The number of daily remotely piloted aircraft flights is expected to remain constant in fiscal 2017, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said the Air Force would continue flying 60 combat air patrols per day, the same number the service now flies.

In April 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter reduced the patrols flown from 65 a day to 60, in an effort to relieve beleaguered airmen.

The Army will provide 16 additional flights per day, Work said.

Concern about overworked airmen has been growing, and the Air Force said that while fighter pilots fly an average of 250 hours per year, RPA pilots were up to nearly 900 hours.

The military has been looking at ways to relieve the overworked pilots, sensor operators, and other crew.

In December, the service announced that enlisted airmen would be able to fly the RQ-4 Global Hawk on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions — the first enlisted pilots since World War II.

The Pentagon has also started contracting with private businesses to conduct daily flights. Work said that the 2017 budget plans for 10 daily government-owned contractor-operated RPA flights.

And the Air Force has bolstered its RPA classrooms in an effort to get more airmen trained on the platforms. At Joint-Base San Antonio-Randolph, Texas, the service said it expects the number of trained RPA pilots to jump from 192 to 384 annually.

The Air Force is planning to buy 24 new MQ-9 Reaper drones in 2017, budget documents show. The aircraft is expected to replace the MQ-1 Predator, which the service plans to start phasing out over the course of 2017.

However, the Air Force also said that to meet the required 60 CAPs per day, they would restore two MQ-1 operational squadrons that had previously been slated for deactivation. The budget documents did not specify which squadrons were being kept online.

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