"John Carrier" wrote in message
. ..

"Bill Baker" wrote in message
...
On 2007-04-17 18:31:15 -0700, John said:

I honestly have never heard of any aviators that came this route, even
when I was in the NAVAIR Training Command in the 70's and 80's when
the need for pilots was greater than now. Not that it does not happen,
just have not known anyone.

We have one in strike training right now. Female, solid student, MMA
grad.

Why would someone even go the Merchant Marine route in the first place if
they were dreaming of a career as a naval aviator? The Navy looks down
their collective nose at the merchant marine sailors, always have. He
would probably had a better shot for a pilot slot by getting his BS in
aeronautical engineering at someplace like Purdue via the NROTC route.

Perhaps that was the appointment offered? It varies year to year, but
competition for an appointment at one of the service academies is fierce.
So, you may go for USNA (USMA, USAFA, whatever) and your congressman says,
"Sorry, can't make it work. How about MMA?"

To the original post. How did our MMA guy do on the flight physical?
When I did mine (back when Moby Dick was a minnow) they culled the USNA
grads by making the physical (particularly the eye exam) a high hurdle.
OTOH, I've seen students lately who showed up wearing glasses to get to
20/20 corrected.

R / John

Ah yes..... the old eye test trick. If you had too many with obviously
better than 20-20 vision, the "color perception" test was brought into play.

But you can't blame the NAVY they spent all that money teaching naval
engineering, strategy and tactics just so everyone that wanted to could
zooming around the sky.

The same thing often happened to NAVCAD's/MARCAD's. The programs were often
used as a recruiting tool to get highly qualified people.