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“Maybe they should not take everyone that wants to fly a plane, and maybe we should be taking the women out of the military! The abilityy seems to have plummeted. How I wish we had the pilots that we had in the past; they seemed vastly more competent.”

I wonder if you have any concept of what it takes to be a pilot in today’s military? First, they by no means “take everyone that wants to fly a plane”. There aren’t that many pilot slots in the first place, and there are probably thousands applying for every slot - there were when I was active duty, at any rate. The Air Force is much smaller now, however, so it may even be worse than back then.

Fast reflexes, excellent vision, excellent awareness of your position in three dimensions, and dozens or even hundreds of factors, and still the only way to find out who is a good pilot is to put them in aircraft and let them fly.

We started Red Flag because our folks in ‘Nam noticed that most of our losses were among people who hadn’t survived their first ten combat missions. We fly exercises like this one in Alaska to try to get them through that first ten missions before they go into real combat — it still isn’t the same thing, but it has helped. Also, the pilots you refer to flew much slower, lower-performance aircraft than the F-15 and F-16. There is less margin for competence there. The pilots of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s would be lost in the newer jets.

And those aren’t the most modern birds in the air, either. I first worked on F-16’s and F-15’s in the late 70’s or early 80’s, those birds were designed in the late 60’s or early 70’s.

My favorite aircraft was the F-4D, but those are hopelessly outclassed by the newer jets. Once the pilots get trained up, the new birds will own the skys.

I once had a pilot from the Illinois ANG bring a strip of gun camera film into my lab and ask for a print from any one frame of the strip; he had an F-15 under the reticle for 7 seconds. That is FOREVER in a dogfight. He was flying an F-100. Major, 4000 hours in the airframe, 2 tours in ‘Nam. Against a 1st Lt. What do you want to bet that LT is a MUCH better pilot now, if he lived?