Leaderboard

It was a good article. What stood out to me is the tone suggests the Navy is somehow more serious in their approach to their training problem than the USAF is. Of course that could just by my cynical view of the Air Force at this point. With that said, it always struck me that "primary" in the Navy was lower quality than SUPT, insofar as the execution seemed very lackadaisical in their timeline execution. There was surprisingly informal nature to their training program where the timeline was just this open-ended "we'll get you there, eventually." Not surprising that they now find themselves with a production problem, that is similar - at least in nature - to ours. The one part that's always missing from these service-centric pieces, though, is the discussion over compensation. There are plenty of articles that cover the difference in airline pay vs military service, but the DOD never seems to want to tackle that part head on. It's even worse when you look at how much aviation-related bonuses and 'pays' have been inflated away over the years. That part is never talked about or acknowledged.

Concur. From the article: McCoy also drew a firm line on culture. He does not want to outsource large parts of the training enterprise. Naval aviation is not a generic air force, and flying from ships imposes requirements a contracted model does not capture on its own. That’s leadership, they are using contractors for some of their training but the majority remains in house, for now we are too but I fear we will be mostly contractor eventually. I’ve thrown out a lot of ideas on this thread but opening a 4th regular UPT base (Sheppard is its own thing), primarily manned by the ARC and primarily for ARC bound graduates with their own syllabus and iron will alleviate the pressure. Give the state and wing that takes this mission confidence the rug won’t be pulled out from under them by making sending ARC bound students there as the normal paradigm. Steady business, steady program support from the Bobs. Keep it reasonable, PC-21 and KA-90 training aircraft, 150 hour syllabus.

That was a good read, thanks for sharing.