USAF pilot training hours

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The above is a bit from the newest Air force Magazine Almanac publication, from June 2021.
If I am reading it correctly, it says that active duty air force pilots on fighter aircraft had just 8 point something hours of training per month?!? In the last several years?
And for some reason that dipped to only 5.7 hours in 2019 ?!?
8 something hours per month averages to mere 100 hours per year, if that.

Yes, the table notes those are actual flying hours and that they do not include simulator hours.
But shouldn't the standard be at least some 180-ish hours per year of actual flying hours? and then all the simulator time is gained on top of those flying hours?

What on earth is going on there?
And what happened in 2019, with that huge dip in training hours?
 
Now I'm really confused. This article from 2018
www.airforcetimes.com

Pilots are flying 17 hours per month, but it’s still not enough, Air Force secretary says

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson on Thursday refuted reports that the service’s pilots are only flying nine or 10 hours per month.
www.airforcetimes.com www.airforcetimes.com
gives some contradictory information. Not just to the table above, but it says USAF
claimed 16.4 hours per month for fighter pilots, for 2017. But then it also says that a member of a senate hearing said USAF pilots got only 9-10 hours per month. And in the very next paragraph an USAF official counterclaimed it was "a little bit more than that".

I mean, what's going on? Why so many widely different figures? Is it possible to get a clear set of figures from a respectable source? Is the AFA magazine a respectable source?
 
A very compressed explanation:

The USAF/DOD senior civilian and military brass have only generally begun to admit that there is a problem in recent years, and even then they have been trying to play down the problem, at least publicly. A major cause of this mess was the belief in certain corners dating back to around the late 1990s that increasingly advanced simulators could replace most real world flying training. Things only got worse during the Rumsfeld and Gates eras as resources were being poured into what was then seen as the future of air forces, large UAVs (which, contrary to their proponents claims turned out to be quite expensive to procure, maintain, and operate, especially when compared to more capable manned aircraft) so as training dollars and other resources were diverted elsewhere simulators including cheap PC/software based ones were being used with abandon for even basic aircrew training, with pretty predicable results. To add more to the USAF (and the other flying services) woes, over much of that same period recruitment of air and ground crew outside of drone operations was being relatively neglected during a time that airlines were still hiring away experienced pilots and maintenance personnel from the armed services on what were generally much better pay and conditions, even post-2008 financial crisis. This mess continued mostly officially unacknowledged pretty much up to the end of the Obama administration, and into the early part of the Trump administration.
 
Of course, all the missions that were being flown in support of the War on Terror, and then later on Obama's various 'leading from the rear' interventions, didn't help matters one little bit either.
 
Yes, probably that as deployed pilots flew more, the ripple effects on home based ones started to be significant a couple of years later with aircraft low availability rising (stock of parts burned during the Iraq/Syria campaign).

But don't forget that those numbers are averaged. There is a lot of pilots license holder that don't fly but a minimal number of hours such as higher ranked members (just to keep their ability). Typically, after the Iraq/Syria campaign you would also expect a new contingent of promoted pilots filling higher ranking positions.

What we can see from these numbers that are generally stable (hence illustrates a trend) is more essentially that the USAF has adapted from being a tactical armed Component with a lot of flyers among their ranks to a more complex force where airmen fill a lot of positions aside of just being competent on flying matters.
 
TomcatViP said:
What we can see from these numbers that are generally stable (hence illustrates a trend) is more essentially that the USAF is adapting from a tactical armed Components with a lot of flyers among their ranks to a more complex force where airmen fill a lot of positions aside of just being competent on flying matters only.
Click to expand...
I fear that you may be overly optimistic there.
 
But is there one set of figures then that can be trusted? Is this most recent set of figures from AFA magazine almanac, for year 2020, average of just 8.1 hours for fighter pilots - a true figure?

And, since that's the average, is there a way to get a sense of what sort of figures go into that average? For example, if 30% of pilots get 12 hours per month, 30% get just 5 hours and 40% get 8 hours. Or any other combination...
 
So, a new set of figures was released for 2021 flying hours in the AFA Alamac.
usaf flying hours.JPG

The trend of very very low flying hours for fighter jet pilots continues. These figures work out at 82 hours per year for Active duty pilots, 88 for ANG pilots and 80 hours for the reserve command.

As the figures seem to incredibly low - I have to keep asking: is there some weird metric used here? Are these numbers even apple to apple comparable to figures of 180 or 200 or more hours per year for US/NATO pilots 10 or 20 years ago? Or are different metrics used here?

While there surely are pilots which don't really fly and are ruining the average, one would expect those to be quite low in numbers, as the force overall is lacking pilots. And while simulators are used more and more, can it really be that that the previous standard of 200 hours per year in a plane is now completely replaceable by 80 hours in a plane and 120/200 or whatever number of hours in a simulator?
 
Curious - how much cycling in/out of pilots & crews occurred in Afghanistan and elsewhere during these operations? A a percentage of the Air Force (and to some extent the Marines and Navy) units, how many cycled thru in theatre gaining real world experience?

Enjoy the Day! Mark
 
Consider how many pilots are flying the "mahogany bomber." Traditionally, RCAF pilots fly airplanes during their first tour of duty, then fly desks during their second tour of duty, then airplanes during their third tour of duty, etc. The RCAF used to keep a handful of T-33 trainers at Ottawa Uplands Airport, just to allow National Defense Head Quarters staff officers to maintain currency in the cockpit.

Also consider that transport and CSAR pilots may be flying many more hours during operational cargo flights or searches. For example, the Canadian fleet of EH-101 Cormorant helicopters has the highest number of flying hours of any EH-101 Cormorant/Merlin fleet worldwide.
 

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