The cost of our defense cuts may well be measured then in American lives needlessly wasted both on the ground and in the air

US Air Force pilots fly less than China's do

by Michael Auslin

A number of us have been warning about this for a while, but today’s Wall Street Journal carries an important piece by Julian Barnes on the decline in flying and training hours for U.S. Air Force pilots. Leading generals I’ve talked to over the past year have warned about the long-term cost of budget cuts that force them to shift money away from training and maintenance towards daily operations. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command had to temporarily stand down 17 squadrons in order to deal with a budget-induced reduction of 44,000 flying hours. When the planes took to the skies again, many of those aircrews had to be recertified, which took several months and more money than if they had been allowed to fly all along.

Now Barnes comes along to report that U.S. pilots are flying only 120 hours or less per year, a drop of over 50 percent from a decade ago. In fact, American pilots now fly fewer training hours than Chinese, Indian, or some European pilots, according to Barnes. When I interviewed Gen Herbert Carlisle, Commander of Pacific Air Forces, for a column in the Wall Street Journal linked above, he noted that training hours for U.S. pilots was dropping to the level once occupied by Soviet pilots during the Cold War. Their lack of flying experience, he noted, was one reason the U.S. remained confident of holding an air edge over Russia and its allies.



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