Pooter

"If you're not ready at the perch, breakout. Except if you're at any airfield on earth that's not called Columbus, Vance, Sheppard, or Laughlin. Then just perch late or whenever tower tells you to, and try not to get drug in." Source: AFMAN 11-248 Chapter 6, Section 9 Paragraph 6.9.6.9.69

^This right here. We spend far too much time teaching students to fly in a local UPT pattern that has way more rules and is far more saturated than anything they're ever going to see in the real world. The rules let us cope with a huge traffic load in the pattern, but the intricacies of local pattern-isms should be the realm of IP knowledge, not expected of students. We need less local pattern nonsense and more off station sorties to get them used to the real world. Not to call anyone out, but I've seen countless students hook checkrides for not being able to find a specific VFR entry ground reference at the aux field or not being able to clear the pattern for the 11 other airplanes doing god knows what. Guess what, half of the IPs don't know where VFR entry is either. It's all a titanic waste of time and poor training in my opinion.

I'm completely with you. I think the confidence gained doing numerous UPT solos is something huge you take with you into your career, especially if you go into the single seat world. As for UPT flying time, mine was 188 in 2014. Crazy that it was basically unchanged from yours in 1997 and we've cut 20% in the last 5 years. It's a slippery slope gents.. keep an eye on your new copilots and wingmen.

I don't see syllabus PA's as a big issue or something that's really happening all that often. Sure you can have a guy who washes out of IFF for something airmanship related, and it's easy to point at a training anomaly a year earlier. But that doesn't mean they are related necessarily. Having said that, when you look at the gradual erosion of the syllabus over 10 years combined with PA's you could easily understand how a general decrease in airmanship is happening. Just speaking anecdotally, when I went through UPT I had 17 solos. 5 in the T-6 and 12 in the 38. Nowadays students get half that. On top of that, there has been a reduction in total flight hours of ~20% in the last 5 years with no added sim time. This is happening because any single syllabus event can be argued out of existence by the good idea fairy. It starts at a syllabus "conference" when someone says: "students don't learn anything new from that second T-6 MOA solo anyway. We'd make a few days up on timeline if we just get rid of it." And before you know it you've lost half of all student solos, ELPs, fix-to-fixes, T-38 form-solo O&B, wing work up to 90 degrees, over the tops in ET, perch setups, VFR nav leg on XC, formation sim, advanced contact and formation for all T-1 bound students, and the motherf-ing chandelle. Okay maybe the form sim was useless, but you get my point.

A few things about PTN: - PTN is not a watered down version of UPT with fancy toys. Because UPT is already a watered down version of UPT. If you look at programmed syllabus hours per student right now in UPT, it is 20% less than it was 5 years ago. That's across flights, sims, and academics. So the question should not be "why has PTN cut all this time out of pilot training and trying to pass it off as okay?" Instead it should be: "the time cuts are already happening at an institutional level. What can we do to maintain some semblance of quality?" We can b*tch about timeline guidance that comes down from on high until we're blue in the face, but that won't change anything. In my opinion, PTN is the only part of the pilot training enterprise that has that has actually made PROACTIVE attempts to maintain quality with reduced timeline. - If the students were handpicked, how is this experiment valid or scaleable? Valid question, and I'll do you one better. The instructors were handpicked too, and I'd argue that's even more important. If your entire squadron is made up of experienced spec ops, fighter guys, and high time faips, the quality of instruction is going to be better. The youngest instructors at PTN had 600+ hrs, which would be considered medium to highly experienced in a normal UPT squadron. UPT is having a crisis of instructor quality right now, and it absolutely needs to be addressed if/when this gets scaled up. - I hope people can recognize that PTN doesn't need to be declared an absolute victory or an absolute failure. The air force seems to be airing in the direction of absolute victory while everyone else (mainly online) is in the schadenfreude failure camp. If we're mature about this we should realize that there's a mixture of good and bad. We should take the good and scale it to UPT as a whole, and also be willing to call a spade a spade and not cling to the stuff that didn't work. - The opr system is broken - We should have bought more raptors - I'm not that drunk.