I’ve been reading through a draft in order to provide comments to be sent up the chain, and I find myself scratching my head a lot. I don’t want to disparage the people who worked very hard on it, because I have good friends at the other bases. The effort was well intentioned, but syllabus 2.5 seems overly optimistic and grasping for anything and everything “innovative.” The new syllabus concepts also seems to have been tested in a vacuum, primarily because the class that provided the lessons learned for it was part of a separate innovation flight apart from the rest of the flying squadrons. No washbacks or forwards, no inbound baby class pressuring the timeline, no brand new FAIP development to worry about, etc. I question it’s ability to succeed in the real world.
My big problem with what we have been doing in UPT isn’t that 19AF wants to innovate, it’s how we do it. We changed every variable a year ago with the new syllabus starting with 19-20, and we changed the way we rate what is successful and what is not. That’s not an experiment. That’s desperate thrashing. How do I know what new concept works and what doesn’t if everything changed at the same time and if I don’t have a control to compare it against? We’re also doing the equivalent of jerking ourselves off here in 19AF because we define our own success. As far as I know there isn’t an official channel to interface with follow on training, and there isn’t an official forum for them to define what they want from a UPT graduate.
What stood out to me is that syllabus 2.5 increases the flying time slightly over the current “new” syllabus. That’s awesome! But...if we are nearing the same amount of hours as the proven legacy syllabus, this entire last year and a half was a waste. We should have used something like PTN to vette isolated, innovative ideas to be rolled into the syllabus in an incremental and controlled manner. Instead we have an entire generation of pilots who were screwed by AETC, received worse training, and are less qualified graduates. I’ll look every one of them in the eye and tell that to their faces when I go back to my MWS because they deserve to know it and also because I’ll be stuck with the results when I’m on a crew with them.
*rant over*