I feel this might work out just like PTN or Avenger. There is no bypassing experience. I think one of the beauties of Advanced was I learned single engine stuff in a relatively simple airplane, and got to practice it a lot in the plane itself. Plus, you would be sending studs to a very complex aircraft while they still have a lot to learn about flying in general. I feel a fast and complex aircraft is not the place to learn the basics of instrument flight and other fundamental flying concepts. Maybe the Air Force has higher fidelity and more numerous sims than the Navy, but this will also increase the load on simulators. It is already a battle to get sim time in my community between the FRS and the operational squadrons. Having undergrad pilots would make sim time even more scarce.
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T-45C Replacement
- Thread starter Birdbrain
- Start date
I believe, and I could be mistaken, that the AF went from Pilot Training Next as an experiment to UPT 2.5 as a test to full operation as just UPT…in other words, you wing at completion of the sim heavy T-6 initial training.
Which includes, I'm told, only 35 actual hours in the plane.
I'm not sure who I feel more sorry for- the new pilots, or the squadrons that have to train them from a lower level...
In the MQ-9 community word is they're moving all tactical training to what we call Mission Qualification Training, (MQT) which is conducted by the fleet squadrons. So the first time we find out if you can actually be trusted to shoot anything will be after you complete the FTU.
I don't like it. Neither does anyone else.
Freshly winged pilots are showing up at the C-17 squadron next door to my office with ~100 hours total pilot time in an actual aircraft. They do have considerable sim experience. That flight time is in Cessna 172, A Piper Seminole, a T-6 and that's it as far as real aircraft time.
Did the Project Avenger stuff flop?
johnpauljones1776
Un-salted butter bar (non prior)
Can't talk for Corpus but TW-5 is currently transitioning to the delta syllabus which is a combination of avenger and the Charlie syllabus. As far as I know Charlie students were finishing with around 70-75 hours and Delta supposedly has around 12 hours less flight time.
Like you wouldn’t believe. Great in small numbers, an absolute nightmare when executed by a full squadron.
Do you think it would have been more successful if it was only used for SNAs who had prior time or otherwise demonstrated high aptitude (i.e. studs who could probably afford to skip a few flights and get introduced to more dynamic/advanced flight profiles)?
As I understood it, that was the original implementation.
There were plenty of benefits on paper. Proficiency advancing was the name of the game, and in theory there would be no wasted flights due to each SNA’s syllabus length being tailored to their individual ability via proficiency advancing.
It ended up becoming a scheduling nightmare due to the unpredictable syllabus flow, and was more resource-intensive despite similar number of average flight hours and time to train per SNA compared to the traditional syllabus. Juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, hence why CNATRA is almost done shifting to a new syllabus that is basically the traditional syllabus sprinkled with a few small elements of Avenger.
To CNATRA’s credit, over the last few years he shot down proposed Syllabi that were simply a reduction of flights. Yes syllabi tend to get shorter over the years as we reevaluate what is needed and what isn’t, but the decision makers seem to be aware that reducing flight hours outright with no training to replace it isn’t the answer.