Jan. 19—Air Force Capt. Donald "Donny" Nguyen eyed an avenue of escape and dashed to one side of the parking lot. Two airmen on an intercept course closed in and grabbed him.
One asked if Nguyen was carrying his cell phone. Then they tossed him into a kiddie swimming pool.
"Yes!" Nguyen yelled, raising his arms in triumph, his flight suit soaked and the air full of laughter.
At 26 on this day in 2019, he was celebrating a traditional rite of passage for student pilots who've just completed their first solo flight.
But nothing was traditional about the Air Force program Nguyen was in. Pilot Training Next, or PTN, was a major departure that, in the years since, has reshaped the way airmen learn to fly.
The few dozen trainees in his small experimental cohort at a Texas Air National Guard facility in Austin's Bergstrom International Airport graduated in about eight months, a speed last seen in the wartime emergency year of 1942.
Since 1946, basic Air Force pilot training was fixed at roughly 50 weeks, not quite one year. With changes pioneered by PTN and introduced gradually in a program called Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5, the norm today is just short of seven and a half months.
The 19th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph oversaw the experiment. The Air Education and Training Command adopted its lessons and framework, which include a "coach-athlete" mentoring approach and heavy use of artificial intelligence in flight simulators.
The revamped system took effect at all three training bases for novice pilots on Nov. 1.
Some aspects of the experiment were dropped. Student pilots in PTN "flew" far more in simulators than in the air — not just in their squadron offices but anytime they wished, at home. The virtual reality simulators, or "VR sims," as they're called, were in every student's apartment, continuously accessible, but that is no longer the case.
Student pilots still have easy access to the simulators — there are 220 of them, which the Air Force calls "immersive training devices," or ITDs. Similar sims also are in use at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, home to the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program.
Pilot Training Next was born to combat an Air Force pilot shortage that was growing worse by the year, a crisis that left the service 2,100 pilots short in fiscal year 2019. The number of aviators it needed increased sharply that year. The number it had available had only begun to recover from a low of 18,400 the year before.
As the coronavirus pandemic erased commercial airline pilot jobs, however, the Air Force pilot inventory steadily improved and the shortfall dropped to 1,650 by 2021. But airlines, a major lure for military flyers, started hiring again and the competition today is as sharp as ever.
The Air Force shortfall numbered 1,907 pilots in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 — 659 of them active duty fighter pilots. The latest defense budget dangles bonuses of up to $50,000 to pilots and gives those whose active duty service commitments end in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 preference in where they would be assigned.
If the question is whether the Air Force found a "magic bullet" to solve its pilot shortage, the answer is no, Maj. Gen. Craig Wills said in 2021, when he commanded the 19th.
"But if you ask a different question and say, 'Did this one particular experiment radically change the way we look at training and what can be accomplished?' then I would say it's been wildly successful," said Wills, who retired last year.
Even while shaving off a third of the time needed to produce pilots, the Air Force is trying to make better ones. The new method is in use by hundreds of students at any given time as they learn to fly the T-6A Texan II trainer at Columbus, Vance and Laughlin AFBs.
"It is like relating it to the professional coach-athlete model in today's collegiate sports environment. It is not self-paced, it is learner-centric," Capt. Lauren Woods, an AETC spokeswoman, said in an email. "Our pilot instructor training curriculum added focus on learning styles, feedback, using immersive technology and how to analyze student errors and provide instructional fixes."
Some suggested these methods could be applied to dozens and perhaps hundreds of Air Force career fields.
The AETC studied how PTN students reacted on the ground and in the air, using off-the-shelf technology to take biometric measurements — including a heart rate monitor. There was a lot of data, and it got a good look.
The experiment had the Air Force "talking about learning, how the human learns, how to focus that well beyond what pilot training is doing," said Lt. Col. Ryan Riley, 41, an instructor pilot at Randolph who oversaw the second and third versions of PTN.
But training humans to fly remains the most urgent task.
Soloing faster
Some didn't like the changes. Others said the Air Force was late in getting to it.
The makeover was driven by a combination of emerging technology and tech-savvy aviation students. It was in the works even before 2017, when Gen. David Goldfein, then the Air Force chief of staff, ordered the new head of AETC, Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast, to develop a way to end the pilot shortage.
"I sat down with a network of bright people and said, 'I want to solve the pilot training problem permanently,'" Kwast recalled.
A sense of paranoia moved him to locate the program at Bergstrom in 2018 rather than the more traditional training hub at Randolph.
"The first principle of innovation is that if you try to do something that is totally different in the midst of a bureaucracy that has been dictated to do it a certain way, it will fail most of the time," Kwast said.
But the program moved, in the end, to Hangar 71 at Randolph during the second of its three versions. Altogether, 42 students graduated by 2019, producing enough data to develop a modified Undergraduate Pilot Training course at two Air Force installations called UPT 2.5.
The old way was based on an 87-page syllabus that everyone followed in unison. The new 126-page syllabus, rolled out base by base, is a series of guideposts, not necessarily a by-the-numbers script, allowing students to make faster progress than their peers.
"In the old days, when you didn't have an immersive training device, the only interaction the student had was with the instructor and with a wall poster," Wills said. "Our students are learning more fast, learning more quickly, and generally speaking, what we've found is they show up better prepared to fly because they've practiced better and they've trained better before they first hit the flight line."
Pilot Training Next and UPT 2.5 might have seemed revolutionary, but the Air Force was simply adopting technology that its students were already comfortable with, Wills noted in a 2021 press conference.
Even before joining the experiment, some PTN students had been flying virtual reality simulators. Nguyen himself had 40 hours as a civilian student pilot and had trained to fly the MQ-9 Reaper.
As a drone pilot stationed at Creech AFB outside Las Vegas, he racked up 1,500 hours flying everything from close-air support and combat search-and-rescue missions to air interdiction.
"I was combat mission-ready very young. I was an aircraft commander, which is unheard of in any other career field. ... And I guess we got spun up fast," Nguyen, now 29, observed of his 2019 pilot training,
A Fort Walton Beach, Fla., native, he is now flying the C-5M Super Galaxy transport plane at Dover AFB, Del.
Pilots with similar experience soloed even faster.
Lts. Aaron Sless and Jim Brittingham learned to fly gliders at the Air Force Academy, where they also accumulated more than 100 hours on sims.
Sless, of Towson, Md., soloed on his fifth flight. Brittingham, of Lexington, Ky., soloed on his fourth. Brittingham, now 27, is a captain flying the F-15E at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho. Sless, 26, flies the F-35A at Eielson AFB, Alaska, and was recently certified as an instructor.
They lived the motto of Pilot Training Next: "Sim to learn and fly to confirm."
Riley, who commanded their detachment, this month recalled their willingness to learn and added, "They absolutely crushed it."
'Student centric'
The simulator that PTN students used in their apartments not only gave them the feeling of flying, but had a virtual instructor to correct their mistakes. That's true of every student pilot in the Air Force today, using simulators and softwar that has been constantly refined in the years since.
"You can see where you go wrong ... and take it with you when we actually get out to the aircraft," Nguyen said. "I learn by practice and continually doing, and the sims definitely help in that sense."
Until fairly recently, novice pilots sat in front of a posterboard display of the cockpit of a T-6A and kept a hand on a broomstick or toilet plunger, running through checklists, takeoffs, maneuvers and landings.
It was called "chair flying," the way Air Force pilots learned the basics for decades.
Students now also study 360-degree videos for virtual pre-flight walkarounds. Local-area flying orientation was detailed enough to locate high-tension power lines and landmarks like water towers, to anticipate what it will look like when aloft. They're no longer limited to their imaginations.
The development of new simulators changed the service's relationships with the industry, said Wills, the former 19th Air Force commander.
"Talking about disruptive technology — the idea that you can build an immersive training device for $15,000 to $50,000 that allows us to train remarkably well is disruptive to an industry that specializes in $26 million simulators that require costly maintenance and costly operators," he said.
Software tools allow students to master radio communications or compare their maneuvers to the way it should be done, often giving instructor pilots the chance to reinforce lessons with video rather than verbal post-flight debriefings.
It was a huge step from such older tools as printed instructions, maps, lessons on CDs or large task trainers housed in giant buildings that are limited to basic "switchology" and no visuals.
The full transition to the "competency-based" and "student-centric" training approach is now in place. The new syllabus relies on "checkpoints" and "competency attainment" rather than specific sorties in each instructional area to determine progress. If students outperform their benchmarks in the syllabus, they can progress faster.
Some, however, will move through the syllabus as it is laid out. And some will wash out.
"Students don't go at their own pace; they have the opportunity to accelerate if they learn faster," Wills said. "We think that that matches up really well with the exceptionally young airmen that we get, that are digital natives and are used to having a little different approach to learning."
Left: 2nd Lt. Michael Gadalla emerges from the equipment room with his flight gear as he prepares to take a training run at Laughlin AFB near Del Rio in 2019. Top: Instructor Chris Poulsen uses hand held models to demonstrate positions of the T-6 aircraft he and students flew on a training run at Laughlin AFB in 2019. Bottom: Capt Donald "Donny" Nguyen greets Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt as he graduates from the second version of Pilot Training Next in 2019 at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. Photos by Tom Reel and Bob Owen, Express-News
Left: 2nd Lt. Michael Gadalla emerges from the equipment room with his flight gear as he prepares to take a training run at Laughlin AFB near Del Rio in 2019. Top: Instructor Chris Poulsen uses hand held models to demonstrate positions of the T-6 aircraft he and students flew on a training run at Laughlin AFB in 2019. Bottom: Capt Donald "Donny" Nguyen greets Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt as he graduates from the second version of Pilot Training Next in 2019 at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. Photos by Tom Reel and Bob Owen, Express-News
Capt. Christine Durham, a PTN instructor pilot in Austin who had taught aviators the old way at Vance AFB in Oklahoma, thought the biggest difference wasn't in how quickly students could solo, but in their freedom to shape the training program.
Traditional instruction said "you need to do A and then you can do B, and then if you're doing well, maybe you can skip C and move on to D," said Durham, now a major flying the C-17 Globemaster III at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey.
Air Force Reserve Maj. Erik Brown, 45, a T-6 instructor at Randolph who had 250 combat hours in Afghanistan when he helped develop the first version of Pilot Training Next, said the old way was "very good at getting the vast majority of students through the program at the pace of essentially the slowest students."
Brown didn't think the PTN students were any smarter than those learning the old way.
"I think more students do show up with more savvy on our tech than some of the instructors and probably that's generational," he said.
The PTN cohorts included a mix of officers and enlisted personnel, and a smattering of students from the Navy, Marines and Royal Air Force. One thing stood out: The washout rate — almost a third — was a lot higher than the 7 percent seen in a recent decade of traditional flight training, and is higher now than it was for students in the old way of instruction.
Scaling up Pilot Training Next to the three UPT bases was important. PTN cost about $42 million, but it was a boutique program that ended in a year when 1,255 students were earning their wings in regular UPT.
The Air Force tracked PTN and UPT 2.5 graduates as they progressed through follow-on flight training and their performance in the operational Air Force. It was hard to compare performance, partly because of different grading methods and software, but overall they seem to be doing well.
"We've done the analysis within AETC," Riley said. "Our PTN cohort performs statistically indistinguishable from their counterparts."
High school grads?
The ultimate, though still hypothetical, goal is to identify future pilots as early as high school graduation and, perhaps, pin on their wings before they earn college degrees — something that isn't allowed now, but letting enlisted personnel into pilot training remains a sensitive matter. The Air Force has long restricted pilot training to college graduates.
It used to be somewhat commonplace, however, for high school grads to join the military and fly. They included the Air Force's most famous pilot, Chuck Yeager, a fighter ace in World War II who broke the sound barrier in 1947 and retired as a general.
In his last year as AETC commander, Kwast called the rule requiring pilots to be college graduates "a proxy for a filter that gave us a higher propensity of talent in an Industrial Age model." He then added, "But when you have the data to measure every person individually, you need to let go of that model because it's not nuanced enough to optimize the performance of the force."
The British, he noted, "will take somebody out of high school that shows these performance indicators, teach them to fly and then get them their degree. That's their method."
Wills, the former 19th Air Force commander, deferred to the Pentagon on the same question but also said, "It's the 21st century, there's all kinds of things happening and so why put limits on what the future holds?"
For all its promise to harness talent and expand the numbers and diversity of the pilot corps, Pilot Training Next took flak from an important segment of the aviation community — seasoned Air Force instructor pilots.
Interviewed on condition of anonymity, some said they feared the changes might produce fatal mistakes in the air at some point. One Air Force pilot dismissed PTN as "another way of doing more with less," and said while planes were increasingly becoming more like flying computers than aircraft it might not be an issue — at least up to a point.
But "hand skills" — not computers — make the difference in some situations, and he worries that PTN's legacy will cost the United States its edge in quality pilots.
Another pilot said that at a minimum, the fast-tracking of "VR wonders" was insulting to pilots who earned their wings the old-fashioned way.
"Doesn't it seem like a real morale killer that the Air Force is issuing wings to trainees after six months of virtual reality training when it took every other aviator 13 months and a lot of hard work to achieve?" he asked in 2019 as PTN's small cohort was learning to fly.
Maj. John "Atari" Pierce, 34, an instructor pilot at Randolph, dismissed the objections.
"Anytime you disrupt a sacred cow, people who have been a part of the process before have a right to question," he said. "We're using technology to get to places in a different way. You can't graduate the program without jumping into a T-6 and passing a check ride under pressure. That is no different from when they were a student.
"We're not lowering standards, I can promise you that," Pierce said.
As a technology-driven service, the Air Force had to treat its experiment objectively, be prepared to say if it was failing, and ask "fundamental questions about what we value in warfighting capability and capacity, for not only today's flyers but for tomorrow's," said Riley, the former commander the unit that oversaw Pilot Training Next.
"I think the future's always murky, right? But what is not murky is that we as a service will change and will adapt."
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