Air Force, Air Lines eyeballing shortage and 1500 hour rule

MikeFavinger said:
You'd kind of figure you'd want to split your "2nd Tier" between heavies and helos to balance the talent pool across airframes.
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Well, it is self-selection. When you rank-order the class, and then let the students pick what they want in rank order, the less desirable stuff is going to fall to the bottom of the achievement pool.

Unfortunately, that is just a function of the people who have joined the Air Force to fly airplanes. I think many of them, if they were really interested in being rotorheads, would have stopped at the Army recruiter's office first.

I agree that the missions AF helos fly, and the airmanship skills required to fly them, should demand talent, though.
 
MikeFavinger said:
I think more and more, military helicopter pilots are getting more opportunities in the civilian fixed wing world, which is great. I'm biased, obviously, but I'd love for the airline world to recognize the difference between, say, VFR only helicopter operations in simple helicopters vs. those who do routine IFR operations in complex, multi-engine turbine helicopters.
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I agree; since airlines are primarily hiring for airmanship, I do with there was wider acceptance that military rotary-wing airmanship is cut from the same cloth as fixed wing.
 
Hacker15e said:
Well, it is self-selection. When you rank-order the class, and then let the students pick what they want in rank order, the less desirable stuff is going to fall to the bottom of the achievement pool.

Unfortunately, that is just a function of the people who have joined the Air Force to fly airplanes. I think many of them, if they were really interested in being rotorheads, would have stopped at the Army recruiter's office first.

I agree that the missions AF helos fly, and the airmanship skills required to fly them, should demand talent, though.
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Good point. We do the exact same thing for airframe selection - students pick by rank order.
 
As someone who flies both (i.e. Gods gift to aviation) helicopter ops are so much more challenging than fixed wing ops. Probably the hardest thing to do is a single pilot approach solid IFR to minimums (no you can't just descend in a hover).

Anyone who looks down on helicopter pilots has never tried to fly one. I've seen the most accomplished fixed wing pilots brought low trying to hover a Robinson.

Add combat ops to maintaining a stable hover out of ground effect with a tail wind as you mask/unmask to trade insults with the guys wearing the wrong color uniforms and you have serious work going on that would bring any fighter jock to tears. Ah....delicious fighter pilot tears......
 
av8tr1 said:
Anyone who looks down on helicopter pilots has never tried to fly one. I've seen the most accomplished fixed wing pilots brought low trying to hover a Robinson.
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Then again, it only takes a couple of hours of training to learn to hover. Take the most accomplished rotary wing pilot and tell them to land a plane with no training - that would work out about the same as a FW pilot trying to hover a helicopter for the first time.

I kind of feel like I'm letting people behind a curtain I don't want them to see behind, but hovering is no big deal and is just a basic, primary level skill.

I am not a traitor!

(The trading insults example however, is apropos!)
 
MikeFavinger said:
Then again, it only takes a couple of hours of training to learn to hover. Take the most accomplished rotary wing pilot and tell them to land a plane with no training - that would work out about the same as a FW pilot trying to hover a helicopter for the first time.

I kind of feel like I'm letting people behind a curtain I don't want them to see behind, but hovering is no big deal and is just a basic, primary level skill.

I am not a traitor!

(The trading insults example however, is apropos!)
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You guys not teaching run on landings as a primary skill anymore? Landing a airplane is about the same as a run on landing.

I've had to send a couple of guys back to fixed wing when they couldn't find the hover button. One guy a 20 something FedEx captain went through 3 instructors before giving up. Some guys have it and some don't.
 
av8tr1 said:
You guys not teaching run on landings as a primary skill anymore? Landing a airplane is about the same as a run on landing.
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Well, I suppose they're about the same if we're just talking about the end result of arriving at a runway with forward speed... in my opinion, how you get to the runway, what you do just prior to touching down on the runway, and what you do when you initially touchdown on the runway are too vastly different for me to list right now. However, if you mean helicopter pilots know what it's like to land with forward airspeed, I see your point.

av8tr1 said:
I've had to send a couple of guys back to fixed wing when they couldn't find the hover button. One guy a 20 something FedEx captain went through 3 instructors before giving up. Some guys have it and some don't.
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Forgive my experience - I'll clarify - I've never seen or heard about a military pilot in flight school who could not learn how to hover in a couple hours.

And hey, I'm all for letting people know how special helicopter pilots are and keep a list of @Boris Badenov -isms at the ready to impress potential employers of my steely-eyed bad-assedness, but, really, I'm a dual-rate too and all it takes to fly one or the other, usually, is training.
 
MikeFavinger said:
Forgive my experience - I'll clarify - I've never seen or heard about a military pilot in flight school who could not learn how to hover in a couple hours.

And hey, I'm all for letting people know how special helicopter pilots are and keep a list of @Boris Badenov -isms at the ready to impress potential employers of my steely-eyed bad-assedness, but, really, I'm a dual-rate too and all it takes to fly one or the other, usually, is training.
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Yeah, I was never a military IP so all I get are long haired hippies with man buns and dope lumberjack beards with pants 2 sizes too small. And the occasional airline captain who just went through a divorce and had some money left over so he blew it on a sports car and helicopter training. Because everyone knows chicks dig helicopter pilots, those fighter guys are just old and balding driving minivans with a carseat in the back.
 
killbilly said:
I was talking with a pilot this weekend who had started out doing CFI work in Annapolis, teaching primary flight to Naval Aviators. He said the ones that coughed up a little extra dough to get some time/hours (the Navy would only pay up to 25 hours to get them to solo) did pretty well. The rest either washed out of the Navy or became helicopter pilots.

I laughed. I felt bad about it. But I laughed.
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This was over 10 years ago, but the majority of my CFI time was teaching Navy IFS. At the time three schools shared the bulk of the contract with the Naval Academy: ours at BWI, another at Fort Meade (KFME), and a flying club at Lee Annapolis (KANP). The IFS syllabus then allowed up to 25 hours, had 2 stage checks, involved 2 supervised solo's in the pattern, and then cumlinated in some cross country exercises. Just about everyone out of the academy could get through it. Asking the students to pay for extra time sounds pretty shady to me.

A few months before the end of my CFI days, the Navy had us all down at the Academy for a meeting. A powerpoint slide came across showing washout rates for IFS at our three flight schools as well as success rates of those students at Primary Flight Training (or whatever it was called, when the students would go on to fly the T-34 or T-6 in Pensacola or Corpus after graduating from the Academy). Washout rates for IFS were pretty low, like 2-3% but were the lowest at the flying club out of Lee. Success rates at PFT were decent, I can't recall for sure but maybe at least in the mid 80's, but for some reason the students that completed IFS at the flying club they were way off, like 10-15% lower. So by the stats, that flying club at Lee Annapolis washed out the fewest students in IFS but they were significantly less successful at Navy training. The auditorium digested the stats in that powerpoint slide for a few seconds and it ended awkwardly with two thirds of the room staring at the other third. My understanding is that the Navy washes out a lot more pilots in the advanced training that comes after PFT, but those stats weren't available to us.

The story in your post brought back that memory for me, and makes me wonder if the place at Lee Annapolis is the same place your pilot contact worked and if there's still something "off" in the way they teach the IFS program.
 
Our mission set in the HH-60 is pretty complex for the different tasks we have and a far cry different from, for example, some Army GSAB unit in slick 60s or -47s. Then again, they have their own complexities with other missions that they do, and which we don't. Then you have ASW -60s in the Navy, and that job requires severe SA and multitasking ability as the tactical coord pilot in the left seat. So they have their complexities. And other unit types have their complexities. Much like fighters, it's not so much flying the helo, as it is the ability to properly employ it. In a helicopter, there are so many more ways to get yourself in trouble by not paying momentary attention, especially with aerodynamic and performance gotchas, than there is in most fixed wing ops.
 
I flew out of Lee as a CFI in the early aughts while I was in college (yes, I went to that OTHER school in Annapolis. We are the croquet philosopher kings!). The only thing I can contribute is that those T-34s never seemed to move. It seems plauisble to me that the stats are useless because not enough dudes were flying to get a statistically useful sample. Not sure, just a data point. Never heard anything bad or good about the program...never really heard anything about it, which I thought was kind of weird given that there were two flight schools on the field and one of them was me and one other guy.
 
killbilly said:
I was talking with a pilot this weekend who had started out doing CFI work in Annapolis, teaching primary flight to Naval Aviators. He said the ones that coughed up a little extra dough to get some time/hours (the Navy would only pay up to 25 hours to get them to solo) did pretty well. The rest either washed out of the Navy or became helicopter pilots.

I laughed. I felt bad about it. But I laughed.
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Meh, I'd say his statement is a little bit off the mark. I knew plenty of guys with zero hours prior to doing IFS (the program your CFI friend instructed) who rocked primary and selected jets. I also know several high time prior civvie guys (to include former 135/121 types) who straight up washed out of the program. It takes a certain type of mind, and a certain type of learning style, to succeed and it isn't something that is taught by logging a few hundred extra hours in a cessna. That being said, I did have about 250 civilian hours going into the program, and that part made the instrument work and basic flying/radios pretty easy. Once I got to jets/T-45's, all bets were off.

For the record, I don't own a minivan or anything close to it. Just sayin…...
 
av8tr1 said:
Probably the hardest thing to do is a single pilot approach solid IFR to minimums (no you can't just descend in a hover)
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A couple guys in my squadron successfully punched out of a RF-4 shortly after takeoff. They said the most terrifying part of the "adventure" was the ride back to the base in the rescue helo where it had to shoot an IFR approach to mins.
 
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