Do they fly daily, 3x a week or something else? I expect it varies by type of plane and budget. A few months ago we had a cargo C-17 fly over hospitals as a tribute to health care workers. They said they would have been flying anyway so there was no extra cost. they dipped wings over the hospitals. they were also very low
“The Air Force is speeding up efforts to have pilots fly roughly 20 hours a month, on par with the other services, Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said Wednesday”
"Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson on Thursday refuted reports that the service’s pilots are only flying nine or 10 hours per month.
In fact, Wilson said at a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, pilots overall flew about 17.6 hours per month in fiscal 2017. Fighter pilots flew roughly 16.4 hours monthly, and mobility pilots flew 17.3 hours, she said. Bomber pilots, who typically fly longer sorties, typically flew 19.7 hours per month."
I would imagine that the transport pilots get a lot more time overall than say… F-22 pilots do. I mean, there’s probably always a need to ship something to/from somewhere overseas or just across the country in a way that there isn’t often a need to put a F-22 up to do something useful other than training flights.
They get flight time (preferable) and simulator time (lots cheaper but not as realistic [yet]). Also there’s take-off and landings minimums perhaps just for the transports. I’ve spent some time under C-5 flight paths (Dover and Atlanta Dobbins) watching the giant birds circle for the required minimums. They wouldn’t actually touch down (tires are really expensive). I imagined the tower would radio “close enough” and the pilot(s) would power up for another go around.
How long do those flights last?
I know that flight hours is a very common metric for gauging a pilot’s experience, but I’ve always heard about how takeoff and landing skills are so much more important than “simply” keeping the airplane in the air. Does anyone include the number of takeoffs and landings [is there a term that covers both?] along with flight hours? It seems to this outsider that “500 hours flying over 100 flights” is not nearly as impressive as “400 hours flying over 200 flights”.
Fight my ignorance!
Thank you.
F-22 pilots fly constantly–not just for training, but real-world missions. At Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER) in Alaska, they patrol the border and international area between the US and Russia, intercepting Russian aircraft at least weekly. Russia is always probing our defenses, just as I’m sure we’re doing to them. There is also a C-17 squadron at JBER. The C-17s fly pretty much constantly and do training flights lasting several hours at least twice a week and that often include dropping personnel and equipment via parachute at low altitudes. On top of those permanent residents, Air National Guard units and other Active units are constantly flying in and out of the area for training. The roar of fighter jets, cargo planes and other aircraft overhead was pretty much non-stop the entire time I lived there.
Pilot flight log books include the number of landings as well as the total hours flown. Military pilots are even graded on their landings every so often. It will be required for someone to be on the ground to score them.
Didn’t realize they had active duty Air Force pilots flying up there… that sort of patrolling has typically been done by Air National Guard pilots.
Anyway, my point was that the transport pilots probably get plenty of hours; their JOB is to fly stuff around, which is a constant thing even in peacetime, unlike a combat pilot, whose job of shooting stuff down and/or bombing things isn’t typically done in peacetime except for training missions, except apparently in Alaska.
FWIW, “takeoff skills” are trivial. After very little ground instruction, anyone would be capable of taking off on their first attempt with no practice. Landing is much more difficult and takes many repetitions just to be able to do it. It’s definitely a learned skill that takes practice. Not so much with taking off.
There’s an umbrella concept of “currency” that would require needed pilot skills for a particular aircraft/mission/job. Depending on need, that could include both short and long duration flights, both VFR and instrument flying, day flights and night flights, and yes, take-offs and landings.
Carrier pilots in particular have specific requirements for carrier landings.
I believe that for fighters the rule of thumb is that 1 hour equals one flight.
I used to live right on the flight path of the main runway at McClellan AFB in Sacramento and the end of the month was always fun with pilots doing “bump and goes” (take off, do a turn on a specific path around the base then land on the other end of the runway, then take off again–lather, rinse, repeat) to get their hours logged. Got noisy when everyone had gotten behind for the month.
As an ancillary note–it was always fun when the local paper would breathlessly announce the departure of, say a bunch of RAF planes that had been at the base for super seekrit training exercises. Those of us who’d watched said planes with their distinct roundels come in one after the other in a parade several hours long weeks earlier would just roll our eyes. SO SEEKRIT!!!
Let’s not be too dismissive here. Sure, under ideal conditions most people could take off an airplane with just a bit of training. But taking off in a crosswind or tailwind, doing a short takeoff on a hot day with a heavy load, dealing with power or engine loss, all of those things will be handled better by someone who has more experience with takeoffs and landings.
Hell, I’m a licensed pilot but I had one occasion where someone with more experience than me had to be flown in to manage a particularly tricky take-off. There are situations even many well-trained pilots would have difficulty handling.
Under ideal conditions the airplane actually takes itself off the ground - they are designed to fly, after all. It’s those marginal situations @crazyjoe mentioned where things get dicey and there are plenty of crashes showing that not all pilots are up to all takeoffs.
Of course. Conditions can make any task more difficult, and everything gets easier with practice. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. But that’s true with everything. Walking is easy, but walking in a strong wind with a heavy backpack is more difficult.
fighter pilots go to regular airports to practice if they ever need to use that instead of their base. A while back one of them ejected at our RDU airport and he was OK. Also at RDU there is a national guard unit with Apache choppers and I see them fly by now and then. I don’t think too many guard units get Apaches.
Not true. One of the big if not biggest lessons from Desert Storm was that National Guard and Reserve units were not ready or equipped to operate as combat units. (Units like air-to-air refuelers, transportation, ordnance were fine due to either doing the same civilian job or frequent activations). Now Guard/Reserve units receive frontline equipment and training on a regular basis. One example is the F-22 Raptors here in Hawaii - Frontline 5th generation Fighters in a large National Guard unit. There are also 4 National Guard Apache units with 16 - 24 aircraft each.
Does @LSLGuy still post? He had returned a few months back.
Guessing he would know.
I’m still here. I don’t have much current facts to add. Here’s some general observations about the shape of the game as to USAF.
Typically the transport pilots did and do fly the most hours, because the USAF is always moving stuff around. The fighter guys fly less, at least in peacetime. With bombers somewhere in the middle in hours.
I suspect the quoted numbers above were talking about after they excluded the ME theater “combat lite” that’s still going on. One of the challenges for the last 20 years (!!?!) is the combat ops eating the seed corn of training hours for the guys & gals back home who’re expected to then rotate into the theater & perform well. The same problem applies to aircraft lifespan and to spare parts availability.
The comment above about fighters being 1 sortie = 1 hour was real true back in the 1960s. Fighters have gotten longer “legs” since and I averaged about 1.5 hours/sortie in the F-16 with a mix of air to air and air to ground training. This was the late 1980s.
From the numbers quoted above that turns into fighters flying ~10-12x month, or about every other workday given a 5 day peacetime work week. The bomber guys might fly 2 or 3x per month for 4-6 hours at a crack.
Simulation is playing an ever-larger role in peacetime training and proficiency maintenance. Simming doesn’t completely replace real flying, but you can buy a lot of hours of sim for one hour of airplane. Apparently TBTB think that the net tradeoff leads to ever more simming. Military sims can include multiple airplanes of different types practicing together, some of whom are real with real crews and some of whom are completely computer-generated. So it’s not just practicing instruments and emergencies and takeoff / landings. They can practice full missions, whether that’s a mass airdrop of paratroops, strategically bombing the capital of Slobovistan, or battling the massed Slobovistanian fighters for air superiority.
All military pilots have (or had in my era) a certain number of landings and of various sorts of instrument approaches that must be done per month, quarter, or year. Fighters get them pretty naturally without many touch-goes or low approaches because of the larger number of flights. The transport & bomber guys need to do more practice because the same hours are fewer flights that will each naturally deliver just one approach and one landing. They also need to have both pilots get those events separately, whereas a fighter just has one pilot to deal with. That alone doubles the requirements in the heavies.
The net effect, at least in my day, was it wasn’t uncommon for 2 or 3 sets of pilots to launch off in a C-130 or C-17 or whatever and each one to fly several approaches in turn. Leading to one airplane beating up the instrument traffic pattern for what feels like hours to the audience on the ground. Because it is hours.
You didn’t ask, but in the airline biz COVID has placed us in a similar situation to the military folks. Absent COVID the vast majority of pilots will fly far, far, more than is required to maintain legal currency and safe proficiency. Since COVID, many pilots are not flying at all, or are flying very little. And are needing to go through a special simulator program every couple of months to be refreshed.
If this was to drag on for another year, there might need to be more attention paid to the inevitable atrophy of skills. It’s much easier to polish up something that’s a little tarnished from weeks of disuse than it is to polish up something that’s now rusted from years of neglect.
So far the statistics don’t show any material uptick in "Oops"es or close calls, much less mishaps. But FAA and everybody else is watching this closely with an eye to reacting as soon as the evidence shows a need.
Thanks!
I read somewhere the the optimal annual hours for fighter pilots is 200-250 and anything more starts being counterproductive.
Also, what about helicopter pilots? You mention that the hours in combat areas are in addition to normal training hours, but again as you say they risk in those is minimal.