Brian Everstine As the service makes progress on its pilot shortage, it still faces racial disparities in the flying ranks.
Brian Everstine
The Air Force, which trains pilots on Beechcraft T-6 Texan IIs, is grappling with a shortage of—and lack of diversity among—its pilots. Credit: U.S. Air Force
About 30 years ago, when then-Capt. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., was asked in an interview what percentage of U.S. Air Force pilots were Black, the answer was 2%.
Now, with Brown serving as the Air Force Chief of Staff, that number remains at just 2%.
In recent years, the Air Force has been grappling with a pilot shortage that has required overhauling how it brings in new recruits, trains them and retains them. Within the past year, though, the service has also conducted two massive studies of disparities among its ranks that have shown it is not effectively attracting people from minority backgrounds and that minorities and women in the Air Force are facing barriers to career progression. To effectively get past this shortage, those issues will need to be addressed.
“We’ve got to look at our diverse talent [to] ensure that they’re having the opportunity to compete for key positions,” Brown said Sept. 22 during an Air Force Association conference.
The two Air Force Inspector General Independent Racial Disparity Reviews—the first focusing on barriers to service opportunities experienced by Black airmen, completed last December, and the second centering on both gender disparities in the ranks and barriers faced by other ethnicities, completed this month—collected input from tens of thousands of survey reviews and focus groups.
The reports found wide gaps between the recruitment, retainment and promotion of white male pilots compared with those of ethnic minorities and women. For example, the pilot career field, which consists of about 15,000 officers, is the least diverse by far across the Air Force, with ethnic minorities making up 16% of regular Air Force pilots and women comprising just 7.7%.
Due to the procedure of Air Force promotions and the hierarchy of its units, leaders are also by and large white and male. Three-quarters of all U.S. Air Force generals are pilots, and 93% are white.
“If you are a pilot, you have a much better chance of reaching higher ranks [and] getting command opportunities because a lot of our organizations are by nature operational,” Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami Said told journalists on Sept. 9.
“[That] makes [you] more competitive to get promoted. So it builds on itself. . . . If we don’t fix this, it’s going to permeate and continue to be a big issue,” he added.
For pilots already in development or in service, the Air Force is reviewing its scoring processes for hints of bias to improve the pilots’ chances for career progression. For example, the Air Education and Training Command (AETC) is revising its Air Force Officer Qualifying Test and the Test of Basic Aviation Skills because height requirements blocked many women from qualifying.
The Air Force has also taken other steps aimed at improving retention rates for women, which range from redesigning flight suits and hair regulations to allowing pregnant women to fly remotely piloted aircraft or to continue flying, if qualified, so that there is less pressure to choose between a career or a family.
To try to increase the diversity of incoming pilot classes, the Air Force is changing evaluation scores that favor pilots who had flight training before entering service and is instead looking at expected proficiency. Flight classes are not cheap, Brown said, and the ability to pay for them while young should not give one prospective pilot an excessive advantage over someone else who could be a talented pilot but simply could not afford the classes.
The Air Force is looking to address this through steps such as sending “ambassadors” who are service members of diverse backgrounds to speak about their experiences to encourage prospective minority and women pilots to join. Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) organizations are expanding flight academy opportunities, and the Air Force ROTC is increasing scholarships for pilot training at the college level.
Outreach like this is important because, Brown said, most people cannot strive to become someone they cannot see.
“I’ll just use my own personal experience,” he said. “I was going to be an engineer in the Air Force until I got a chance to fly in a T-37, and that changed my mind to become a pilot. And it’s those kinds of things that we’ve got to continue to do for our young population that might have a hesitancy to join our Air Force.”
A Pandemic Pause
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic gave the Air Force a reprieve from the worst of its pilot shortage, as a downturn in the airline industry kept some pilots in service.
In 2019, as the Air Force’s Aircrew Crisis Task Force expanded its efforts to address the shortage, the service was down about 2,100 pilots. As of the end of 2020, that number dropped to 1,925. And although figures are not yet available though the end of fiscal 2021, the service expects the shortage to decrease even further.
At the same time, the Air Force saw an increase in the take rate of aviation bonuses for pilots, up to 51% in 2020 from 44% in 2019.
The Air Force is working to keep more pilots around by: increasing administrative support at its squadrons to avoid piling on office duty, giving more flexibility on assignments, improving licensure options for spouses to reduce familial stress and making changes to officer development.
“Retention is not just the flying part; it’s what we do for our airmen and our families when we talk about quality of life,” Brown said.
That "flying part" has been lagging for the Air Force, however. Pilots “do like to fly,” Brown said, but the service has been cutting the amount of time aircraft are in the air. In its fiscal 2022 budget request, the service calls for about 1.15 million total hours, down from 1.24 million in 2021 and 1.33 million in 2020. In addition to maintenance issues with aging aircraft, Brown said the Air Force is limited in the amount of training it can do based on airspace issues, adversary aircraft and the need to avoid showing potential adversaries the capability of the service’s high-end aircraft.
On the production side of the pilot shortage quandary, the Air Force has made more progress. In 2021, the service expects to produce about 1,350 pilots, compared with 1,263 in 2020. Moreover, it aims to produce at least 1,500 pilots per year by fiscal 2023.
“We found during COVID, compared to 2019 [and] 2020, [that] our numbers didn’t really drop as far as production,” Brown said. “So that is a good indicator that we are actually making some progress, even with COVID.”
This progress comes through steps such as using virtual reality to speed up training for student pilots. The program, called Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5, uses these systems to build proficiency—a new era of “chair flying” with virtual reality goggles instead of posters and sticks. With increased use of simulators, AETC is developing an initiative to have instructor pilots teach student pilots remotely, instead of relying on local civilian instructors.
Students in the training process who show they are capable are also able to progress through training more quickly. AETC has also established faster training pipelines by having student pilots move straight from simulator training to flying the Raytheon T-1 Jayhawk trainer, skipping the need to fly with Beechcraft T-6 Texan IIs. Similarly, student pilots selected to fly helicopters are also going straight to operating helicopters to free up the Texan IIs for other student pilots.
“If you’re actually doing well, you can move forward and graduate a little bit earlier,” Brown said.
Furthering the increase in pilot production and training on the front end of a pilot’s career will be key to continuing the progress in addressing an overall shortfall, especially as the travel industry continues to rebound and demand for more private pilots grows.
“As the airline industry starts opening back up, it will be something we actively need to work [on],” Brown said.
