Theres talk on the Navy side of things of increasing winging commitments… again… to help retention. Wonder if the Air Force is considering the same.

I'll be honest, even at age 18 I might have balked at going down a road that involved a 15-year commitment after wings... at that point, might as well stay for 20.

for a minute I thought I was reading this circa-2000 RAND report

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/ran...007/MR1204.pdf

23 years later, and we are still "looking at ways to solve this problem"

Closed bases and surrendered airspace that will never come back. Too few too unreasonably expensive aircraft. It’s much like the rest of the Defense industrial base…

Ther once was a base called Mather AFB and the flyers out of there had a shoulder patch that said Air Training Command Headquarters West. At the time I think only two ATC bases were west of the Mississippi (Williams In Tempe, now also gone, and Mather itself).

I thought the whole HQ West thing was more than a little arrogant until I got to digging into the history. During WW2 there were apparently over 100 ATC bases in California alone.

“Ther once was a base called Mather AFB and the flyers out of there had a shoulder patch that said Air Training Command Headquarters West. At the time I think only two ATC bases were west of the Mississippi (Williams In Tempe, now also gone, and Mather itself).”

I’m not sure what timeframe this might have been. I know Mather was still training Nav’s when I graduated college in ‘89, but there are numerous ATC bases west of the Mississippi.

I think the closest thing to military aviation still there might be the CBP Air Unit (sub unit of North Island). Two dudes and an unmarked Astar. They're killing it, though.

AFD does have a caution note for T-38 traffic still.

not any more. ATC went away in 1993, but yeah, the ‘west of the Mississippi was wrong. It should have been west of the Rio Grande. But in the early 1990s I do believe the only ATC bases left that were once part of ATC West were Mather, Williams, And a couple of tenant units at Fairchild AFB and up in Alaska that taught basic and arctic survival. During WWII, there were over 100 ATC training bases or auxiliary fields in California alone.

https://military-history.fandom.com/...raining_Center

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:


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