I agree with you completely. But of the 3500 Fighter pilot billets, approximately 1000 are staff billets, and 2500 are active flying. Since we are over 1000 pilots short right now and getting worse, we are in a crisis.Originally Posted by JTQ
I agree with you completely. But of the 3500 Fighter pilot billets, approximately 1000 are staff billets, and 2500 are active flying. Since we are over 1000 pilots short right now and getting worse, we are in a crisis.
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master"
Ya, that's a problem. You can convert some of those staff billets to something else, and they have in the past, but there are sill a bunch of those that you really need to keep as pilots so you're not going to cover that 1,000 shortfall.
Is the the T-38 about to be transitioned out in the not too distant future? Changing aircraft in the training command could also cause more pipeline issues if they have any problems. That could be bad.
Of course if you retire some airframes, B-1, B-2, (like this thread is about), A-10, etc., that probably takes care of some of that shortage.
USAf is approaching this in another interesting way - they're recalling volunteer pilots who retired in the ranks of captain, major, and lieutenant colonel. The previous Executive Order allowed 25 per year but this has been expanded to 1,000 per year. It's non-flying and is targeted (I expect) to organizations above the squadron and wing. There are plenty of pilot-coded jobs that don't require actual current flying.
The loss of experienced flying lieutenants and captains means someone else has to fly their hours. In one respect a person who stays in and loves flying is in tall cotton now but as the article alludes it's not just flying - "the job's not over until the paperwork is done." Consider two, or occasionally three, flights a day at 1.5 hours in the air, plus mission planning, plus preflight and cockpit checks, plus post flight maintenance debrief plus mission debrief - even twice a day can wear on you.
Now consider those non-captains who take some of those hours - lieutenant colonels and colonels. The colonels won't be actually assigned to the squadron, which is commanded by a lieutenant colonel - can't be done to have an 05 with an Officer Effectiveness Report on an 06. So the 06 has to hold down an wing-level job, with the wing commanded by an 06 colonel, and not all of them can hold down actual 06 jobs, like Deputy Commander for Operations, so they'll be "Assistant Deputy Commander of Operations," with a colonel as his boss and the wing commander colonel as the DO's boss. That's not a prescription for a happy, promotable house.
Lieutenant colonels have roughly the same problem working in a squadron, with another lieutenant colonel as commander and working for him the Operations Officer (terms may have changed from my day in squadrons), so there, too, we have a lieutenant colonel working for another working for another. Morale must really suck. Move one of the LCs to Wing Headquarters and fix one problem, but now the squadron commander and Ops Officer have to negotiate with wing for his flying time. Those guys in my time got what was called "field grade takeoff time," i.e., the good times, leaving the bad times for the overworked company grade officers. More suckage for the people who do the majority of flying.
I don't think the light attack aircraft will fix any of this; it'll make it worse. It'll add more flight hour requirements because the lighter aircraft are naturally more reliable and more available for flight. The at the end of the light attack tour what will the USAF do with them? Send them to go-fast aircraft? Unlikely, as they really haven't prepared for that in their current career. Send them to go-fast school? Sure, that'll work, but that means they have to train two pilots, not one - the new go-fast pilot and the new light attack replacement. They've avoided sending highly-qualified navigators to pilot school for decades for just that reason. I suspect this is the core reason that USAF has been dragging its feet on light attack aircraft.
If there were easy answers someone would already have done it.
Oh there are easy answers to the fighter pilot shortage, but no one wants to go there. Make fighter pilot life fun again. Strippers in the Club, first Friday’s at the squadron bar. Single women allowed on base / in the club on Friday nights. Full per diem on TDYs, more fun TDYs, fewer worthless deployments. Higher promotion rates for pilots. More flying hours, more cross-country hours, more air-to-air and more dissimilar air-to-air. More live weapon deliveries.
None of those are approachable for various reasons. But life was a hell of a lot more fun as a fighter pilot 25 years ago.
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master"
Not just fighter pilots. Infantry too. Back when we were expected to go shoot things, blow stuff up, and measure the value of our time with the "what does this have to do with killing" metric.
Last edited by ranger; 03-03-2018 at 05:05 PM.
I can’t speak to the fighter community but that’s not how it is in the helo community. We’ve got our commander, a lieutenant colonel, and our DO, also a lieutenant colonel. I don’t see those guys having any issues both being the same rank. And they’re certainly not taking hours, or the good hours, from young guys. They’re flying to stay current, and they’re giving checkrides.
We’re actually lacking field grade officers, which makes our CC and DO spend more time in the office and more time making decisions and giving oversight to things that are frankly below their level.
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Praise be to the LORD my Rock,
who trains my hands for war,
my fingers for battle.
-Psalm 144:1
Recent article in Air Force Times sheds more light on the issue. I’m very surprised they published the MC rates for the various aircraft. That information has been treated as classified in the past. Additionally they bring up the issues of deployed flying hours vs home-station training hours. Deployed flying tends to have a lot of flying time, with much less weapons employment. 5-hour sorties, where you might not employ ordnance very often, sometimes only once or twice a month. Home station training would be a 1.5 hour sortie, and multiple passes of practice or simulated ordnance delivery, coupled with a thorough debrief and analysis. If the fighter pilots are averaging 16.5 hours per month, that might mean 18 months of 12 hours per month, and then a 4-6 month deployment with 250+ hours, dropping ordnance occasionally.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/y...-pilot-crisis/
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master"
It's pretty amazing that they'd publish those figures.
It looks like USAF's shortage of pilots is matching up to a shortage of maintainers. More available pilots would not be supported and more maintainers would generate aircraft that no one was available to fly.
I'm not being flip, just that I've seen various mis-matches before. In the late 70s with a robust Vietnam pipeline feeding in every B-52 squadron had a minimum of two co-pilots per crew, and some had three; the aircraft commander got half the flight time and the rest was split by all the co's. They eventually had to distribute T-38 to B-52 bases in order to allow excess pilots to stay current. In the 1980s there were shortages of engines and some F-15 and F-16 were delivered from McDonnell Douglas with empty P&W engine bays and that led to the selection of the GE engine as an alternate.
There are things they can do - they've been studied for years at staff college. Redefine squadron rank requirements, promotion requiring staff time, even re-opening the flying warrant officer program - no need for staff time for promotion, there. It just appears to me they want to put a short-term bandage on it by applying money and waiting for a recession that would dry up airline jobs.
I suspect that a lot of information about "readiness" is being shared to seek higher funding for the military and is being released on purpose. One issue is this protracted state of war - the military budget was designed to sustain a peacetime military and the intent was that there would be supplemental funds for fighting a war. The challenge is that we are fighting this unending war against Islamic Terrorists whether they be ISIS, Al Quaeda, etc. plus maneuvering to deter Korea, Russia, and China. It costs money to sustain a military while "using" it constantly. A simple Army example, while we were deployed to Iraq, my Heavy Infantry Brigade consumed years worth of tracks for our M1s and M2s in 6 months of heavy use plus all the other wear and tear on the systems. That type of consumption is not included in the budget.
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