Suppose I join the US Navy or Air Force in my early 20s with a college degree but no aviation experience. How long before I’m a full-fledged pilot who can fly combat air patrols in a fighter jet, or fly a transport/tanker aircraft that’s actually transporting/refueling something, as opposed to just learning how to fly? I mean I get that pilots need to engage in continuous learning and practice to maintain proficiency and progress from beginner to a Sullenberger-style pro who can handle any contingency, but at what point in your career do you officially qualify for solo flight and regular duty in one of these sorts of planes?
@LSLGuy would be an excellent Doper to direct this question to, as well as @Loach or @Johnny_L.A.
My brother flew the F-16 in the AF. I remember he went through UPT, undergraduate pilot training. So you should look into that. There may be more training than just UPT.
And +1 to @BippityBoppityBoo ’s suggestion.
Edit — he went through UPT in the late 1980s / early 1990s, so there’s likely many changes since then. Prior to UPT he was a navigator on the FB-111 so that may have made some required training non-applicable that a fresh undergrad might require.
It takes roughly 2 years. At least 3 months of that will be attending Officer Candidate School, essentially basic training for officers.
Then you’ll attend either the Air Indoctrination Course (Navy) or Initial Flight Screening (Air Force) which last about 6 weeks. There’s a lot of classroom study, but you do get into a small prop plane every now and then.
After that you graduate to Primary Flight Training (Navy) or Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (Air Force), which last about 12 months, give or take a few depending on what you’re training to fly.
I seem to recall a YouTube video that once people graduated from the T-38 Talon trainers, it was then 140+ training days to get qualified on the F-15 Eagle.
If I’m not mistaken, also, the odds of ANYONE becoming a military pilot are extremely low, something like only 2% of candidates (or, that is, people who joined the Navy or USAF with the intention of flying)?
Injuries kept me out, so I had to pay for my own license. 
Lt. Dad went there. (He was a ‘mustang’.) Chief Uncle calls it ‘Knife and Fork School’.
From what I’ve heard, if you want to fly, join the Army. CWO2 Wifey flew Black Hawks in South Korea, and in Iraq during the Gulf War.
My nephew wanted to be a pilot, but because his vision wasn’t quite 20/20, he did not qualify. From what he said the line-up is so big that they can afford to choose only the absolute top candidates, mentally and physically. (He went the private route, worked his way up teaching others in Cessnas, and now is flying the big jets transcontinental.)
That was certainly the case in my (now disturbingly ancient) era. But I’m told that nowadays waivers for vision or other minor physical shortcomings are granted routinely. Substantially no-one who grew up with their face glued to a screen has 20/20 distant vision. And now that the commitment post-training is a decade or more, the recruiters aren’t exactly overflowing with top candidates.
As to the OP’s question of duration to journeyman pilot the others mostly nailed it.
Ballpark 18-24 months starting from civilian with a 4-year college degree. That breaks down as about 5 months to get through officer training & flight screening, then a year of generic pilot training to get your wings. Then 6 months to a bit over 1 year to learn to fly your particular assigned aircraft and its mission.
That’s if there are no bureaucratic delays between the various training phases. In my era, USAF was pretty good about minimizing delays, but USN was a mess, with many folks experiencing almost a year total sitting around doing BS busywork between the several schools. I have no idea about delays now.
Once someone has graduated from their aircraft / mission school they’re ready to report to a frontline unit. Whereat there’s another mini-training program of a couple months to get you ready to operate with the unit’s tactics against the unit’s particular mission and airspace.
So as to the bare bones of the OP’s question, you’ve reached your goal: combat-ready pilot doing the mission, not just training for it. But wait, there’s more!
At that point in fighter / attack / recon, you’d be a fully qualified combat-ready wingman. So while you can fly the airplane alone (if single seat) or assisted by a non-pilot systems operator in a two-seater, you’d almost always be flying with another more experienced pilot, a “flight lead”, in a formation group of two or four aircraft. You go where and when and how the formation goes. It’s not as limited as simply hanging off Lead’s wing like in an airshow. But you are definitely the follower in a team combat effort. Think lineman or receiver in US football vs Lead as quarterback and you have some idea of the dynamic. You execute your part of the total play on Lead’s command.
Conversely, if you’re assigned to a heavy, you’ll be the co-pilot sitting alongside of, and working for, the “aircraft commander”. This is much like in airline ops, where you’re essentially a supervised apprentice learning the nuances of mission accomplishment even though you’re fully capable of operating the machine and ham-fisting your way through the mission.
Whether fighter / attack or heavy, it takes another 2-3 years as a wingman or co-pilot before making the upgrade to flight lead / aircraft commander yourself. And unlike in airline practice, it’s not strictly seniority; talent and drive have a big influence on your trajectory. Also unlike airline practice being unable or unwilling to upgrade is a (fairly) short ticket to the career reject bin and eventual unemployment.
Most folks in the biz consider flight lead or aircraft commander of a crewed aircraft to be the real fully qualified journeyman status. At that point you’re in charge and everybody else around you works for you. So all told that is 4-5 years at best.
Yes, I think he would have been born 1968, so would have applied 1990, give or take. (Unless that was a question for getting into ROTC, which would have been 1986?)
My brother didn’t quite have 20/20 so initially he was a nav. He said he picked the FB-111 because it was the coolest plane in USAF inventory where the navs sit side by side with the pilot. He eventually got a vision waiver and attended UPT. There, he said the competition was fierce and that most graduates would get assigned to TTBs — tankers, transports, or bombers.
My brother is a true rocket scientist, he’s really sharp, and he has two masters, one in physics and I think the other is in something like orbital mechanics. Something like that, I’ll have to ask him. He worked his ass off in UPT and it paid off when he was signed the F-16 out of Luke AFB. What a great job assignment! Once he got me in to the flight sims at Luke and he loaded up a cool scenario, Las Vegas at night. He took me down the Vegas Strip at night, ‘buzzing the tower’ of every casino on the Strip. Fun! When it was my turn I could barely control the plane.
My brother was USAFA ‘86 and he was well on his way to becoming an astronaut like he dreamed and worked hard for, but unfortunately he married a volatile woman and their marriage was full of drama. She was so volatile she’d call his squadron commander in fits of rage. Not great for his career. She was a brunette but deep down I suspect she was a redhead.
Still, he had a great USAF career and he got to fly the F-16!
The student leader of my UPT class was an F-111 WSO under the same sort of waiver. Hell of a good man in addition to a good aviator.
As to TTB, at least in my era USAF’s needs for new pilots were about 35% fighter / attack, 10% retread to be a UPT instructor, and 65% heavies. With occasional seasonal or temporary blips one way or another, but the general average distribution was as above.
Everything you did for the entire year was tracked and contributed to your ranking within your graduating class. The resulting pecking order was what it was, and the bottom 2/3rds of graduates went to heavies, like it or not. As did one or two folks from the top of the class who wanted heavies for personal reasons.
Yeah but no matter what, you’re flying! Once I was rolling around in the dirt and heat (115 F) and hot winds of the Mojave Desert, at 29 Palms doing my artillery stuff, one of the fun missions we’d practice were SEAD missions, Suppression of Enemy Air Defense. We’d coordinate with the FAC, Forward Air Controller, who would set a Bombs on Deck time. From BOD,
- 2 minutes before BOD we’d land a suppression volley onto the enemy AA unit
- 1 minute before BOD we’d land a suppression volley onto the enemy AA unit
- 30 seconds before BOD we’d land marking round, WP (white phosphorous) onto the target to guide the pilot in
- 30 seconds after BOD we’d land a final suppression volley onto the enemy AA unit - the “back door”
Once we missed the marking round. A few minutes later the pilot in his A-4 came coming overhead really low. I mean REALLY low. I could see him. The other FDC guys thought that was cool. It was cool, but I told them that he’s poised because we missed the marking round.
Well, rolling around in the dirt off the desert I was certainly envious of those pilots zooming around in the air! I shared that with my brother.
I guess it depends on who we’re talking about. USNA and NROTC certainly don’t seem to be struggling to get people to become pilots–actually, it’s Naval Flight Officers (NFOs) they are sometimes having a hard time coming up with (and if you really want to get into the weeds, I recently finished a blog post that touched on this phenomenon, that is the difficulty of finding NFO candidates).
The gist is, that around 20 years ago the Navy (not sure about the Air Force) started allowing waivers for laser eye surgery (specifically PRK, IIRC). Not only that, they even started letting midshipmen at the Naval Academy get the surgery for free. Provided the surgery resulted in 20/20 vision or better, they could then go on to be Navy pilots. So someone like @Bullitt’s brother, for example, might not have had to go Navigator (or the nearest equivalent for the Navy, NFO) if he’d been born twenty years later (assuming the Air Force has adopted a similar policy of waving PRK or even LASIK): he could have just gotten the surgery and then competed for a pilot spot.
The result? It’s still easy enough to find people who want to become pilots but, for the Navy at least, it’s been a lot harder to find volunteers for Naval Flight Officer (to the point that USNA and NROTC sometimes don’t meet minimum quotas for NFO).
Such was my experience working in the officer accessions department at USNA ten years ago.
Yes, one of my relatives had navy Seal training which apparently he did use in Vietnam, then they got him his Aeronautic Engineer degree and he was eventually a flight instructor for the Navy. He transferred to the USAF and flew B52’s for a while but really wanted to be a doctor. The Navy put him through med school and he became a neurosurgeon. He was apparently also shortlisted to the shuttle program, but his wife said no. (!) He’s retired from the Navy now, but still does neurosurgery and according to the company website and his nephew, also a doctor, says it’s allegedly quite lucrative.
I like to joke he’s probably the closest there is to a rocket scientist and brain surgeon.
Very interesting. Thanks for the update & insight.
Certainly in Ye Olden Dayes many NFO / USAF Navigator candidates were pilot wannabes who didn’t quite clear the vision hurdle and had some hope of back-dooring into pilot via waiver or a future change in requirements once rated.
As such, the NFO/Nav pool drying up once that carrot was practically removed was/is a semi-predictable consequence. Watching humans as individuals and hence as groups of individuals vs. bureaucracies (business or government) interact is always fun: no change goes un-reacted to. It’s 3D chess all the way down.
As a more direct response to the OP, I just want to note that there is a huge difference between “solo flight” and “regular duty in [a fighter jet or any other kind of combat aircraft].” Flight school for a pilot typically runs about two years, and for most that’s not even the end of it. It’s roughly two years of flight school (and potentially longer if some disaster befalls the training pipeline), after which time the student naval aviator will certainly have had the opportunity to fly solo, but not in the actual type of aircraft they will be flying in the fleet: training aircraft only. That’s followed by yet more time at a Fleet Replacement Squadron, which does involve flying in the particular aircraft they are meant to be flying.
All told, it’s something like three years before a naval aviator can expect to be assigned to an operational unit. That’s based off of:
https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/training-sna.asp
…with additional inferences drawn from prior experience (not as a pilot, just dealing with midshipmen interested in flying) and:
So, the short answer is something like three years to be barely qualified to fly in an actual combat environment. Maybe. Although of course I am sure there is a theoretical minimum time that would be much less than that (although by how much I cannot say because I don’t have that kind of knowledge/experience).
Below is a link to a guy with a YouTube channel who was both an AF(F 16) and Navy (F/A 18) fighter pilot. If you have any interest in this sort of thing, he makes interesting videos. Some have to do with the training required and his personal path to the military cockpit.
Here’s a fellow who managed to start flying within a year of joining, and was solo flying after two years.
It helps if daddy is the ultimate boss of the outfit. (And a former combat pilot also).
George W. Bush joined the 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group of the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968,
Following his six weeks of basic training, Bush began 54 weeks of flight training at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia.[4] In December 1969, Bush began twenty-one weeks of fighter-interceptor training on the F-102 in Houston at the 147th’s Combat Crew Training School, soloing in March 1970 and graduating in June 1970. When he graduated, he had fulfilled his two-year active-duty commitment.[1]
His daddy was a Congressman at the time so while I am sure he had considerable influence, he wasn’t in charge.
And that’s about typical for the era. Ordinary pilot training is a year. Aircraft mission training varies now from 6 to 15 months depending on the airplane. The F-102 was rather simple and the air intercept mission was too. For the ANG of the time, they often did all mission aircraft training locally. Which could reduce a lot of delay waiting for other classes at central USAF schools.
I’m no fan of GWB, and I suspect he had strings pulled to get in and get out at times of his convenience. But the pace of his training is about typical if you measure from when he showed up at central USAF pilot training to when he graduated from the local F-102 school at his ANG unit.