Posted on Aug 2, 2017
Air Force Gets Creative to Tackle Pilot Shortage
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Pilots are going in droves due to High Ops Tempo and the Bow wave of Commercial Pilots reaching mandatory retirement ages. If a problem sucks and you throw money at it...guess what it still sucks. We are going to have to find a way to open the pipeline and allow more people to apply for Pilot positions versus keep it an old boy network of elitists' in my mind...don't change the training standards by no means as it is a dangerous occupation...however, get them in the pipeline and if they can't cut it, then offer them another job that is grounded but still as much in need...yes there are other career fields that are stressed with deployments and workload...pilots don't have a monopoly on that. More pilots reduces workload and provides more structure...how we do that...don't know. Glad I am not in that decision tree.
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Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen
I hear you. In a way this situation reminds me of what we saw during the post Vietnam draw down. Pilots left in droves for airlines then, leading edge of those getting ready to retire now, but that was what the AF wanted. That policy led to the "Do More With Less" policies that I vividly remember. Frankly AF personnel management in all career fields has been more like a roller coaster ride than any force shaping policy. Unfortunately, from all I've seen, the pilot training pipeline is maxed out right now, but some thinking outside the box could help relieve the pressure. Back in the 20s and 30s a lot of military pilots came from people who were already flyers; they didn't need to learn how to fly, they just needed to learn the military way to fly. Today there are a lot of young non exmilitary civilian and commercial pilots, especially in commuter airlines, who could fly in the military if there was some type of incentive program to draw them in. Yup, AF should recruit from the small commuter airlines! Only fair after all.
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