What New Air Force Pilots Go Through In Flight School | Boot Camp | Business Insider

This is drop night, a long-anticipated event, where soon-to-be Air Force flight school graduates find out what aircraft they will fly. But before they get there, they have to start here at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, just nine miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Newly commissioned officers begin a year-long journey to earn their wings. The purpose of undergraduate pilot training is to give students experience in an aircraft in the military aviation world. So usually they come in with a little bit of flight experience in the civilian world, and then we teach them what that's like to do that as a military aviator. The Air Force has grappled with a pilot shortage for the last few years. In response, it's working to streamline training to get new pilots into the cockpit faster without sacrificing standards. After graduating T-6s, within a year they'll be mission ready and could possibly see combat in less than 18 months. Pilots have trained at Laughlin for over 70 years, beginning in World War II when it was a training site for bomber crews. Today, it's home to the 47th Flying Training Wing, and it trains more Air Force pilots than any other base. It's pretty competitive, so it all starts either in OTS, ROTC, or any other commissioning source that they may come through. There they have to compete to be in the top half of their graduating class. Then there they'll get picked to become a pilot. To be selected, applicants must hold a four-year college degree, be commissioned as an officer, and pass a series of academic and flight aptitude tests. My degree in college was communication studies. I have a hospitality degree from the University of Central Florida. I know it doesn't translate, but during that time I gathered about 2,000 hours of flight instruction time. I got my private pilot's license in high school, and then I went to the Air Force Academy and did a couple of airmanship things there, and then in general been exposed to aviation pretty much my whole life. It's been a lot of years. I'm 27 years old now, and I've been told no many times. I've applied several times to get into this program. All students begin training on the T-6 Texan II, a single-engine turboprop plane designed to teach the basics of military flying. But only top performers are selected to continue training in the T-38 Talon, a twin-engine supersonic jet that prepares pilots for the fighter jets they may fly in the operational Air Force. These are all the things that come on when we turn on the avionics master switch that are powered by the generator bus. Before they enter an aircraft cockpit, students spend weeks in the classroom learning its layout, how to read flight instruments, and how weather systems will affect everything they do in the air. So we're going to provide the academic foundation the theory that we think is essential for all high-performance flying that we do here, so that when they reach the simulator phase of training, they can practice that, and then it'll make a lot more sense by the time they get into the aircraft itself. You have to learn about the entire aircraft, how to fly it, where to fly it, and the procedures that follow that. It's a firehose, so we're getting a lot of information all at once. The pacing is really tough. However, it's manageable, and we've been selected for a reason. So we're here to work hard, study hard, and move on to our bases. That's where you're pointed. That's where you go. Students spend about 100 hours in the academic phase of training before moving to the next phase, logging 50 to 60 hours across three types of simulators to develop skills in cockpit procedures, emergency scenarios, and instrument flying. The unit training device, the UTD, which is a basic cockpit with no visual outside references, it enables the students to practice their cockpit procedures, work on their checklists, and get familiar with the switches and controls. Then they'll upgrade to the instrument flight trainers, which is in a dark container with a simple video screen in front where they can practice developing those instrument skills for landings, for takeoffs, for basic instrument procedures. And then ultimately, the grand finale is the operational flight training, which is about 120 degrees of visuals where they can practice ground references, aerobatics, more advanced emergency procedures. Each student is paired with an instructor pilot, or IP, who evaluates their performance through each phase of training. So flying the sims, there's certain moments where it feels really real. Your spatial orientation, how far you're off the ground, emergency procedures. I had that sim last night and it really picks up tempo and it's like, oh wow, this is actually happening. I was here previously as an instructor here in about 2014 to 2018, and it took students about 20 rides to solo, and now utilizing the immersive training devices, they solo in about half the time. So it's really accelerated their development and their growth, and ultimately we see a better product from T6s based on that technology. It's a one-to-one recreation of what is outside here at Laughlin. So we can practice on the simulators for hours on end, see what our visual references are, and then the first day we step in the plane, we can point out everything that we're familiar with up to that point. While simulators have sped up training, they're just one part of a larger strategy. The Air Force has struggled for the past eight years to meet its annual goal of producing 1,500 new pilots. There are multiple reasons why there's always some event that happens, whether it's OBOG's event in the T6. Laughlin had a hail event here several years ago that destroyed basically every T1 that had to be rebuilt. At Laughlin, our IPs are working very hard, you know, typically flying two sorties per day to make sure that we can produce pilots to fill the cockpit that America needs to go defend our national security. One of the most dangerous challenges pilots face is spatial disorientation, a condition where the body's senses can no longer accurately determine the aircraft's position, altitude, or motion. So if we're flying in formation through the weather, you're really, you're just staring at your flight lead's wing. You're not looking at any instruments. They are looking at their instruments, and you're just staring at their plane, and that can become quite disorienting. Tango 6-2 turn right heading 120. Descend and maintain 6,000 feet. To help them recognize and recover from it, students undergo training in a spatial disorientation simulator. Yeah, so that was the Corio solution, and in the aircraft, the Corio solution occurs in situations where the aircraft is turning, rolling, or changing pitch. Students also train with the Barony chair, a spinning device that simulates the types of illusions that spatial disorientation can create. It's meant to reinforce an important lesson. Your senses can lie, but your instruments won't. When you're getting onto it, and then you inevitably hit your head, you broke two rules, actually. So please be careful. We teach them local area survival, and we cover emergency parachute training. But we go through a practical application of what's taught in the class, because obviously we're not going to have the opportunity to real-world use this until it is a life-or-death situation. And this is a refresher training that you have to do every 36 months to maintain your currency, because again, it's not things that you're doing every single day. You're going to lose that muscle memory. It's going to feel snug. You should be able to fit your fist between your chest and the chest strap. Squat and pull as evenly as possible, and it should now be easy Before students step into the cockpit, they need to be properly fitted for the gear that will allow them to withstand the intense g-forces they will experience in the air. They are going to get custom fit to a helmet, harness, g-suit. The harness is what is attaching them to their parachute and to their seat kit. Mask is going to provide them aircraft oxygen. The helmet offers basic head protection. It's also a device we use to mount things like their visor and their mask to their face. Deep breath in, hold, and exhale. You don't find any air leaking out from up here? You do? Okay, go ahead and adjust your mask a bit. Every 120 days, we'll check the fit to make sure everything's still fitting well. If they've gained or lost any weight, there's a chance we'll need to tighten or loosen the g-suit. Laughlin Air Force Base has a fleet of over 160 aircraft, 103 T-6s, and 59 T-38s, valued at more than $800 million, requiring a $1.6 billion maintenance budget. And with three runways, it's one of the Air Force's busiest airfields. They'll be able to text you. All right, And their hands-on training begins in the T-6. Man, I love the T-6. She's kind of all-purpose, all-weather. She can go wherever you want. She's not the fastest or can she hold the most gas, but she goes upside down. She rolls, she pulls. You get all of the training that you would need in the T-6 to go off into any other aircraft, whether that be a fighter aircraft, a bomber, a tanker, or a heavy cargo plane. Once you punch that power up, it was definitely surprising. Lots of power, 1,100 shaft horsepower, compared to the Cessna 172 that you'll fly at a local flight school. Once in the T-6, students begin applying the fundamentals from the classroom and the simulators. This phase of training is broken into three progressive stages, transition, navigation, and formation. In transition phase, they're looking to pull a high-g, high-speed maneuvering, other things like that. Versus the navigation phase, it's more so slow maneuvering, methodical process. For the formation phase, again, that high-g maneuvering comes into play, as well as that slow maneuvering. The reason they call it the transition phase is because finally we're stepping out of these big boxes we call sims. And then once you hop into the jet for the first time, for me it's been a six-year goal of mine. So it's a great feeling to finally get control of the aircraft, feel the power, and learn how to become a military amuter. Training objectives today will be zero-miss ground, checklist items, slash call-ups. Every flight starts with a mission brief. Maintain minus zero, plus 100 feet on the localizer. Students will come to the brief. They've obviously studied before. We'll cover all the basics of the flight, so going through the weather, operational risk management. We'll have a brief overview of the plan that we'll run through so that everybody's on the same page, and that's standardized between all briefs. I woke up around 4 30 just to start reviewing the weather, start preparing for your flight, and just to make sure that you've chair flew the maneuvers. Nothing's going to surprise you, and you want to become, to the brief, as prepared as possible. After the brief, the student and instructor pilots suit up for their flight, or sortie, and make their way to the step desk. Where an operations supervisor will assess their risk level for the flight. We write down everything that might be a risk factor for our flight, so if we didn't sleep well, if we're not feeling hydrated, if we have personal things going on at home maybe, and it's just to take a second to look at it, add up the points, like, hey, are we safe to be flying? Does this make sense? So just started flying. We've been informal for about four weeks now, but very first week of flying, having a blast so far. Our plan was just to go up, do some motor work, basic aerobatics, get the blood flowing, get the body pumping, and then we're going to head back and recover via a localizer. A localizer is an instrument approach you'll do, and we typically will practice in VFR, which is visual flight rules, and IFR, which is instrument flight rules. The reason we do that is to practice when the weather is terrible and you can't see the runway, that will give you the lateral course you need in order to get you down to the runway. Once you come back and start debriefing is when you have the time to kind of understand how I could do this better. The debrief is the most critical part to learning. We'll discuss, do we have any safety of flights, right, so anything where that could have been dangerous, we could have gotten in an unsafe situation, or maybe something not totally legal in the air, right, so we'll talk about that, and then we'll go through like, hey, do we actually meet the objectives that we set today. When you're on the ground talking with your IP, going over what you did and how you can make things better is when you really learn how to become a great pilot. Student pilots that are getting ready to be wing pilots, do not forget how important your maintenance brothers and sisters are, because without them you're not doing the mission. So today was kind of the start of our graduation experience where we get our wings. The tradition was to get someone who gives you the wings that he like meant something to you and got you here, and so today maintenance gave them to us. It's just kind of a symbolic thing to show that they are the ones that really supported us getting the graduation today. Going to Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma, so I'll train with the C-17 squadron out there. After this, I'm going to Little Rock, Arkansas for six months to learn how to fly the C-130H, and after that I'm going to Cheyenne, Wyoming to fly for the Wyoming National Guard. Students selected for the fighter track remain at Laughlin for four to six months. I'm going to go fly the T-38, which is the next phase of training here, so I will stick around Laughlin for a little bit. The students we get for 38s are typically towards the top of their T-6 class, so higher performers in T-6s and people that want to go fly something fast and pointy. At the end of the day and in their program, their scores goes into what's called a mass, and they're ranked number one to the last person, and there's only a few slots for both T-38s and the major weapon systems, and the top students get their top choices. While T-38 training follows the same structure as T-6, the pace is faster, the demands are greater, and the margin for error is smaller. T-38, you really got to be on top of your game. There's a lot of things you have to be constantly thinking about and making decisions on. It's like, are you on airspeed, altitude, and you're doing like maneuvering out in the MOA or anything, it's your G, your AOA, what altitude you're at, where you are relative to the MOA, what your energy state is. Gas is a huge thing for us, very limited on that. It flies very different than a T-6, so they need to learn how to land it, how to take off, how to do all the ground operations, and even get the jet started to begin with. So we'll start with those things. We'll start just flying out to some airspace, practicing loops or simple aero, and just practicing landing, practicing landing in different configurations. As soon as we can teach these students how to just take off and land the aircraft, we're basically making sure they can get from point to point without getting lost or getting in trouble, and then we're going right into formation phase, which I think is really just the crux of the entire program. There are so many great benefits to formation flying. It simulates the stress and the fear of a deployed location, right? We don't have bombs coming at us, but we have to in some way instill the pressure from the outside world, and I think formation is a great way to start. So the 38 in formation itself is a little bit different than the T-6. The T-6, you got about 10 to 20 foot spacing between the aircraft due to the wing length. The 38, you got about three feet, so you're a lot closer, you're a lot faster, and there's a lot more going on that you have to pay attention to. No matter what aircraft they go on, they're going to fly some type of formation, whether that be two C-130s following two minutes behind each other, or if you have a boom sticking out the back of your tanker with a fighter aircraft rejoining to refuel. Good evening and welcome to drop night for 2508. So drop night down here at Laughlin is kind of a culmination for us T-38 students of about two years-ish worth We're getting our assignments. We're going to figure out what we're going to do next. On my dream sheet were F-16 and F-35, both very capable jets and something that I would be very proud of flying. I am hoping to get F-35s and or F-15s. Those are my top two choices, but we'll see a little bit later here in about five hours exactly what's going to happen. Not everyone gets the assignment they want. Some graduates will be selected to become first assignment instructor pilots, or FAPES. They'll spend four years training students to fly the T-6 or the T-38. So today's our graduation ceremony for our pilot training class. It's the final step where we get our wings, we get to pin them on, and we officially become pilots in the Air Force. How it feels for me is kind of surreal. My father was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, my grandfather worked for the Air National Guard, and then my uncle was an officer in the Air Force, and having that history of, you know, my family members being in the military, it just kind of reinstates that drive that I had when I first set out to join the Air Force and when I first set out to actually push forward to be a pilot. It finally feels so good to be at this moment. We put in a lot of hard work over these last six, seven months, and to finally have it come to an end is bittersweet, but it's pretty fun. These newly pinned pilots will head to their next base to begin aircraft-specific training. Some will fly tankers, others fighters, bombers, or cargo planes, but they'll all leave Laughlin with the same title—United States Air Force pilot.