The tension on the force right now is significant.
I know they’ve been gone for two sometimes three weeks at a time.
Then they come back, there’s no time we gotta start back up again.
I need you to get back.
There almost 2,000 pilot short.
There’s no shortage in the amount of work that needs to be done.
It just has to be done with fewer people.
We’re making the mission happen, but we’re having to do it very often on the backs of
our Airmen
How do you take an organization that is brilliant.
They are world class.
They are the best in the history of mankind, and they start seeing the signs that they
need to do something different.
So in our business of national security where our job is to fly, fight, and win.
Our job is to be prepared for the unexpected.
Our job is to win no matter what.
We better be masters at this game of innovation.
It’s a complicated problem, it’s not just, there’s no silver bullet or one thing.
It’s a relationship of things.
Reversing the pilot shortage requires coordination across the Air Force to produce more pilots
without creating a bottlenecks in the training pipeline.
Right now the Air Force must retain pilots to grow its future force, but the only way
to recover from the pilot shortage, is to produce more pilots.
And so the strategy is production, but stable production at the numbers that we need over
time.
That is really the ultimate fix to the pilot crisis.
The most critical shortage right now is within the fighter pilot community.
To produce a way out, the Air Force has to tackle challenges throughout the 3 stages
of the pilot production pipeline.
After commissioning the first stage of an Air Force pilots journey is undergraduate
pilot training.
UPT is essentially a program where we take students and develop them into aviators.
We teach them the foundations of flying.
The class sizes for the students have increased without a corresponding increase in instructor
manning.
Time is a commodity.
In pilot training it’s a big time commodity.
To maximize the learning for that student, to have it be focused in order to able to
now facilitate getting that student to their peak, or getting beyond any sort of barrier
that they might be having.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different
result.
So when it takes us a year to produce an aviator, that timeline has to be shrunk based on our
current demands.
The Air Force is working on game-changing ways to train aviators.
Which has brought 20 Airmen to Austin, Texas, for an experimental program called Pilot Training
Next.
It aims to train skills learned at UPT in half the amount of time using virtual and
augmented reality.
We’re not taking UPT and making incremental changes.
We’re taking a leap in one direction with the expectation that that leap is going to
provide change inside of the UPT construct.
There are a couple of artificial intelligences that we intend to leverage, one of them algorithmic
in nature which means that it’s a model that’s able to instruct students in the
absence of a live instructor pilot.
This isn’t to replace the instructor pilot, but it’s to give access to instructor techniques
much more on demand for the student.
We know that pilot training can be better.
Um, the reality of this is that we don’t think we have solved right now.
This is not intended to be the program which replaces pilot training.
When somebody sits down for the first time in these sims, and they make a comment like,
this might not be where it needs to be now, but I can totally see how we can across that
goal line in a month, two months, three months, whatever it might be.
And if it’s not us then it will be somebody else.
After graduating UPT pilots head to their formal training unit.
That could mean Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, for a newly selected F-16 pilot.
In a formal training unit we are teaching F-16 pilots ultimately to be ready for combat.
And so, each of the missions sets that the F-16 does is taught here in the FTU.
This is where it all begins.
Teaching a student first how to take off and land, but more importantly, how to employ
the ordinance.
And so this is where we teach them the fight portion of that.
Right, so they can fly an airplane, but now we need to teach them how and give them the
capabilities and the tools to go out and employ when the nation calls upon them to do so.
At this stage solving problems through innovation doesn’t mean technology changes.
Here at FTU it’s processes that needed to change.
In the past when an instructor pilot needed to make changes to the syllabus to meet the
needs of a student.
They had to route those changes up through their squadron commander, group commander,
and sometimes the vice wing commander for approval.
Now that authority has been placed in the hands of a squadron commander.
And that almost in itself creates more efficiency because there’s much less asking of superiors,
can I do this, can I do that?
For instance I can make a syllabus waiver if I think that a student has done well and
needs to do one event potentially out of order, or to proficiency advance past an event because
they’ve been doing really well.
One of the things that keeps me up at night is that making sure that in our discussion
of trying to produce more students faster that we don’t lose sight of the fact that
we still need to produce the same quality of student and make sure that they are very
close to being combat mission ready.
We understand that what we do here today could affect the decisions they make and the actions
they take within a year from now and that could affect the air power and dominance projection
that we have across the globe.
One of those bases across the globe is Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina.
Well I think that Holliman is sort of a stepping stone to get you here.
A lot of the things designed at Holliman are based on the needs of those bases like Shaw
and what they need to get guys through MQT faster and get them ready to go fight.
Mission qualification training is the training that we do when we get a new pilot here and
we wanna make them combat mission ready.
So that we can take them on any deployment, they can go fight in any war, go do whatever
we need them to.
I don’t have a ton of experienced pilots which means I don’t have a instructor pilots.
We’re trying to solve a retention problem.
Because we know that we cannot produce the pilots fast enough to backfill all of those
who have been leaving.
So that loss is really felt at the squadron level because it just doesn’t get replaced
for quite a bit of time.
Maybe a year, maybe two years that that position will just go vacant.
The Air Force is working on about 65 planned incentives to to improve work-life balance
and quality of service for pilots.
We’re just improving force development, talent management.
We’re taking care of families better.
We’re treating pilots like professional athletes, working on neck and back care.
We’re just doing a lot of things that needed to be done to take care of our Airmen.
And in every crisis there’s an opportunity.
So we see an opportunity to really just improve the way we take care of our pilots and Airmen
who are at large.
We might have to go out on a limb and try some things that maybe, maybe we even think
might fail.
Even we think they might fail, but let's just try something new in order to potentially
get a win in the long run.
What you do is you find the people that have a natural propensity to be good at innovating.
They have these habits of mind.
They have this hunger to do things better.
Always, always, always thinking about this one question and if there’s one question
you oughta leave here remembering it’s this question.
And the question is, how can I do this better?
We better be masters at this game of innovation.