Posted on 04/27/2021 3:13:35 PM PDT by Jacquerie
Air Force standards for flight training and promotions have been on a downward spiral since the Cold War ended in 1991. Incredibly, the service’s senior leaders are about to accelerate that dive.
During the 1980s, the U.S. faced a potential conflict with the Soviet Union. Soviet air-to-air capabilities and surface-to-air missile systems presented a formidable threat. The U.S. Air Force, therefore, designed standards and a training pipeline that prepared pilots to excel in that environment. That pipeline incrementally stepped their skill levels by presenting an ever-growing number of tasks and increasingly complex systems and missions they were expected to master.
Training is expensive, but those costs rise steeply after flight school, making it the most economical point to screen out poor performers. Student failures at every level beyond becoming more and more burdensome; however, the costliest failures take place, not in training but in the unforgiving environment of combat. There, mission success and the lives of others rely on the faculties and the confidence of our pilots.
To ensure mission success, screening at all levels was intense. The washout rate for flight school in the 1980s was high—just three out of every four students got their wings. And the demand for proficiency elevated with every level of training beyond.
Pilot training graduation rates rocketed up from 75 percent in the 1980s to 90 percent in the ‘90s.
From 2016 through 2019, that graduation rate averaged 96 percent, with several classes each year graduating everyone who entered. And that hefty four-percent washout rate included factors like a student's health issues as well as ethical and legal shortcomings.
Those eye-popping graduation rates came with no discernible improvement in candidate screening and no leap in the caliber of instruction. Meanwhile, the aircraft they were flying did not get any easier to fly.
(Excerpt) Read more at realcleardefense.com ...
A few more washed out of fighter lead-in training, front-line fighter training, and even Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun).
Sounds like the author really knows about the Air Force.
</sarcasm>
The author, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course with more than 3,300 hours in the F-16C and a veteran of three combat operations, John “JV” Venable is a senior research fellow for defense policy at The Heritage Foundation.
Topgun is the Naval Fighter Weapons School.
The eject button will be getting used often now.
Bottom gun
Permanent Latrine Orderly Ping
Permanent Latrine Orderly!
That sounds like the catcher in homo speak
Are they that short-handed?
I hope people realize that a much different set of criteria is being applied. It has nothing to do with capability to do a particular job, or aptitude for that job. Instead, the select factors will be based on a “social credit” score, part of which is incorporated from on-line activity and chat rooms. A more nearly pure ideology is being drawn up, and those with certain opinions will either be barred from service, or if they somehow slip through, probably face a “less than honorable” discharge from the service.
[and even Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun).]
Ah, so the Air Force is now hiring people from the Navy.
Kewl
I wonder if the increased graduation rate is related to the increased number of pilots going into the private sector (for various reasons).
Yes, I was always under the impression that Top Gun was Navy and Red Flag was Air Force, but what do I know? I am just an Air Force retiree, and my son is an Air Force pilot. 😁 We couldn’t possibly know what we are talking about. /S
Who knew that those “Dog is my Co-Pilot” bumper stickers could be true one day.
Coincidentally he has been quoted in several trade publications that his objective is assignment and promotion based on representation of ethnic members in various AFSCs.
Coincidentally in most of his interviews he presents himself as a victim of institutional racism.
What have they done to my Air Force? Their job used to be to fly and to fight. Now it is to feel good about who gets to fly and fight anyone who disagrees with their methods of selection.
I think pretty much the entire military-industrial complex has become a social service branch.
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