Originally Posted by
Excargodog
There is a shortage of pilots because they no longer train the number of pilots they once did. BRAC closed UPT bases like Reese, Williams, Laredo, Webb, Craig and allowed NATO allies to do their training at others like Sheppard. Their Associated MOAs and training areas went with them and will never be recovered. Back in WWII the military turned out 50,000 pilots a year. Then came the post Cold War drawdown of active squadrons.r.
It's not as simple as Drawdown/BRAC.
There is a huge retirement wave to age demographics in the US pilot force right now.
Military aircraft tend to be more capable than they used to be, and therefor more costly. Especially tacair... to do X warfighting you need Y logistic aircraft and that hasn't changed much. But you can get by with a lot fewer fighters today, and as always budgets constrain.
The military is a minority producer of airline pilots and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Our opponents may increase numbers but they can neither develop nor afford the kind of bleeding-edge hardware that would be required to force us dramatically increase our tacair inventory. In fact the DoD is actually now buying updated 4th gen fighters as a cheaper, faster alternative to costly 5/6 gen hardware... 4-1/2 gen hardware is plenty sufficient for many roles in a peer fight.
The reason we have a pilot shortage, fundamentally, is that the industry somehow disregarded the very simple math involving retirement age, mil pilot output, and civilian flight training output. Also maybe blind to the fact that younger generations are not quite as oriented to get away from the farm and have some adventures as the pre-internet demographic. They could very easily have solved this in advance by setting up schools, recruiting suitable and applicants, then paying them to do primary training. The problem with that is long lead-time and they missed the boat.
If push comes to shove you can give somebody 1500 hours in a crew-oriented program (you can do simulated crew ops in a 172) and put them in the right seat of a legacy narrowbody.