Should senior members within squadrons be organized into Flights?

[DNall]

I very well understand how military units work, and it's exactly what I'm describing. The DCS IS the flight commander for the adult side, the DCC is the flight commander on the cadet side. Do you understand that? Now, do you understand why the title of flight commander is not & should not be used... cause it'd screw up the imaginary lines of authority created in the cadet chain, but effectively & in authority that is exactly what the DCs are.

Everything else is set up exactly like a military system, or most corporate systems too for that matter. You come in, talk to the command team & PDO about where you are going to fit (hence who your supervisor will be), develop a progression plan, and are assigned an OJT supervisor (mentor - who may be in another unit). That's it!! And, that's how it would work in a miltiary unit as well.

The DCS/Flt Cmdr supervises the dept heads/NCOs & element leaders, who in turn supervise staff officers/amn.... rahter than looking at a trainign flight structure, try looking at an operational flying Sq or something that's mostly officers & see how that's broken down. I think it'll make more sense to you.

[RiverAux]

Okay, can we hear from some folks who have been Deputy Commanders for Seniors or Squadron Commanders in units with large numbers of seniors? 

Do you think it would have helped you to have all the seniors assigned to flights so that many questions/problems/issues could have been handled by the member's flight commander rather than having everybody come to you with every problem? 

Do you think that you REALLY gave the amount of individual attention to each senior member that they deserved?  If not, would having several flight commanders working for you have helped that problem? 

[DNall]

how many senior members are you talking about here, cause 30-40 people is the right size for one flight. Which is where I'm saying it works with the DCS as the functional flight commander you are looking for.

If you were talking about 70-150+ active adult members (doesn't exist) then I can see where you're coming from, but I still believe they'd fall neatly into depts. Obviously in that case you'd need a bigger PD section to track everyone & provide for their progression. That's just not reality though. Reality is you'd be talking about one flight. & the people in it wouldn't know which officer they answered to or what their job was.

[RiverAux]

In my original post I proposed flights of between 5-10 members, but I think 5 is too low and would now say each flight should have 10-15 members.  So, if you've got 40 members you would have 3-4 flights.    As new members come in and old members leave the flight membership would be re-balanced so that each flight had about the same number of veteran and new members. 

[DNall]

That's not flights, that's elements. A standard training flight is 3 elements of 9 = 27 Amn plus guide, flt Sgt, & flt Cmdr to bring it to 30. Operational units tend to be much bigger cause the Amn & junior NCOs know what they're doing & need less direct attention from an officer to acocmplish tasks.

So again, you'd be talking about 3-4 elemetns with the DCS acting as the functional flt cmdr.... now maybe you could divide those elements up by function, so you got an ES element with the ES officer in charge & a few officers working for him (SaR, DR, HLS, CN, Training, Ops, Comm section)... see what I'm saying? That ES officer is a dept head overseeing all those officers & reporting to the DCS. Everyone else gets grouped into depts like that so that you have 2-6 people reporting to the DCS, and only the DCS & DCC reporting to the CC. What's missing in the picture is a 1Sgt (adult versio of CAC).

[RiverAux]

Well, I'm going to stick with flights as I see no need to mirror the AF in this manner unless we adopt wholesale changes to our organizational names.  We don't seem to have a problem with having multiple cadet flights within a squadron, so I don't see it as a problem for seniors. 

I do not think it worthwhile to try to group in staff officer positions with the flight concept because like I have said, the majority of squadron members do not have a staff job and as you have argued most staff positions are not needed at the squadron level anyway. 

Dnall, I think we've said all we can to each other and I would make another request for someone, like me, who has served as a DCS in a unit with a large number of seniors.