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Commanders OK with added simulator time

The commanders of the Air Force’s two main flying commands said last week they are content to replace some of their pilots’ flight training hours with simulator time.

Gen. Ronald Keys, commander of Air Combat Command, and Gen. Duncan McNabb, commander of Air Mobility Command, said Feb. 9 at the Air Force Association symposium in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., that their pilots are getting plenty of flying hours through wartime operations, so cutting training hours in the cockpit isn’t a big deal.

In order to meet 2008 budget requirements, the Air Force has instructed ACC and AMC to cut their live flight training by 10 percent.

“A lot of the cuts that we’re taking in flying hours right now are being masked by the war,” Keys said. “When I send kids down flying F-16s to the war … they’re flying 70 hours a month. So in four months you get a lot of experience.”

Ditto for AMC pilots.

“We’re flying a bunch,” McNabb said.

But how the training cuts will sit with commanders once pilots are flying fewer war-related sorties is less clear.

“There are certain things that today we don’t simulate well,” Keys said, “so there’s a certain balance … [where] you’ve go to be able to fly the airplane.”

But both leaders lauded simulators’ ability to give pilots dry runs before they go into combat.

“Some of the high-end, time-sensitive targets … we really don’t have live systems available to do that regularly during training,” Keys said. “The high-end simulation allows us to do that so the first time you go [four friendly aircraft versus 20 enemy aircraft] … is not the first time … you’ve done that.”

McNabb pointed out that in a tighten-your-belt budget environment, the financial advantages of simulators cannot be ignored.

“It’s cheaper to do a lot of that training in a simulator than to fly that airplane around the flagpole,” he said.