Initial Pilot Training and Future Pilot Training

[Pooter]

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that anyone in senior leadership is concerned with actual skillsets or experience. 

What is happening is very simple:

We can't maintain the jets we have and we can't acquire new ones in a reasonable timeframe.  At the same time we must keep the slides green at all costs. The only answer left (short of offloading the entire operation to the civilian world) is to retcon what a UPT grad is.

It costs AETC nothing to churn out crap and dump it into b-courses across the other MAJCOMs. B-course instructors will still wash out the weak swimmers, but at that point finding them a new home is an ACC/AMC/AFSOC/AFGSC problem.  AETC's hands are clean (on paper) and the brass at Randolph have figured this out. They can even pitch the UPT cuts as #innovation and cost saving to keep the (even more out of touch) GOs in the Pentagon happy.  

[Clark Griswold]

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that anyone in senior leadership is concerned with actual skillsets or experience. 
What is happening is very simple:
We can't maintain the jets we have and we can't acquire new ones in a reasonable timeframe.  At the same time we must keep the slides green at all costs. The only answer left (short of offloading the entire operation to the civilian world) is to retcon what a UPT grad is.
It costs AETC nothing to churn out crap and dump it into b-courses across the other MAJCOMs. B-course instructors will still wash out the weak swimmers, but at that point finding them a new home is an ACC/AMC/AFSOC/AFGSC problem.  AETC's hands are clean (on paper) and the brass at Randolph have figured this out. They can even pitch the UPT cuts as #innovation and cost saving to keep the (even more out of touch) GOs in the Pentagon happy.  

This is very easy for me to say from Retiredville but it may take several whistleblowers (IPs and recent grads) who contact media, sympathetic congressional leaders for top cover and inform the public, civilian leadership that what the GOs are selling is just bullshit.
For whatever reason, the people who should be and should have been skeptical of all this nonsense have let them get away with it, like 60 Minutes and the F-22 guys telling their story, someone(s) is going to have to risk their career & give an unvarnished, plain language explanation of the problem.
Public shaming of the AF at this point is probably the last thing that could be done.
It could be what I listed above but also a public advertisement(s) in appropriate places (military news sites, aviation news, etc) comparing recent historical UPT/SUPT to the recent iterations and comparisons to what allies and enemies are doing.


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[WheelsOff]

On 8/13/2025 at 10:38 PM, Clark Griswold said:

This is very easy for me to say from Retiredville but it may take several whistleblowers (IPs and recent grads) who contact media, sympathetic congressional leaders for top cover and inform the public, civilian leadership that what the GOs are selling is just bullshit.
For whatever reason, the people who should be and should have been skeptical of all this nonsense have let them get away with it, like 60 Minutes and the F-22 guys telling their story, someone(s) is going to have to risk their career & give an unvarnished, plain language explanation of the problem.
Public shaming of the AF at this point is probably the last thing that could be done.
It could be what I listed above but also a public advertisement(s) in appropriate places (military news sites, aviation news, etc) comparing recent historical UPT/SUPT to the recent iterations and comparisons to what allies and enemies are doing.


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Sadly, this is the way.

This is likely the only card we have left to play at this point to shed enough light on the problem in order to turn things around enough so that we don’t get our cheeks clapped in WW3.

Edited 5 hours ago by WheelsOff