A330 CAPT. Retired Army Infantry Combat Vet. DC9(717),DC10,767,A330 Traveling the world on your dime. All opinions my own, not my employers’

41,000 feet
Joined June 2010
I have the best FO today, my Son 🥰. HNL to KIX. Taking the family to go see Cherry Blossom 🌸 in Osaka, Japan @HawaiianAir
64
69
12
1,888
279,797
Think I found my next gun to buy.
Mossberg just put 20 ROUNDS OF 12 GAUGE into a short-barrel shotgun. And I have questions. The Mossberg 590RM Chisel has an 11.5-inch barrel. Magazine-fed. Folding stock. AR-style safety. And a 20-round magazine that looks completely ridiculous hanging off something this small. It's like dropping a Hellcat engine into a Mini Cooper. It shouldn't make sense. But somehow it does. And here's the part I wasn't expecting. This thing genuinely made me feel like a kid again. Every time I picked it up, I kept saying the same word. COOL. Not sophisticated. Not revolutionary. Just cool. And sometimes that's enough. Here's my question: Would you choose a compact 20-round shotgun over a traditional tube-fed shotgun? And if you're loading 20 rounds… BUCKSHOT or SLUGS? Full review on my YouTube channel.
7
22
1,345
I could stay home, sit on the couch, and watch football all day. Or I could get outside, enjoy this beautiful Hawaii weather, hit the beach, and spend time with the family. Yeah, I think I’ll take the beach and family time. The NFL can wait. I’ll catch up on all the games on NFL GameDay Final after dinner tonight. 🤙
10
2
125
3,057
Very interesting read.
I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan? They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more. THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change. So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock. That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars. I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege. Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work. For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping. So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof. THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061. The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines. And this didn't happen under the left. One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway. What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years. The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March. Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling. Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger. That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die. In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again. WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem. Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time. You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us. If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves. A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.
4
45
3,744
Oh well, good riddance. Everyone moves up one seniority number. The airline was flying before him, and it’ll keep flying long after he’s gone. The day you start believing the company actually cares about you beyond your employee number is the day you need a reality check. You’re replaceable. Your family isn’t. Never confuse a paycheck with loyalty, and never forget who actually gives a damn about you.
43
11
556
34,062
FL410_over_HNL retweeted
The U.S. Department of War and the U.S. Navy must end the corrupt Navy Reserve program popular with the Beltway, and all officers past and present should be reinvestigated. All flag officers who managed the program should be brought back to active service and demoted one rank. The program is the epitome of deep state pay to play corruption. The Navy trades commissions for influence in the federal bureaucracy and up to Congress. Moreover, Democrats who are bereft of veterans use the program to check a box, not to serve. If it was service, they would join through the normal process, and wouldn’t cluster around Intelligence and Public Affairs. If there was a need, the majority of commissions would be for Surface Warfare Officers. Among the many Naval Reserve Officers include former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, who half his donors were illegal China Smurfs. Most in politics are similarly compromised. All classified leaks since March 2025 are from Democrats with SIPR/JWICS access. No exceptions. This Navy Reserve Commission program is cancer and must end. Literally none of the other services have this, and if they did it would be the exact same problem. @SecWar @PeteHegseth and @SECNAV @HungCao_VA
Wait...Ian Brinksman was one of those dime-a-dozen DC Navy reserve intelligence officers?
68
253
16
1,429
135,393
FL410_over_HNL retweeted
Correct. Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be. Starshield, a different system, is controlled by the US government. What they decide to do is up to them. Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week. Starlink remains critical to the defense of Ukraine, as it is the only system that cannot be jammed or blown up, at least for now. Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately. This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact. Starlink was also crucial to preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine in the early days of the war, as all other means of communication were destroyed or jammed by Russia. SpaceX has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR. That said, I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict. May you burn in hell. End of story.
STARLINK WORKS THE SAME WAY ITS ALWAYS WORKED. ITS NOT A WEAPONS SYSTEM, NO MATTER HOW MUCH UKRAINE WANTS IT TO BE.
11,094
31,961
3,407
188,707
11,022,075
Still can’t believe 14K of you actually wanna follow me. I mean, between my aviation stuff, Army life, all the food I eat in Japan, family vacations, life in Hawaii, and my occasional political rants… y’all really signed up for a little bit of everything. 🤙🏼 Seriously though, are you guys okay? Do you need help? Is someone making you follow me? Blink twice if you’re under duress. 👀
31
3
1
263
3,845
I guess all the combini’s need more workers. 🤷🏻‍♂️
🚨 BREAKING NEWS! 🚨 Prime Minister of Bangladesh is set to visit Tokyo to discuss a deal to send 100K Bangladeshis to Japan every year for the next 5 years. If the LDP accepts the deal this will be the biggest act of Conservative treason since UK's Boris Wave & Merkel's Open Door Policy.
1
7
1,228
Well, that was fun! Nothing like cruising along at 39,000 feet and seeing a massive line of thunderstorms directly in your flight path! Air Traffic Control gave us clearance to deviate up to 120 nautical miles left or right of our planned route to navigate around the weather. Ended up needing 94nm to the right with some zig zagging and then went left of course 48nm. Just another day flying in the Tropics
21
12
454
32,209
Europe mocked Americans for their love of AC. Now an estimated 50,000 people have died in European heat waves. Maybe air conditioning isn’t a luxury after all. 🤷🏻‍♂️
11
1
51
1,809
Sad but true 🤦🏼‍♂️
Hawaii was conquered 3 times. kamehameha, Dole, and Marxist progressives.
3
24
1,505
Tom Skerritt is gone at 93. Viper from Top Gun. Captain Dallas in Alien. Duke in MASH. The dad in A River Runs Through It. An Emmy for Picket Fences. Before Hollywood, he served in the United States Air Force. No scandals. No lectures. Just a working man's actor who showed up and made every movie better. They don't make them like Tom anymore. Rest easy, Viper.
842
3,444
231
21,144
197,698
FL410_over_HNL retweeted
BREAKING: Historic Iwo Jima statue in VA (built in 1945) just decapitated by Miguel Soriano Immigration status not known
2,559
6,985
878
41,208
1,664,721
While going through TSA at Honolulu Airport today, guess who happened to be right behind me at the metal detector? Congresswoman Jill Tokuda! I have to admit, I was tempted to share a few thoughts. I’ve been disappointed with her performance in Congress and would love to see more meaningful action on the issues affecting the people of Hawaii. I chose to remain professional and simply went about my day. Sometimes it’s best to let the moment pass!
20
1
132
4,984
Every day we are fighting to prevent American streets from looking like this.
2,825
8,609
511
80,428
2,963,059
FL410_over_HNL retweeted
The last time Elon posted “message received” it cost California over $100 billion. Wonder how bad it is this time…
200
2,643
28
23,822
753,735
Back to the grind! ✈️🇦🇺 Doing my usual Wednesday run from Honolulu to Sydney (SYD). Flight time today is 9 hours and 42 minutes. Typical weather along the route, so we’re carrying plenty of extra fuel to give us flexibility for any weather deviations along the way. Another day at the office, 34,000 feet above the Pacific! 🤙🏼
29
22
634
21,385
Il disagio giovanile merita più attenzioni! 😉
177
1,557
69
4,581
658,692
Paris SG fans during the match vs FC Barcelona tonight 😂
902
12,950
1,294
151,572
3,813,714