The United States Navy (USN) was short of almost 100 fighter pilots in mid-July 2022 and the problem is not expected to improve anytime soon.
There is more than one reason for this predicament and all are complex, including flight instructor’s physiological events (PE) and the increasing problems of maintaining an ageing fleet of training aircraft.
In 2017, the USN grounded the Boeing T-45 Goshawk fleet for a three-day “safety pause” after more than 100 instructor pilots refused to fly the aircraft, citing concerns about incidents of hypoxia that they believed to have resulted from faulty onboard oxygen-generation systems.
A Physiological Event occurs when an aircrew experiences physiological symptoms in the aircraft which can be attributed to a known or suspected aircraft and/or aircrew systems malfunction.
Rear Admiral Fredrick Luchtman, the commander of the Naval Safety Center and the lead of the Physiological Episodes Action Team (PEAT), said that a root cause corrective action (RCCA) team that was tasked with looking at the pilot’s PEs with the USN’s T-45 advanced trainer aircraft had found that they weren’t caused by contaminated air, a lack of oxygen or systems not designed well enough to keep humans safe in harsh environments.
“The bad news is that there’s no single causal factor that leads to physiological events,” Luchtman said, although he noted that a string of pilot programmes and early mitigation efforts to tackle contributing factors have already “resulted in a 96 percent decrease in the PE rate in the T-45 fleet since 2017.”
Three-Stage Overhaul
The US Navy is now pursuing a three-stage overhaul of its pilot training, called Naval Aviation Training Next, to increase its pace and bring in new technology.
The first phase, Project Avenger, is a change in the primary flight-training curriculum to increase one-on-one instruction, including the use of virtual and mixed-reality trainers in addition to flight time in the T-6B Texan II primary trainer. The prototype class started in September 2020 and graduated in April 2021.
Second is Project Hellcat, which introduces a new intermediate flight-training phase for students in tactical jet training, which previously had students go directly from primary to advanced training. Navy officials say this will enable students to focus on foundational principles of flying in the T-6B, with the goal of reducing T-45 flying time in the last phase.
The third part of this new approach is Project Corsair, which recently started its prototype flight-training syllabus for advanced tactical jet pipeline students. The prototype syllabus incorporates advanced concepts that would typically come in fleet-replacement squadron training. It also focuses on instructors gauging a pilot’s proficiency for completion as opposed to measuring total hours and sorties – the traditional T-45 syllabus would take about 52 weeks to complete. The syllabus calls for a minimum of one flight per day, plus the use of virtual reality simulators, prerecorded briefs and 360-degree flight videos to augment flight time.
The changes come as the Navy makes long-term plans for pilot training with the retirement of the T-45 Goshawk and introduction of a next-generation Undergraduate Jet Training System. Central to the planning is determining whether to train future aviators on aircraft carriers. The service is considering switching to lower-cost land-only jets, an idea that is proving unpopular among many navy aviators and commanders.
The T-6B Texan II is a turboprop-powered trainer selected as the winner of the USAF/USN Joint Primary Aircraft Training System (JPATS) competition in June 1995, although the first of 275 production aircraft were not delivered to the USN until August 2009. Only three have been written-off, the last on 17 January 2023 in Alabama when both pilots successfully ejected.
The McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing, T-45 Goshawk is a carrier-qualified version of the British Aerospace Hawk Mk.60 land-based jet trainer. In November 1981, it won US Navy’s VTX-TS advanced trainer competition and the T-45A became operational in 1991 with an analog cockpit design, while the T-45C, first delivered in December 1997, features a new digital glass cockpit design. All T-45A aircraft currently in operational use have been upgraded to T-45C standard.
Thirty-two Goshawks have been written-off since June 1992, and in October 2022, the T-45C fleet was grounded following engine related issues. More than 230 Goshawks remain with the USN and are scheduled to keep in service until 2035 or later. There are currently no plans for a carrier-qualified version of the Boeing-Saab T-7 which won the US Air Force’s T-X competition in 2018.
by David Oliver
