How often military pilots fly
 

I am currently in a collegiate aviation program and was considering the military route. I was just wondering how often you military guys get to actually fly when you are not deployed. I am particularly interested in the Air Force and Air Force reserve.

There's no single answer to this. My experiences as a C-17 guy from 1998-2009 will be a lot different than a new C-17 pilot today. But I averaged about 350 hours per year. The first year was only about 150 hours, but then things picked up. Some years were closer to 500 hours with up to 170 hours in a single month.

On average, I'd say that a C-17 pilot will fly about 3-4 hours in the sim per month, about 1 or 2 locals per month (about 5 hours per local, but time is split between several pilots), and a hugely wide variety of operational flying, but probably average about 30 hours per month.

At about the 5 year point, you will start flying less - instead of 1-2 overseas trips per month, you might get 1 per quarter.

I'm at the 13ish year point and I've been doing non-flying work since the summer of 2009. It'll likely be 3-5 years before I'm back in the cockpit.

Realize that different airplanes have vastly different flying schedules.
C-17s and C-5s generally fly locals and 7-14 day overseas trips (about 30-50 hours per trip). C-17s will also deploy as a flying squadron for about 4 months and you'll probably fly your butt off. C-5s don't do flying deployments.

Everyone is vulnerable for non-flying deployments. Everyone is also somewhat vulnerable to getting assigned to fly UAVs (aka RPAs), which the AF counts as a "flying" assignment.

C-130s, KC-10s, and KC-135s generally fly locals and 4 month deployments. Not sure about the ability to fly shorter overseas trips - probably not as many of the short trips as the C-5s and C-17s do. I think some of those units break their deployments into 60 or 90 day chunks of time.

Fighters and bombers generally fly locals and Red Flag (or similar) exercises and 4 month deployments.

I'm sure that some of these other folks will chime in.

I got 200 in the Viper last year...Guard/Reserve. Usually flew about 3-7 times a week, on a 4 day work week. A few trips, no deployments.

Must have been very short flights, no? Sounds like quite a few hops for 200 hours over a year.

As an example, I was in the top 3 flight hours for all of my first 3 years as an IP and I topped out at 357 hours one year (got 350 two other years). They advertise that 250 hrs/year is the fleet average.
Monthly I never topped 40 hrs, but there were some where I didn't break into double digits either.
I'd say that probably 1.1-1.5 would have been an average per sortie over time if I had to guess.

USMCFLYR

I got 5200 hours in 11.5 years of active duty.

So many variables to this question. It's going to vary for the different services and platforms. Fleet flight time will vary depending on community. I flew multi-engine props, the C-2A Greyhound, three different tours in a row (fleet, FRS, fleet) and my flight time sucked. Unless on deployment or on an FCLP/CQ det, we didn't fly a whole lot for various reasons (maint, money, etc). There are months where I have 2-5 hours in my log book. That was from 98-2006, things might very well be different now.

In the Navy, if you want flight time, go the training command route. Even then, it can vary. Back in 07-09, I was an associate pilot at TW-5 at Whiting Field flying the T-34C with VT-6. I was generally able to get scheduled for about 25-30 hours a month and usually flew only 15-20 hours a month, most flights cancelled due to weather. Those in the squadrons were flying 40-60 hours a month (one good buddy flew 1800 hours in just over 3 years with VT-3). I never flew cross countries and that hurt me a bit. Now that I'm with TW-2 flying the T-45C, I get 2X's a day, average 30 hours a month. The squadron pilots will average that and up, some get 50-60 hours a month. I'm on pace to get 350 hours this year alone. Squadron pilots have logged over 400 easily. It's very good flying.

I should have said 3-7/week when we were flying. There were some weeks we didn't fly at all due to weather, etc... You also have to account for leave, non-flying tdy's/schools, a few weeks of sims. Sorties range anywhere from .7 to 1.5 on average. A few 2+ but those are few and far between.

USMCFLYER/Crewdawg, thanks for the clarification. Are flights (excluding ferry/x-ctry) in the fighter world short due to the nature of the mission you practice for? i.e. it doesn't take too long to fly to the range and drop a few bombs and RTB; practice air-air fighting?

It really depends. KC-10 folks can easily fly 750-800 hours a year. Happens all the time. No, that's not a good thing.