Stormbird

Today I flew out to visit one of these ift flight academies. I sat down with about 15 of the students off premises. Included in the group were a number of second lieutenant Academy grads and some X enlisted fighter maintenance second lieutenants . So I asked about Duty days and one of the girls said she had been on scheduled duty for 14 straight days. Alll of the students said this was not unusual even though they knew contractually the Flight Academy was supposed to schedule a day off after 7 Days Of scheduled duty. Rarely would any of them go to the scheduling office and demand a day off, either for fear of appearing weak, unmotivated, or because they're just trying to get through the program as quickly as possible. I wonder if any of them realize what the consequences would be if they knowingly flew on the 8th day and had an accident. I personally do not know. Would the Air Force get involved? Would the FAA get involved? I cannot find any FARs that put limits on consecutive days of training for students. All of them agree that the Management areas of this Flight Academy are completely stove piped and never talk to each other, mostly because they don't care. One CFI actually knew that because of the winds , nothing would be accomplished on a particular instrument training fight, but he literally said, "I don't care. I'm 2 hours away from my 1500 for my ATP so we're going." The management and the cfi's literally have no vested interest in the well-being of the Air Force students, it's all about the hours and the money.

The only way I could explain the lack of Air Force supervision over the schools is the same reason the whole concept sucks: every school has a different management composition and style, every school has a different pool of cfi's and every school has different aircraft. How could the AF possibly expect any kind of standardized result.

Wish I was as well written and in the know as some of the followers of this thread so I thought I would just let things stew for a while (didn't help) and see how this contracted Flight Academy issue would work out. My information comes from first hand accounts but may not be indicative of other contracted flight academies. In this particular case, one AF Captain back at the home AFB is tasked with keeping contact with that home base's TDY students as an additional duty and not as a primary job. Essentially there is no day to day monitoring of the civilian flight academy's performance or treatment of the students. The result is this flight academy in this particular case has to a large extent abused its students. Stretches of 12 days or more of being scheduled on duty, literally no regular scheduled days off each week, and the instructors have been abused too, and told to quit or be fired if they didn't like the non-stop 12-hour days. In some cases this has built up a huge animus towards the students . There is absolutely no consistency amongst the cfi's except that they all operate under FAR's. Instructional rides sometimes last up to three hours in the peak of heat in a small, hot cockpit. Can't remember if I ever in my career had initial instructional rides longer than an hour and a half. My understanding is it took a couple RAF guys, more senior in rank than the second lieutenants to call back to home base and threaten an IG complaint. That worked for a while but the civilian boss had other ideas. It's not unique that this Flight Academy is trying to push the Air Force students through as quickly as possible, and cheaply as possible, using new, young cfi's and schedulers that have no clue about duty days. And the word is out, every flight academy is different and some, like CAE, are top tier and very professional .Others have sent initial solo students out in planes that have had engine failures and were not fixed.( yes solo student had an engine failure on departure after it had supposedly been fixed.) Suffice to say, these flight academies, from Atlanta to Southern Florida to Texas and Arizona , sourcing instructors from every corner of the globe in no way shape or form will deliver a consistent, across the board equal product back to the respective home bases --from what I am seeing and hearing. I would love to hear this is just sour grapes from a couple students and I'm not getting a proper perspective.

Can't remember the derogatory name given to the flag officers that came up with the current program, but it's obvious that when they opened up the conversation for ideas, their bandwidth was extremely narrow and recognition of valuable inputs from outside their staff was extremely short-sighted. With contracts awarded it's probably just too damn late to do anything about it. It'll be like the airlines, courses won't be changed and problems solved until it starts costing more money.

Ya gotta remember these flight academy instructors are civilian kids working towards their ATP rating and, none have ever been exposed to anything military. Right now, it's a 30 min brief, maybe a 15 to 30 min de-brief. It's an assembly line. What you're suggesting above might help, but I don't have the data. It would be a huge ask. If I were one of these young CFI's, I'd say GFY and go where there is a nice relaxed atmosphere to instruct.

These rates and discussions were based on other bases that were first to gain students from the new IPT pipeline. I believe the AETC Commander is out at Aeroguard Flight Academy in Phoenix today. My ears are to the ground as to what he passed on to the school and its newest 2nd LT arrivals. My mistake from previous post, the Chinese students at this school are either PLAAF or Air China, not Cathay Pacific. I know the politics that led to this becoming an issue but prefer not to relay.

Sorry don't know what a huckleberry is. But I just got back from a UPT base, and I would be glad to share what I heard from the flight line. First most distressing in my mind but maybe not if you're a part 141 dude is there were three engine failures in the last month at ipt, one was with a solo student on takeoff, the same plane / engine had failed the day before on Final. There is a huge gap in uniformity of instruction at the contracted IPT locations, some are nose to the grindstone 7 days a week finishing 30 days early , some as one Lieutenant put it are Club Med FAA rating writtens spoon fed to them. There was a 30 to 40% failure rate in the T6 instrument Sims with the new ipt student flow, they are working to figure out the solution. I witnessed a drop night, only 6 T38s, and when three of those are slotted to Guard /Reserve babies then it's slim pickings for those that did really well and are in the top five or six of their class. One class at a different base got just one T38, still scratching my head on that one but he is the only one in his T-38 class. Lastly, at one of the IPT bases in Phoenix, two Chinese students who were flying at the same school and living in the same dorm complex were caught in one of the lieutenant's rooms photographing the Air Force students" curriculum. No one I talked to could find out if they were PLAAF students or Cathay Pacific. That whole thing is under investigation and the two Chinese students were tossed.