New study shows grim outlook for future of Air Force pilot shortage

Canadian Air Force, but same issues with the overly stringent medical requirements. A minor form of scoliosis disqualified me from ever using an ejection seat. Although I wanted to fly transport planes, the training required the use of an aircraft with ejection seats.

Yes, this has been a thing forever. (Former 33S/17D here) I went through two separate instances of reductions in force (aka "force shaping") - 2006 and 2010 - but there were others as well. (I chose to separate in 2010) They believed they brought too many officers on board in the 2001-2004 timeframe and were looking to trim down, especially because of budget cuts. I remember hearing about your situation as well (letting ROTC accessions off the hook). Yet the USAF periodically seems to cycle through "we have too many"/"we are way short" phases and this has now come back to bite them for their most critical asset, pilots. (Cyber retention is an issue as well - how do you keep them from getting out and working as contractors? The incentives don't line up)

That's interesting. I'm curious how much of your college costs that ROTC participation covered. Just tuition, or housing too, or also a stipend?

And...there is the other end. My brother is a pilot and was retired by the Air Force because he had been in so long...so out he goes. Now he is a contractor flying drones for them getting paid 3x as much while drawing a hefty retirement. My brother loved the Air Force and wanted to stay...now he gets to stay and get paid a boat load more. Air Force brass not very smart.

> looking for people to voluntarily leave with no commitment/obligation - seemed like a good deal

How’s that a good deal? Presumably you wanted to join and now that’s something you’d never get to do?

Hay fever causes problems with wearing the oxygen mask.

Edit: Downvote me if you like, but that's the reason I was given when I asked an Air Force pilot.

If this was around 10 or so years ago, my understanding for the stricter pilot requirements was that same glut of recruits. The Air Force flip-flops on how strict or lax they are on some of those based on the need for pilots at any given time. When there's a deficit, suddenly someone with 20/70 vision can get a slot as a heavy (cargo or bomber) pilot, but when there's a glut they want everyone to have 20/20 vision. It's an arbitrary discriminator because they don't have more effective methods.

Yea afpc decision making is always short term 3year scale thinking with real consequences rarely analyzed, just number crunching whether or not current training pipelines are optimized for minimal idle time of trainees.

When a t34 rudder issue it a fleet in the navy pipeline, numbers for 92T slots dropped accordingly, so the marker for pilot qualification is as much luck as it is merit

> had pollen allergies on a form and was instantly disqualified (like you would ever be breathing pollen at altitude).

Any form of rhinitis (nose irritation or inflammation) after age 12 is disqualifying (allergic, nonallergic or vasomotor).

The reason for this is because anyone who has rhinitis has higher risk of getting the reaction at least sometimes from changes of humidity, barometric pressure, irritants like chemicals, dust, stress, etc. Having runny nose or puffed eyes is no-go for fighter pilot in a breathing mask. Spending millions to train someone who has a change of not being able to fly is not a good investment.

It's the same for the eyes. They estimate how the eye conditions develop for the rest of the career. Small things that don't matter now can become problematic later.

> Drone pilots can be put pretty much anywhere in the world so they don't need to be forward-deployed, which will probably help attract people.

Unfortunately the USAF likes to put all their drone pilots at Beale which from what I have heard isn't a very big difference in experience from Minot.

Also right now all drones are required to be full pilots and officers. This is a big factor in the shortages problem. No one wants to through the Academy and then sit at a desk flinging a joystick around. When I was in it was asked all the time why not have warrant officers or let enlisted fly drones? Brass always said no.

All of that can be automated. For new drone systems it makes a lot of sense to strive for fully autonomous systems. Why have some human in the loop for things a computer can do faster and more efficiently? That stuff will eventually trickle down to civilian aviation as well. Just like self driving cars are likely to happen in the next years; self flying planes are just as feasible. The shortage for pilots is short term. Pilots starting today in their careers need to consider that they might be automated away some time during their career.

Fortunately, a large part of the planes flying today will still be flying for years to come and they won't be flying themselves. E.g. the B52 program was just extended to 2050 I believe. Replacing that stuff will take decades even when it is feasible technically.

Drones are susceptible to electronic counter-measures (ECM). As it stands now, Russia has a lead in this field. So, (presumably) has China which is busy buying Russian military hardware in addition to developing its own.

Drones are great for slaughtering camel herders armed with AK-47s and TOW missiles. They're not that great against a tech-parity adversary.

It's interesting how the US military copied the British class-based system of management, officers v other ranks. It does stymie a lot of creativity and talent.

The US Army has an interesting program called 'High School to Flight School' for Warrant Officer pilot candidates.

> The focus was fighter jocks, but I doubt most will end up flying commercially -- the skills of flying passengers or freight don't overlap much with dogfights, missile tech, or flying invisible.

My understanding is that the main "skill" commercial airlines are looking for is flight hours - lots and lots of flight hours. The combat-focused skills obviously don't transfer, but an experienced fighter pilot is still very prepared to transition to flying commercial flights if they want to.

Probably the majority of fighter pilots end up flying for the airlines once they leave active duty. For one thing, the airlines are just as desperate to find qualified pilots, though that's greatly driven by the ups and downs of the economy.

> The focus was fighter jocks, but I doubt most will end up flying commercially

My understanding from folks I've talked to in the airline business is that they generally want people who flew fighters. Those people who have previously taken aircraft to their maximum limits are not as freaked when things go wrong in the cockpit of an airliner.

"and young people in their early 20's shouldn't mind deployments in the midwest or wherever."

That to me sounds exactly like the kind of thing someone in their early twenties who is ready to head out and see the world would mind. Maybe I'm just projecting?

When I was young and single the last place you were gonna catch me relocating to was some sleepy midwestern town. That was a weird thing to just paper over

The problem is that a lot of these guys are getting shunted from 'real' flying into drone piloting. They get front row seats to pushing a button and killing someone impersonally thousands of miles away, and they're managed like call center employees.

In the words of one of my childhood buddies, "I didn't go through all that to fly a simulator, even if it's connected to something with wings somewhere else."

That excitement has to last through years of training with crappy hours in crappy locations. Doesn't matter if you are cool fighter pilot if you can't be there for your family, move them out to the desert, don't have any say over when and where you will go for weeks at a time when you aren't deployed, gone for months or a year at a time when you are deployed, move from one crappy location to another every couple of years with sub-standard housing, and deal with a litany of red tape and BS not only on the ground but in the air. Assuming the stomach twisting maneuvers never get old and you still love the actual flying (many people have to learn to keep their puke in their stomachs). You have crazy hours and can't get regular sleeping hours, can't even drink when you want, but are still surrounded by functional alcoholics and professional bros. I could go on. The sheen wears off, the data backs it up. Imagine never seeing your kids even when you are at home because you are gone before they wake up, and home after they have gone to bed. The pilots often have to do more than fly. I hear it's much worse in the Marines since the pilots are also the officers in charge of the enlisted in the squadron, whereas in the Air Force you can be a pilot and an officer with no one reporting to you.

The pilots quit because they don't get to fly. Isn't that obvious?

An aspirational job is a recipe for supply problems.

Whether it's fighter piloting, game development, teaching, acting, athletics, or music, you'll find people who love the idea of the work and are willing (for a time) to be exploited and mistreated for the "opportunity".

Employment, at its most basic level, is a business transaction: Employees sell their time and skills, employers offer financial compensation in exchange. This exchange is complicated by expectations of status, morality, patriotism, fulfillment, health care, education, high risk/reward opportunities, societal obligations, and so on into the sales pitch. It's also complicated when the actual job involves fewer fun flight hours and more paper-pushing, distant deployments, bureaucracy, and boot-licking (all revealed only after time in the job). problems are going to arise. Specifically, financial compensation can be reduced, working conditions made worse, and responsibilities increased, without immediate feedback from the starry-eyed recruits.

But eventually, someone taking a critical look at their employment will say "This isn't as glamorous as I expected. It actually kind of sucks." A while later, starry-eyed recruits will hear about that and stop thinking that the job is Top Gun and think it's more like Office Space. And someday, way down the road, management will wonder why there's a shortage of people willing to work in the conditions they created for the pay they're offering.

"Job dissatisfaction, career dissatisfaction, frequent and long deployments, poor quality of life, non-competitive pay and lack of personal and professional development are among the reasons cited"

It sounds to me like "fly jets" is the only upside, and every other part of the job is pretty lousy.

> They make video games of that.

Video game design is constrained by what is feasible to program, and what makes a decent game. Tetris and Minecraft are incredibly popular, but that wasn't because brick laying was ever an aspirational job.

Apparently fighter pilots only fly ~16 hours a month [1]. Against a typical 40-hour work week, that's less than 10%. No matter how much I love flying, it's tough to sell me on a career where I'll spend more than 90% of it doing the parts I hate.

For techies, working at a startup is cool ("aspirational"!) these days. How many programmers would you still get if they earned less than $50K, would spend less than 10% of their workday writing code, and had to basically retire from coding altogether by 45?

[1]: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/03/01...

Something like this seems to be infecting our entire society.

See: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs—he blames, more or less, the takeover of Finance and with it a new form of managerialism, generally.

See also: common everyday experience and observation.

See also: the mysterious non-Baumol's cost disease not-so-slowly eating "the West"'s, and especially the US', ability to get anything done.

The Air Force wants fighter pilots to end up as generals. In order to do that and compete in the promotion system that is in place in the Air Force, they need to do more than just fly. The fact is that the Air Force wants officers first and pilots second. Perhaps the answer is that pilots should just be warrant officers like in the Army. They can fly their entire career and do just that and nothing else. There would be really good pilots. However, the Air Force wouldn't have fighter pilot generals. The training now takes so long and is so expensive that it seems like a huge waste for a pilot to go through all that and do other things most of the time.

I'm a former Air Force pilot and was going to writeup a long post about my experience. But, this pretty much sums it up.

I loved the people, and LOVED the flying. Some of the best times of my life. But, the organizational bloat, bureaucratic BS, and constant deployments just became too much.

As you can imagine, it really wears on you to be gone 6 mo's every year risking your life for a counterproductive endless war that the American public barely knows is happening.

I just finished reading "Blood Makes The Grass Grow", about a Norwegian soldier who decided to leave the Norwegian military to join the Kurds and fight ISIS on the ground because his skills weren't being put to use in the Norwegian military. In it, he talks about how the Norwegian brass painted him as a traitor and a war criminal, and shunned him from his old unit.

Every Western military suffers from this. Every. Single. One. And the reason is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: there are two kinds of people in bureaucracies: those who serve the bureaucracy's goals, and those who serve the bureaucracy; ultimately the organization is led by people who serve the bureaucracy rather than people who serve the bureaucracy's goals. It's simply unavoidable in a military which must necessarily be a large bureaucracy.

As an Air Force vet, I think he accurately identifies the problem but I don't think the solution is what he thinks it is. The Army has been flying with Warrant Office pilots for years. They make less money, but they don't require a college degree so they have a _much_ larger pool of applicants.

The solution is to disentangle leadership and piloting. Currently, because they're all officers, pilots view themselves as leaders of men. However, as the author of this post says, the most leading a pilot will ever do is lead a flight of jets. Piloting has always been a tactical skill, and its place as an officer-exclusive job makes it incorrectly perceived as a gateway to a strategic career.

You only needed a high school degree to fly in WW2, and I honestly believe the Air Force should be hiring pilots based solely on ability to fly vs credentialism.

As a funny aside, the Air Force originally gave up Warrant Officers so that they could have have higher ranked enlisted personnnel (E-9). Afterwards, all of the other services complained that their enlisted personnel were outranked by the Air Force so they got E-9s and didn't have to give up their warrants.

But then you'd have pilots making more than Generals.

The ultimate answer to any skill shortage is always going to be "pay them more." However, that falls apart quickly, so the problem is finding a better answer.

Just a single sortie is very expensive in just maintenance + supply. You need a whole crew to prepare a plane. Not to speak of the whole infrastructure required to train pilots, having places to fly from, teachers to learn from. It all adds up to a huge number, that when you divide by the number of pilots trained, doesn't get reduced by a lot.

- Years of training on multiple platforms (initial pilot training, follow up training on the platform itself, possibly others)

- Maintenance and logistics of those platforms

- Probably amortizing the cost of those planes across each pilot using it for training

I'm guessing it has to do with flight time. Flying a jet is expensive. A jet will consume something like $10,000 of fuel per hour of flight time. Not to mention maintenance costs, the costs of the maintenance crew, the cost of having dedicated f-16s and f-22s for training is probably included in there as well. Not to mention what is probably a high dropout rate. All that adds up. $5.6M still sounds high to me, but I imagine there are a bunch of other costs I'm not thinking about.

It seems as expected to me. These planes cost tens of thousands per flight hour plus a huge support staff is needed. I don’t think they even fly that much.

Per Wikipedia a B2 bomber has an hourly operational cost of $135,000.

No idea how many hours you have to train on the thing in real life to become proficient; but at that rate...yeesh!

Cost of flying F-22 for an hour is reported anywhere between $33k and $70k, with most estimates in the $60k range. Let's assume $50k/hour to be safe - 200 hours of flight time gets you to the $10 million figure on its own, with no other costs accounted for.

Pilot still ends up the cheap part of the equation, given ~$200mil+ per airplane cost.

Whee - are we having budgetary fun yet :-)

How much do you think it costs to fill up an F-15 with Jet Fuel?

Not to mention the maintenance requirements on the planes (and the ground crews to do it) and the cost of ammunition used in training (missles aren't cheap)

Think about the logistics of getting a class of pilots from the training sites, simulators, classrooms, housing, etc. Not to mention the costs to keep all those places open. Pilots have 100s or more of hours in simulators before they even touch a plane. Now add the costs of training in the actual plane and related training missions bombs, fake targets, bombing ranges etc...

One important detail is that not all pilots are going to be fighter pilots (which usually means less expensive trainings).

C17s, KC-135s, A10s, C-130s make up a significant part of the USAF fleet, not to mention the smaller transport/utility craft

Jets cost a ton to operate, in fuel, maintenance and personnel.

We build manned warplanes because you want a human with decision making capability on the trigger, drone communications can be jammed, and AI is a myth.

That was actually how air forces adapted to the jet era. Attrition was horrific, about 35% of USAF F-84s and F-86s being lost in crashes through the 1950s. Actual combat losses in Korea were insignificant compared to accidents.

The 1970s-designed F-16 has a loss rate of 3.4 per 100,000 flight hours. The two 1950s fighters were 52.6 and 44.2 respectively.

That's the incentive bonus.

Except they do. Pilots also fly in humanitarian aid, fly out civilians and medical casualties, carry out Search and Rescue, and perform reconnaissance during natural disasters.

how else would we go into deeper debt? the budget deficit and debt is not going to grow on it's own.

Most of the boomer airline pilots will be retired in the next decade. The number of pilots in the US currently is about half of what it was in 1980. I'd imagine the demand for air travel has not decreased by half in that same time frame.