PLANES WITH BENEFITS: How Buying Light Attack Fleet Would Help USAF’s Pilot Shortage.

The problem the Air Force faces is not recruitment. It’s that the service is currently producing more pilots than it can absorb into operational units, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mike Holmes explained here in an Aug. 17 interview. In other words, many pilots who complete undergraduate pilot training (UPT) have no spot available for them in the combat Air Force. Some end up flying T-38s here as aggressor aircraft for the F-22 Raptor until a spot opens up on a fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft, Holmes said.

“We are making more lieutenants than we can comfortably absorb right now in the squadrons, so if we had another place to put them we’d start feeding them in there,” Holmes said.

A light attack fleet would provide another track for new fighter pilots, allowing them to gain critical combat experience and accumulate hundreds of flight hours in a short amount of time, Holmes said. Part of the appeal for new pilots would be that the light attack fighters would likely see more combat and fly more hours overall than the high-end fighters, because they are so much cheaper to fly.

“We’d use it as a way to season new pilots,” Holmes explained. “Some of them would choose to stay in that airplane because they liked it and they liked the mission. A lot of them then would move on into one of our other fighter aircraft that would enter the squadron as an experienced fighter pilot but new in that aircraft.”

As I wrote last week, “less bureaucratic bullcrap, more flight hours,” would go a long way towards mitigating the Air Force’s pilot retention problem. The light attack fleet would certainly help with the second part of that.