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UPT grads to start careers flying UAVs

Three hundred pilots fresh out of undergraduate pilot training will ship off to Creech Air Force Base, Nev., over the next three years for their first assignments — as Predator and Reaper pilots.

The temporary surge of UPT pilots — 100 a year — will start immediately.

Plucking pilots straight from UPT to fly unmanned aerial vehicles is only the first part of a new plan to fill the rapidly growing need for UAV pilots.

The second part, which Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz announced Sept. 16 at the Air Force Association conference in Washington, D.C., includes creating a new UAV pilot career track.

The new career track will kick-start this January with a test group of ten officers who will go through a course designed to train the officers who will have no previous flying experience to pilot a UAV.

The testing phase will end after a second group of ten officers complete the training in January 2010, at which point the Air Force will decide if its new pipeline is capable of supplying the next generation of UAV pilots.

As for the first part, officials decided to pick pilots straight from UPT after internal reports showed too many experienced pilots were being tapped to fly drones, creating a gap in the availability of experienced pilots for manned aircraft, said Brig. Gen. Lyn D. Sherlock, director of air operations for operations, plans and requirements at the Pentagon.

“We are hitting a point right now that we are getting an imbalance of experienced pilots in our operational units with the young pilots that are coming in,” she said.

Sherlock said UAV pilots selected out of UPT will serve only one tour — which will last three to four years — at Creech.

But, student pilots now at UPT say they are worried those tours might last longer.

The Air Force has frozen assignments for pilots at the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, where MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers are flown. Some pilots have served as many as five years at Creech as the Air Force struggles to keep up with the demand to increase the number of UAVs flying over Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the addition of UPT pilots and the continued influx of fliers from manned aircraft units, Sherlock said service leaders hope they’ll have enough pilots to end the assignment freeze by the end of the year.

The Air Force doubled the number of UAV combat air patrols over Iraq and Afghanistan last year, and the goal is to reach 50 by 2011, which will require at least 1,100 pilots, service spokesman Ed Gulick said.

As a result, the number of UAV pilots will skyrocket by 2012, outnumbered only by F-16 pilots, Sherlock said.

UPT students, who spoke to Air Force Times on condition of anonymity, say they recognize the “insatiable need” for more pilots but remain worried a first assignment flying a Predator could hurt their career and their chances to eventually fly the F-22, A-10 or C-17 of their dreams.

Sherlock and 432nd commander Col. Chris Chambliss said they can understand those concerns, but said these students won’t be the first who are assigned to a unit — straight out of UPT — where they won’t be flying their primary aircraft.

“I think it’s an extremely valid point, but there are a ton of pilots whose first assignment wasn’t in their primary aircraft, including myself,” Chambliss said. “I started as an instructor pilot, but I eventually got F-16s and it hasn’t hurt my career at all.”

Sherlock’s first assignment was as an instructor pilot flying T-37s before she began flying C-141s.

She emphasized that a first assignment to Creech “will not hurt a pilot’s career.”

“When I have sat on promotion boards, I look at a pilot’s expertise level. I look to see if they are excelling during their assignments,” she said. “This is going to be good for them because they will be directly supporting the war fighter.”

Students in Class 901 who are now finishing UPT will be the first to find UAV slots listed on their dream sheets — a student’s wish list for his first assignment.

“We would welcome volunteerism and hope some students will step up and put [UAVs] on their list,” Sherlock said.

Instructors will have orders to select students for UAV assignments from a range of skill levels, including top graduates, Sherlock said.

The first students will know by October if they will head to Creech straight from UPT.

Those selected will attend a three- to four-week initial training session, either at Creech or at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, before they start at the UAV Formal Training Unit at Creech.

Upon completion of their UAV tour, the pilots will enter the assignment process like any other pilot and receive the primary aircraft they will fly the rest of their careers.

Sherlock said she doesn’t know if pilots who serve UAV tours straight out of UPT might receive first dibs on the best tours.

However, Chambliss said he could guarantee that the UAV pilots “will be more effective in combat in their first assignment [UAVs] than they would be in any other aircraft.”