In 2019, the Air Force wrapped up a small-scale experiment called Pilot Training Next....
The wings that graduates of Pilot Training Next will break in half with a person of their choice in a private ceremony at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. The Air Force taught an experimental cohort of students fly by leveraging technology, particularly simulators. Today, the service teaches all its novice pilots that way.AUSTIN — Air Force Capt. Donald “Donny” Nguyen eyed an avenue of escape and dashed to one side of the parking lot. Two airmen on an intercept course closed in and grabbed him.
Since 1946, basic Air Force pilot training was fixed at roughly 50 weeks, not quite one year. With changes pioneered by PTN and introduced gradually in a program called Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5, the norm today is just short of seven and a half months. As the coronavirus pandemic erased commercial airline pilot jobs, however, the Air Force pilot inventory steadily improved and the shortfall dropped to 1,650 by 2021. But airlines, a major lure for military flyers, started hiring again and the competition today is as sharp as ever.
Even while shaving off a third of the time needed to produce pilots, the Air Force is trying to make better ones. The new method is in use by hundreds of students at any given time as they learn to fly the T-6A Texan II trainer at Columbus, Vance and Laughlin AFBs. The experiment had the Air Force “talking about learning, how the human learns, how to focus that well beyond what pilot training is doing,” said Lt. Col. Ryan Riley, 41, an instructor pilot at Randolph who oversaw the second and third versions of PTN.Some didn’t like the changes. Others said the Air Force was late in getting to it.
“The first principle of innovation is that if you try to do something that is totally different in the midst of a bureaucracy that has been dictated to do it a certain way, it will fail most of the time,” Kwast said. Pilot Training Next and UPT 2.5 might have seemed revolutionary, but the Air Force was simply adopting technology that its students were already comfortable with, Wills noted in a 2021 press conference.
“I was combat mission-ready very young. I was an aircraft commander, which is unheard of in any other career field. … And I guess we got spun up fast,” Nguyen, now 29, observed of his 2019 pilot training,
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