate or not.

The potential problems with Whisper extend beyond health care. Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Virginia studied thousands of audio samples and found Whisper adding nonexistent violent content and racial commentary to neutral speech. They found that 1 percent of samples included “entire hallucinated phrases or sentences which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio” and that 38 percent of those included “explicit harms such as perpetuating violence, making up inaccurate associations, or implying false authority.”

In one case from the study cited by AP, when a speaker described “two other girls and one lady,” Whisper added fictional text specifying that they “were Black.” In another, the audio said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.” Whisper transcribed it to, “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

An OpenAI spokesperson told the AP that the company appreciates the researchers’ findings and that it actively studies how to reduce fabrications and incorporates feedback in updates to the model.

Why Whisper Confabulates

The key to Whisper’s unsuitability in high-risk domains comes from its propensity to sometimes confabulate, or plausibly make up, inaccurate outputs. The AP report says, "Researchers aren’t certain why Whisper and similar tools hallucinate," but that isn't true. We know exactly why Transformer-based AI models like Whisper behave this way.

Whisper is based on technology that is designed to predict the next most likely token (chunk of data) that should appear after a sequence of tokens provided by a user. In the case of ChatGPT, the input tokens come in the form of a text prompt. In the case of Whisper, the input is tokenized audio data.

The transcription output from Whisper is a prediction of what is most likely, not what is most accurate. Accuracy in Transformer-based outputs is typically proportional to the presence of relevant accurate data in the training dataset, but it is never guaranteed. If there is ever a case where there isn't enough contextual information in its neural network for Whisper to make an accurate prediction about how to transcribe a particular segment of audio, the model will fall back on what it “knows” about the relationships between sounds and words it has learned from its training data.

According to OpenAI in 2022, Whisper learned those statistical relationships from “680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.” But we now know a little more about the source. Given Whisper's well-known tendency to produce certain outputs like "thank you for watching," "like and subscribe," or "drop a comment in the section below" when provided silent or garbled inputs, it's likely that OpenAI trained Whisper on thousands of hours of captioned audio scraped from YouTube videos. (The researchers needed audio paired with existing captions to train the model.)

There's also a phenomenon called “overfitting” in AI models where information (in this case, text found in audio transcriptions) encountered more frequently in the training data is more likely to be reproduced in an output. In cases where Whisper encounters poor-quality audio in medical notes, the AI model will produce what its neural network predicts is the most likely output, even if it is incorrect. And the most likely output for any given YouTube video, since so many people say it, is “thanks for watching.”

In other cases, Whisper seems to draw on the context of the conversation to fill in what should come next, which can lead to problems because its training data could include racist commentary or inaccurate medical information. For example, if many examples of training data featured speakers saying the phrase “crimes by Black criminals,” when Whisper encounters a “crimes by [garbled audio] criminals” audio sample, it will be more likely to fill in the transcription with “Black."

In the original Whisper model card, OpenAI researchers wrote about this very phenomenon: "Because the models are trained in a weakly supervised manner using large-scale noisy data, the predictions may include texts that are not actually spoken in the audio input (i.e. hallucination). We hypothesize that this happens because, given their general knowledge of language, the models combine trying to predict the next word in audio with trying to transcribe the audio itself."

So in that sense, Whisper "knows" something about the content of what is being said and keeps track of the context of the conversation, which can lead to issues like the one where Whisper identified two women as being Black even though that information was not contained in the original audio. Theoretically, this erroneous scenario could be reduced by using a second AI model trained to pick out areas of confusing audio where the Whisper model is likely to confabulate and flag the transcript in that location, so a human could manually check those instances for accuracy later.

Clearly, OpenAI's advice not to use Whisper in high-risk domains, such as critical medical records, was a good one. But health care companies are constantly driven by a need to decrease costs by using seemingly "good enough" AI tools—as we've seen with Epic Systems using GPT-4 for medical records and UnitedHealth using a flawed AI model for insurance decisions. It's entirely possible that people are already suffering negative outcomes due to AI mistakes, and fixing them will likely involve some sort of regulation and certification of AI tools used in the medical field.

[sequencefairy]

It's very weird to work in an industry that is entirely built from vast sums of people's personal identifiable information and to have the senior leadership in the compliance and privacy spaces both be going all in on the "outsource all your thinking to copilot" train.

Listened to an AVP today in a town hall meeting talk about how cool it was to have an AI crawl her calendar and the calendar of the candidate she was interviewing to find a time that works for both of them to have the interview. The whole time I was sitting there like, do... do we need an AI to do that?

Do we need an AI to book our meetings for us? Are we so fucking inept that we can't ... send a meeting invite and do the little back and forth of rejigging the times/dates if the first one doesn't fit?

In the same town hall, I listened to our VP tell us that she uses copilot every day! She lets it write her emails and her departmental communications and I can extrapolate that to mean that she probably lets it write her performance reviews, too. She wants us all to use it for everything we can, and she's very excited about how much time it's going to save all of us.

(Time saved is such a bullshit thing anyway, 'cause no one is actually saving any time by spending forty minutes crafting a prompt for the stupid thing so it won't lie to you and make shit up and then you have to go through everything it did for you to make sure it's correct and didn't lie to you, and by that point, you might as well have done the thing you asked copilot to do in the first place. And don't get me started on how useless it is at like, actually doing anything helpful - you go ask copilot to help you with anything in excel, I'll wait...)

I also listened to our Financial Crimes guy talk about how sophisticated fraudsters are becoming, and how they're using AI to generate audio and video to fool authentication processes and therefore, get control of people's accounts and take their money.

Like? Guys? Bueller? Anyone?

I really don't think that we should be feeding copilot any client data, ever, even if we say it's a captive version that we have isolated from the web and only given it access to crawl what is within the boundaries we have set for it, as a company. I just feel like this is an unacceptable risk and I am not even CLOSE to the most risk averse person in the compliance space.

It just baffles me that this is even a thing we are DOING, never mind, considering. We are actually doing this. People are using copilot every day. People are probably feeding personal identifiable information into fucking chatgpt 'cause they have no idea why this might be a bad idea, or they just think that because they're accessing it on their workplace-sanctioned device, it's fine?

Maybe, just maybe, we could re-learn how to write emails and book meetings and take notes in a meeting and read legislation and rely on our own brains to do our jobs? Maybe.

Also, like, y'know, it's killing the fucking planet.

[yawpyawp]

the idea of people using chatGPT for legal advice and therapy is SO WILD

chatGPT is literally just if you could ask your iphone’s predictive text function questions in word problem format so it can google things for you

it’s meant to augment a skill you already have, not replace the need for expertise

signed, someone who works with AI professionally

(my main use case for chatGPT and Copilot is to have them basically present me with executive summaries of information pertaining to topics in which i already have some expertise, so i don’t have to do grunt work, but can still tell if it’s hallucinating. it’s a good whisper assist when i’m conducting technical interviews. also, i know prompt engineering, so i know how to mitigate bias in the outputs i get)

[lover-of-mine]

hi my love it’s gg here

it’s time for a loooooong update

so there is tension that is building up like a background buzz in the gc bc remember that on main they have to look mindful and demure bc they know the cast and crew lurks so the anger the madness the pettiness needs to stay hidden

they were so happy in ep 1 but what they really wanted was that emergency even more than them living together bc tommy helping would’ve established his role in the 118 and how new work partner for buck

this emergency was going to give them interaction with the 118 but mostly with athena and since they have already buck and bobby talking about tommy they wanted athena too

they needed him to be a hero so everyone was going to be grateful to him

first they were sure about ep2 bc they thought the tim would’ve really have him being landed inside the hole in the cockpit and then they were sure about ep3 bc if the 217 truck is there he NEEDS to he there otherwise too much waisted potential

and they are mad MAD rn bc the spent all summer so sure he would’ve been main, that ostark and lfjr would’ve promoted the show together, interviews, joint photoshoot, him being featured in the poster, him in the promo, him being the white savior of the plane emergency

and seeing this kind of deranged in their closed quarters where no one can really see im really “scared” of what they will do when tommy is going to go away

Hello baby 🩷

Wow, imagine spending months raising hell just to be wrong in all fronts. They got a random flight instructor to talk Athena through the landing, they had a literal child being her copilot, not a single mention of him along with the implication that 217 is the not harbour since it was referenced as an engine, and Hen and Chim were the first ones on the plane to help. And that along with the scene he was in to remind the audience he exists was about Eddie and he did not fit in. He's not established as part of the firefam, he's not in the field with them even though he could've easily been included. Plane emergency, no one thought about him, and they played themselves because at no point watching Athena and Jem land that plane anyone thought "oh wow this would be better if we had a real pilot". He was gonna be a main and 3 episodes in, he has less than 2 minutes of screentime in the season, he's completely irrelevant. No promo, no interviews, 2 lines and absolutely nothing of substance. I would feel bad if I wasn't getting death threats. I'm just laughing. Well done, guys, you went to war for racist tree #3 and you're losing badly.

[blorbocedes]

I'm doing a little ethnography on new social realities and I'm falling short of interview respondents 🥲

if you or anyone you know talks to AI (ChatGPT or Copilot or Character.AI or Grok or any of them) and talks to it like a friend, like venting and talking about day to day stuff - not doing your work/assignments or using it as Google but like a personal therapist or friend I would loooove to interview you. (Totally anonymous with only as much identifying info as you feel comfortable sharing, done over discord where you just answer some questions as detailed as you want to)

[interviewassistant]

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[headedoutleft]

this interview is something else - between Wolf asking stupid questions, and Nathan calling the FAA “dumb” and criticizing the Representative he met with, while John Goglia stares into the distance…

Wolf and Pamela try to do a cute bit where they are playing the characters in the copilot role play, but then obviously don’t remember what that meant in the context of the show, so it just becomes incredibly awkward when Nathan tries to relate to them as those characters… just so much going on here

[sadalmostlesbian]

hello! i was just thinking about that one yellowjackets interview where the teen cast is doing emoji charades, and courtney gets a flashlight, and sophie n understands it immediately, BUT she yells the answer out in french and can’t get the word in english... and then i was like how can i make this a blue blooded reference

and so my question is. how frequently do you think this would happen to arvada (or really just anyone) in front of english speakers?

Hehe I just watched that interview to answer your question and YES!!!! Absolutely!!! This happens ALL the time...

I would when Arvada doesn't know a word he usually just doesn't talk, because he's quite reserved and would likely be too embarrassed to say anything. BUT if he's around people he's comfortable with it def happens.

The main example that I've thought of is when giving directions. (Minor spoiler) but during the first rebellion Arvada is Boggs's copilot, and he's in charge of navigation. Which is all fine and well except there is no French word for "straight". To say "go straight" you would say "aller tout droit" which literally means "go all right". To say "go right" you would say "aller à droite" or "tournez à droite". So this is how that conversation would go:

Arvada: We're landing just beyond those buildings. Continue all right.

Arvada: Why are you turning? I said go all right.

Boggs: I am going right. This is as far to the right as I can go.

Arvada: No, no, all right! It's directly ahead of you!

Boggs: ...straight. Go straight.

Arvada: Yes, that one.

As for the other people from l'abri who aren't as fluent in English... if there's one thing about French speakers they REFUSE to admit they're wrong about what something is called, so I think that there was a lot English speakers just learning to call things in French because they were sick of correcting people.

[usafphantom2]

SAC Crew Dog War Stories: The Missing Aircraft Commander

T Campbell

@tcamp202

·

6h

Every good war story starts with the best four words in the English language… “So, there I was.”

(“So there I was, leading a four ship of (F-4) Phantoms over the Ho Chi Minh Trail; So, there I was, in the O’Club casual bar in Subic Bay on a Fri night…”).

So, there I was, on SAC Alert in the late 70’s at Loring Air Force Base, Maine when I got a call from the squadron admin. He told me the Ops Officer wanted to see me right away. Well, sh*t!

First, a little about me. I was first term Senior Airman who had just been upgraded to Instructor Boom Operator assigned to the 407th Air Refueling Squadron. I had been stationed at Loring for almost three years and had a pretty good reputation around the squadron. I knew I hadn’t done anything stupid lately, so I was concerned about my visit to the Operations Officer’s office. When I walked in, I could tell by the look on his face that I wasn’t going to be happy when I walked out.

He had me sit down and said, “There’s no easy way to tell you this so here it is: I have to send you TDY to the Alaska Tanker Task next week.” I had been to Alaska once already and had totally enjoyed it. Great flying, cool environment, and it meant no alert duty for a month. What’s not to love? I told him, “No problem, Sir. That would be great.” Then he gave me the bad news by saying “You’re going with Capt. Joker’s (not his real name) crew.” Well, sh*t!

Every squadron I was ever in had THAT one crew. The crew that could never get anything right. Always late for the crew bus, flunking Emergency Procedure tests, going DNIF (Duties Not Including Flying) so other guys had to cover for them. You know…THAT crew. Well, in the 407th, THAT crew was Capt. Joker’s and it started with him. He was actually a really nice guy and a pretty decent tanker pilot, but he was nothing but trouble. He had filed a Congressional Inquiry over something at his previous base and the “powers that be” decided he should spend his last year in the Air Force experiencing all that northern Aroostook County Maine had to offer. He was down to his final month in the Air Force and needless to say, he was sour. The co-pilot was a rich kid who was getting out in less than a year to go back to Georgia and run the family business, the Navigator was a sad sack that wanted to be a pilot but didn’t get the opportunity, so he was getting out in a few months. The boom operator was OK, but not well liked and I liked him even less when he got the DUI that landed me in the Ops Officer’s office at this moment.

Patches for the Alaska Tanker Task Force and the 407th Air Refueling Squadron. The 407th was stationed at Loring AFB, Maine.

So, off to Alaska. The first three weeks of the TDY were pretty routine and everything was going OK until our second-to-last flight when Joker told us that he had just gotten a call from an airline that wanted to interview him. Pretty cool, except that it had to be done while he was still going to be in Alaska and the interview was in San Francisco.

Sucked for him, but I didn’t give it any more thought until later that week, when we had to go to the Strip Alert bird to do the daily preflight since we were the strip alert crew. The Copilot and Nav picked me up in the alert truck, but we had no Aircraft Commander. “Where’s Joker” I asked logically. The copilot almost whispered “He went to San Fran for his interview. Left last night, and he’s supposed to be back tomorrow.” We were scheduled for our last sortie in two days, so if everything went well, it would all work out.

Of course, while we were at the plane, command post called us on the radios and told us to prepare for launch. Radar had spotted a Russian Bear bomber on course for an ADIZ violation flight, and we had to refuel the Phantoms launched out of King Salmon to intercept them. Well, sh*t!

An air-to-air left side view of a Soviet Bear H bomber aircraft March 25, 1986, National Archives DD-ST-86-06589

We had a quick crew meeting, and the subject was broached about launching with just the three of us. I was the first to speak. “I am NOT gonna be party to any of this. We’ve gotta tell them that we don’t have an AC.” The copilot sheepishly called the command post and told them we didn’t have an AC and they told us to keep preflighting up to engine start and then wait.

About ten minutes later, the ATTF (Alaskan Tanker Task Force) Ops Officer came out in the SOF vehicle, jumped in the left seat, and we took off. It was actually a pretty cool mission. The Bear came a lot farther in that they usually did, so they launched another pair of Phantoms out of Galena, and we got to refuel both pairs three times each. Lot’s a work for me and nothing was said about our missing crewman during the flight.

An air-to-air left side view of an F-4E Phantom II aircraft over Mount McKinley. The aircraft is assigned to the 21st Tactical Fighter Wing, Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. Nationa Archives DF-ST-84-07308

Once we landed however, that all changed. It usually sucked being the only enlisted guy in a world of officers, but this one time, it was GREAT. They dismissed me, and whatever was said wasn’t my business, and to this day, I don’t know what officially happened to Joker, but he never flew again in the 407th after we got home the next week. And then he was gone.

There were many truths about SAC Crew Dog life and one them was “Be careful who you piss off because it’s a small world and you will meet them again.” This was true in my case. Fast forward three years, and I was at my next duty station flying, pulling alert, living the life. I was chatting with our squadron commander one day and he said we were getting a new Ops Officer who was coming in from the Alaska Tanker Task Force staff. You guessed it…it was the staff pilot that flew for our AWOL AC. I figured it was three years later and he probably wouldn’t even remember me. His first day in the squadron, I met him, and he looked at me and said firmly “I remember you.” Well, sh*t!

Notes about this story:

This story was provided to me by a fellow boom whom I’ve met on X. He asked if I would “host” his story and I agreed because these stories are total gold and they need to be preserved.

@Tcamp202 via X

[adelidae]

in the past my dads given me advice for questions to ask in job interviews so i just asked him for some and he came back with this huge list and i was like aww thanks (rare my dad w). and he was like No worries i just generated them with copilot and picked the best ones. me going ......