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Wonderbolts Academy (December 15th 2012, 22 minutes)

Summary: Rainbow Dash follows her dream to become a Wonderbolt!

Rainbow Dash's mailbox is firmly stapled to the ground, not up on her cloud condominium. This could be because the postal service isn't all pegasi and the mailboxes have to be mounted so that all mailponies can reach them. Or cloud houses move around, so they're not considered a 'fixed address' for mail routes.

Either Rainbow Dash is really impatient, or ponies are used to exceptional mail service. That acceptance letter arrives the same day Rainbow Dash has to leave to get to the Academy? Especially with the speed RD uses to get *anywhere*, that's not allowing much leeway if any. And the Academy is only a week? More likely that's a week before RD will be able to come back to Ponyville to visit. Any Academy that only takes a week is pretty pointless.

The Academy is mostly on a plateau of some sort. That's somewhat surprising given the pegasi usually work with cloud structures. Unless they have to allow for service crew members who aren't pegasi.

Most of these guys are from Ponyville. Do they recruit one region at a time normally?

Okay, just because the recent episode brings this up, I'm going to touch on it here. Snowflake (because I think that name's funnier, so there) starts out right there with a very slow takeoff. Basically a F-84 Thunderjet rather than a F-86 Sabre. I don't know why he's at this Academy, as he'd be better suited for regular Pegasi Guard. However, he can obviously fly just fine.

They're pushing the 'Wonderbolts'='Military' here, but I'm starting to question that.

There's a *lot* of support staff around for this Academy. That's a lot of resources being devoted to what is nominally a stunt team. Unless this is all in support of the Pegasi Guard as well, and we're just dealing with it in context of the Wonderbolts for purposes of the Academy.

And that right there is where this deviates from a military operation. The cadets were not under observation during the entire agility exercise, which would never happen. Survival exercises, sure, but not agility exercises. If had they were under observation, then Rainbow and Lightning would have been on the carpet for endangering their fellow cadets right then and there.

Actual weather work. This specific scene is why I wonder if the weather ponies are actually a branch of the Equestrian military in the vein of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Rainbow Dash compresses several normal clouds into one dense mass, changing it's color, and allowing the other ponies to sit on top like pegasi on a normal cloud. It appears to only work while RD is actively compressing the cloud, and even then she can't keep it intact for long.

And where are the trainers? These cadets are working unsupervised *again*? If this is how the Equestrian Military is organized normally, I'm surprised they haven't been conquered a dozen times over.