NTSA! (Not invoking the government agency)
1. The F-102 was a difficult plane to fly, and not a few pilots died in crashes.
2. GWB volunteered for a program in which several TANG F-102 pilots served in Vietnam. GWB was turned down for lack of cockpit hours, and the program was ended soon after.
3. Actually, the story has been refuted, by multiple sources, including by another member of GWB's TANG squadron. The key word in this sentence is "definitively": the article author is the one who is the judge of what would be "definitive".
4. There was "favoritism" involved. TANG took pilots ahead of future gate guards. GWB was already a pilot. As for "to avoid dangerous duty in Vietnam" see 1. and 2. above.
I'll have to add some urls to this post later, my sources for the statements above.
The Century-series jets were ALL widow-makers, as were their Naval contemporaries, the 102 and 106 probably among if not the worst of all for the US (And the 104G for Germany), due to all but one of the series-production planes being single-engine birds with aerodynamics designed around pushing them through the air near or past the speed sound, which resulted in rather 'Sporty' behavior at the speeds necessary for landing and glide ratios roughly similar to boulders if the engine had a bad day. In the days before rocket-powered ejection seats (They mostly used a pair of 20mm blank shells to blow off the canopy and a 37mm blank to blow the seat assembly out), ejection during a landing gone bad was normally fatal since the ejection trajectory did not go high enough for the chute to inflate. Riding it out, also pretty likely to be fatal, was the only option. Planes and lives were a lot cheaper then, and the Air Force had a lot more of each.
But the whole AWOL meme is technically defective anyway. W was excused, properly or not, from drill days, which are 'Inactive duty training.' You cannot be legally AWOL from that type of duty, only from an active duty status like 'Annual Training,' 'Active Duty for Training,' or the like. If you miss drill days without permission, you simply get an administrative black mark for unsat performance of the drill period(s) you missed; once you accumulate a big enough stack of them, you could (In those days) be involuntarily activated and shipped out (Nowadays, they just separate you from service). The degree to which people are excused from those drill duties varied widely from unit to unit, but given how reserve component units were funded at the time, I doubt his squadron had any flying hours to spare beyond the necessary minimum to keep the active pilots minimally qualified, they were probably at on near full manning, and a bunch of bored butterbar pilots sitting around the break room reading the paper while everyone else does the normal unit support work is not all that appealing to most commanders.
