The Air Force has cut as much as five weeks from the time required to teach novice pilots to earn their wings, a move that will help it replace rapidly departing veteran aviators.

But some instructors are wary of the change, warning that it could lead to a disastrous future for the service.

The new syllabus already is in use and for the first time in decades will trim the duration of undergraduate pilot training — called UPT — from 54.7 weeks to an average of 49.2 weeks.

A key element is that the best students will be able to finish the course faster.

Several veteran instructor pilots, speaking on condition they not be identified because of possible retribution, expressed concern that the syllabus makeover is too much, too fast, and could lead to unintended and even deadly consequences.

They believe the Air Force’s desire to produce more pilots faster was the driving force behind the revamped schedule, pushing that priority ahead of safety. Other observers said the expected modest increase in new pilots would not be enough, by itself, to solve the pilot retention crisis.

“Dumping or radically altering the way we have trained pilots since the beginning of the modern era could be disastrous,” one instructor said. “Tinkering with the formula could produce an unknown product that is vastly inferior to what we produce now. There is simply no replacement for experience.”

More Information A look at the T-6A Texan II The T-6A Texan II is a single-engine, two-seat primary trainer designed to instruct students in basic flying skills common to Air Force and Navy pilots. Produced by Raytheon Aircraft, the plane is powered by a turbo-prop engine with 1,100 horsepower. The T-6 can perform an initial climb of 3,100 feet per minute and can reach 18,000 feet in less than six minutes. Wingspan: 33.5 feet Length: 33.4 feet Height: 10.7 feet Speed: 320 miles per hour Ceiling: 31,000 feet Range: 900 nautical miles Unit Cost: $4.272 million Inventory: Active force, 444 SOURCE: U.S. Air Force

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Col. Travis Willis, vice commander of the 19th Air Force, part of the Air Education and Training Command in San Antonio, dismissed the notion that safety wasn’t a top priority.

“For training command and AETC, safety’s paramount,” he said.

Willis, a pilot with more than 3,000 hours in the T-1, T-37, F-111 and F-15, expressed no concerns about an increase in risks, saying: “We’re going to make pilots and they’re going to be great pilots.”

The new system’s efficiencies allow more classes to graduate more aviators, but the changes mainly were driven by a desire to produce better fledgling flyers for their first operational assignments, Willis said.

However, his boss, 19th Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Patrick Doherty, elevated the benefits of cutting training time in a news release in March, saying “quality, speed and increased numbers were the driving forces of this effort” and stressing the need to “get after the pilot crisis.”

The Air Force had about 21,000 pilots at the end of last fiscal year and was on track to produce 1,200 new ones in the current year — but that will be roughly 2,000 short of the number needed to replace veterans who are leaving the service, including 1,300 fighter pilots.

The Air Force said it has begun other efforts to step up recruiting, with an eventual goal of 1,500 new pilots per year, but in the short term, the new training schedule could increase the number of graduates by as much as 10 percent, a bonus of 120 additional new pilots when applied to current training levels.

That will help, but “it does not fix your problem,” observed retired Gen. Lloyd W. “Fig” Newton, a former head of the AETC. “You’ve got to do a lot more than that.”

“You’re not going to get that many more pilots out by changing the system by five weeks,” former Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters said.

The training command last year said it was studying whether another UPT wing is needed and where it might operate. No decision has been made.

Willis said there had been talk of changing the UPT curriculum several years ago. Doherty started the process in June 2017 when he ordered a team at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph to develop “ideas from the leaders and instructor corps to produce more pilots, higher quality pilots with agility and speed,” he said in the press release.

“The status quo is not an option, we’ve got to change, we’ve got to produce better pilots faster, who are more competitive sooner in their combat squadrons,” Doherty said.

AETC spokeswoman Marilyn Holliday said the changes are meant to bring the syllabus “in line with meeting the needs of today’s combatant commander” and give instructors “the flexibility to add, subtract and re-purpose training” geared toward individual students.

A steady loss of aviators to commercial airlines has pressured the Air Force to train new pilots, but the effort was set back this year by problems with the T-6A Texan II, the Air Force’s principal trainer. The plane was grounded for all of February because its oxygen system, called OBOGS, was suspected of triggering a sharp increase of unexplained incidents that left pilots incapacitated.

Crews now clean and maintain the oxygen system more frequently, but the episodes have continued, prompting a number of instructor pilots in recent weeks to refuse to fly the plane.

Willis said the changes to training were not prompted by problems with the T-6, but he said lessons learned while the plane was grounded did help shape the new curriculum. The 80-plus instructor pilots at Randolph, along with civilian simulator instructors, found that novice pilots who spent more time in simulators while unable to fly the T-6 did better after the plane was cleared to fly again, he said.

The new curriculum front-loads simulator time in the early weeks of instruction, in such areas as basic aviation skills, but has reduced simulator time for pilots in the T-38 Talon, a supersonic jet used to train future fighter pilots, and T-1 Jayhawk, a small twin-engine jet that trains pilots bound for airlift and tanker planes. Students assigned to T-38s needed more practice in formation flying, and those headed for the T-1s had different needs, Willis said.

The pilot instructors who criticized the new syllabus cautioned that simulators have their limits, and said some novice flyers perform better in them than they actually do in the cockpit. Several stressed that the cockpit is a different experience, a loud, hot, sweaty and claustrophobic test of flying under pressure that “represents an existential threat to you if you get it wrong,” one said.

“Even though it’s scripted, it’s happening in real time,” one instructor said. “It’s a physical thing. It makes you tired. Sitting in the sim doesn’t make you tired.”

Simulators a step up

The four simulators at Randolph have a monitor, keyboard, throttle, rudder pedals and stick just like those in a T-6A and can mimic a typical training flight profile. The AETC is acquiring six more.

A user dons goggles and is suddenly sitting in the cockpit, staring at the runway. Pushing the throttle forward gains takeoff speed and, a moment later, the visual experience of rising into the sky, breaking through the clouds. Users feel other senses of flying, right down to the “G roll” that causes the plane to spin like a top counterclockwise.

Student pilots can use a pair of goggles at home similar to a Google Daydream View VR Headset to drop in their iPhone and call up a YouTube video of a T-6 sortie. The pilots obtain a private link to watch the Air Force videos, getting a better feel for the procedures used in a training mission.

“When I went through pilot training,” said Lt. Col. Justin Chandler, commander of the 99th Flying Training Squadron, “we put a poster on our wall, we sat in a chair with a plunger in front of us and did what we call chair fly — visualize and walk through a flight in our mind. Now this technology allows us to see, feel, touch and recreate the flight environment to quite a high level of fidelity.”

“I think what this is about is acknowledging some training capabilities that we have now that we didn’t used to have, and at the same time kind of examining ourselves and how we teach,” said Col. Randy Oakland, acting commander of the 12th Flying Training Wing at Randolph.

“That’s something we’ve been trying figure out how to do better, and working to do well, since the beginning,” he said.

The UPT syllabus is divided into instruction blocks that start with “contact” — visually rated flying in which the student learns to land, take off and do basic maneuvers such as climbing, descending, banking and managing radio traffic. Once a pilot solos somewhere into his 13th or 14th flight, he or she enters a second block of more sophisticated aerial maneuvers.

Instrument, formation and low-level navigation blocks follow, with a total of as many as 10 in all before graduation.

The confidence in the teaching ability of simulators has made new efficiencies possible, Willis said. On days early in the training when the weather is good enough to fly but not good enough to do “loops and barrel rolls and all that kind of stuff … you can do an instrument sortie because you’ve already learned instruments so well from the simulator,” he said

Cockpit experience

Pilot instructors who criticized the new syllabus said such a sequence is possible in Pilot Instructor Training at Randolph, but not for students who have just started to fly at UPT bases. Instrument flying comes roughly 41/2 to five months into the program and “you can’t take these things out of sequence,” one of the instructors said.

He likened a new pilot learning instrument flying in the first block to an infant still learning to crawl trying to ride a bicycle, adding, “You couldn’t do it. The kid would just glaze over.”

While there have been slight modifications of the curriculum over the past half-century, the instructors said, it has remained essentially unchanged.

“Because it works,” one said. “It makes really qualified combat aviators.”

“They do it right,” another said. “You’ve got six months of primary training, you’ve got six months of advanced training and you’ve got six months of follow-on in a major weapons system and then you’re hot to trot. You’re ready for the rodeo.”

A third instructor pilot noted that the syllabus for training instructor pilots, who will teach novices how to fly, also has been trimmed, with fewer simulator events and sorties. Instructors, he said, “are going to be less qualified, less proficient, and they’re going to be forced to fast-forward pilots through this pipeline that are ultimately going to come out less efficient and less qualified.”

The instructors agreed the new system is certain to endanger aviators of the future — with eventual pilot deaths or because the Air Force will lose its qualitative edge over its enemies. Experience, one said, makes pilots. Reducing exposure to experience reduces their prowess, which also rests on a shared aviation culture and “a sense of ‘timelessness’ of our training practices.”

“Incremental change will occur as technology or requirements advance, but to do so rapidly to satisfy an end strength is not good for business,” he said.

The new undergraduate pilot training is being used for the current class, which began in April. Changes still could be made during the class.

“I think this is the tip of the iceberg, frankly, I think it is the very beginning of this,” Oakland, the wing commander, said. “Once we sort of unlock how effective some of this is, it’s really going to affect, no question in my mind, how we train people, maybe beyond the aviation community,”

A review of training records going back to World War II shows aviators often earned their wings after instruction that ran up to 55 weeks. Holliday, the AETC spokeswoman, said the figures over the ensuing years varied, with the program dropping from an average of 49 to 53 weeks in the early 1970s to 53.7 weeks around 2000, and finally, 54.7 weeks until the new syllabus was implemented.

Through the years, simulators got better and better.

“Simulators bring much more of a real-world scenario than it did in years past, so the simulation these days with artificial intelligence and all of that can be incredibly good,” said Newton, a Vietnam veteran with more than 4,000 hours in jets ranging from the F-15 to the stealth fighter.

Retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who was AETC’s vice commander and later headed U.S. Strategic Command, recalled taking 54 weeks to earn his wings in the mid-1960s. The length of time, he said, was due to “the intensity of the academics, the flying schedule, that sort of thing,” and added that the washout rate in those days was around 30 percent. It now runs anywhere from 10 to 15 percent.

“It may be a cultural change, but there are other factors that would support a change in the syllabus - better equipment, lower attrition rates and more experience,” Habiger said, explaining that today’s trainees have been exposed to video games and, in some cases, aircraft simulators. Some even have earned private pilot’s licenses, he said.

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