Originally Posted by
Irondrivr
UPT instructor friends have told me they are cranking out pilots as fast as they can. It's insane!
Well, in WWII the US was producing 50,000 pilots a year by the end. But they had a serious number of training bases and military training areas that no longer exist.
https://media.defense.gov/2015/Sep/1...150911-028.pdf
Now they are struggling to produce a small fraction of that output:
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/y...ious-position/
Some excerpts:
“In the 1990s, they divested too many aircraft, they closed down too many pilot training bases,” she said. “They simply don’t have the capacity to produce the number of pilots that they need, and they don’t have the aircraft required to absorb the pilots they do create.”
Air Force officials have seen hints of progress. The service closed out fiscal 2022 with about 200 more active duty pilots than it had three years earlier. Now, though, military officials and civilian experts alike argue the Pentagon needs to amass a more robust pilot corps to prepare for the next conflict.
The service put 1,276 airmen through undergraduate pilot training last year, about 100 fewer than in fiscal 2021, Riley said. It typically aims to
graduate 1,500 new pilotseach year, and is shooting for 1,470 pilots in 2023.
Keeping the pipeline running smoothly was tricky in 2022. The service continues to struggle to find enough civilian workers to run flight simulators despite a slate of hiring incentives.
About one-quarter of those sim instructor jobs — 135 of 518 — remain empty.