The Air Force’s chief of staff isn’t considering using stop loss, an order preventing airmen from moving to inactive status, to help stem the tide of pilots leaving the service.
“It’s a tool in the secretary’s tool bag to use when we’re in a state of emergency,” Air Force Gen. David Goldfein said Wednesday about “stop loss.” “We’re not in a state of emergency.”
Goldfein linked the pilot shortage to the decline in readiness over the last few years. He said pilots who don’t fly, maintainers who don’t maintain and controllers who don’t control won’t stay with the Air Force.
“Getting readiness levels up so we can make quality of service the largest incentive for getting pilots to stay is where I’m focused,” Goldfein said at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Goldfein said the pilot shortage is also an Air Force quality of life issue and that service leadership must figure out how to improve pilot retention. He said improving the quality of life at the squadron level would be a good place to start.
Retired Air Force pilot and Heritage research fellow for defense policy John Venable said Wednesday the service was 1,000 pilots short of a 3,800 pilot requirement. The Air Force did not return a request for confirmation on Wednesday.
Goldfein said the Air Force pilot shortage is a national level issue based on supply and demand. That the United States is producing less points than needed to service military, commercial and business aviation. Air Force leadership said years ago that a pilot shortage was being fueled by demand from the commercial airlines, which commercial airliners denied (Defense Daily; June 18, 2013).
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said as recent as February 2014 that though some 70 percent of pilots hired by airlines came from the military prior to 2001, roughly 30 percent came from the military in early 2014. GAO said, in addition, all of the airlines interviewed reported that fewer candidates with military experience were applying for pilot job vacancies than has been there experience in the past. From fiscal years 2001 through 2012, an average of 2,400 pilots separated from the military service branches per year, according to GAO.
Goldfein said, like pilots, the Air Force has a maintainer shortage and he’s looking to improve quality of life issues to help stem the maintainer shortage. This “math challenge,” he said, leads to maintainers working twice as hard to perform jobs that once required two people.
He said, in years past, there would be two crew chiefs, primary and dedicated, a different team on the runway and a final team performing “last chance” jobs like pin-pulling and bomb arming. Goldfein said now the same work is being performed just with half the workcrew, which skews readiness numbers.
Goldfein again warned lawmakers against passing a year-long continuing resolution (CR) that would extend fiscal year 2016 spending levels through FY ’17. He said the Air Force would have a $2.8 billion bill to pay if this was to happen. He said another CR would stop end strength growth, which would directly impact Air Force readiness issues for the worse. The current CR ends April 28. FY ’17 ends Sept. 30.
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