Originally Posted by busdriver12

I am curious how much has changed, since I finished AF UPT back in the dark ages. I was just talking to a friend whose daughter will be a senior in high school this year and is interested in aviation. She had the impression from talking to a recruiter, that her daughter just had to sign her life away for ten years after college, and boom, she'll get a free ride scholarship and become an AF pilot.

Well. Way back when, it wasn't so easy. You had to compete nationally for a scholarship and had to maintain a 3.0 GPA to keep it (you could only get a scholarship in a technical field, if you changed your major to a nontechnical field, you lost the scholarship). Men were awarded pilot slots at the local detachment level in their sophomore or junior year, women had to compete nationally for 1% of the total pilot slots. If you made it to UPT, there was a high washout rate. One guy in my class washed out with 2,000 flight hours already, and my spouse said 40% of their class washed out. There was zero guarantee you were going to finish, no matter what kind of experience you had.

So while I realize there's plenty of recruiter BS going on, I'm curious what the real story is. Are they giving out far more pilot slots and is training that much easier to get through? I'd heard that many people are given drone assignments after graduation, which wasn't something we had to consider back in prehistoric times.