The “he doth protest too much” vibes coming off that article are strong.
Strange coincidence that he also renounced his American citizenship around the same time he was doing this very cool and totally legal flight instruction.
I get "doth protest too much" vibes from the US pursuit of this. From a decade ago.
The most telling thing about this situation is the US' paranoia about China. This is so obviously a "set this guy up as an example" to scare the bejesus out of any other ex-forces types wanting to do almost literally anything even tangentially related to China.
Ten years ago!?!
Not a great advertisement for the US armed forces.
Renouncing US citizenship seems to be the smart move regarding taxes if you're peermanently moving overseas, from my casual knowledge. Wouldn't help ones relationship with a paranoid, jealous, and overtly violent government at all though.
The thing that scares me most about this, though, is the Australian government's treatment of a citizen. Just continues the sad historical trend of being a yes-man to any slight whiff of power. Australia: "anyone need a sidekick? We don't know how to lead, but damn we can blindly follow like fuck"
So the US spends, what, $10 million (more?) to train each military pilot, and then after retirement, with their pension and thanks of a grateful nation evidently being insufficient compensation, it’s OK for one of them to decide to moonlight for the country’s main adversary to their their pilots how to shoot down US pilots (“tangentially”)?
If and when the fact pattern above is found to exist in a court of law, I sure hope the US makes an example of that.
Just get a job flying for the airlines. Those guys are making bank these days.
I don't know what dollars of pension are involved here, but the dude is currently 54, so when he was doing this training he was 44, which is 20 years away from retirement age. He served from 1989 to 2002. What's the pension he'd be earning from 13 years of work?
I'd also be guessing that no longer being a US citizen would probably mean the pension = $0 (which is a choice, of course).
> Just get a job flying for the airlines. Those guys are making bank these days.
Wasn't so good a couple of years back, but both "these days" and "couple of years back" isn't applicable to decisions for a decade ago.
This adds some context to the far different political climate with China a decade ago:
"So far as China is concerned, we were conducting joint military exercises at sea between the Royal Australian Navy, and the PLA (People's Liberation Army) Navy at a time (2010) when Dan Duggan is accused of, as it were, consorting with the enemy. It's double-standard. It's hypocrisy," he said.
That’s a reasonable point. I don’t envy folks in your situation having to deal with that. From what I understand, the tax situation sounds pretty ridiculous.
Still, it somewhat boggles my mind that one could be patriotic enough to volunteer for military service yet ascribe sufficient sentimental value at least to keep the citizenship.
Patriotism may not have been the motivating factor. The chance to fly fast planes or shoot things or earn a guaranteed income are all fairly enticing to people from all sorts of different backgrounds.
The Australian armed forces pretty much advertise joining the services as being paid to learn skills that are transferrable outside the services, plus some amount of pride for "doing your bit" for the country.
The two test pilots who helped test the Chinese Comac C919 prototype all went to the S.A flight school while the rest to the "National Test Pilot School" in California.
Most likely they did military flight training before this but that is how most pilots get their training before moving on to civilian flying considering the costs involved.
Strange coincidence that he also renounced his American citizenship around the same time he was doing this very cool and totally legal flight instruction.