The Air Force is overhauling Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT), moving to a hybrid private/government instruction program that officials at Air Education and Training Command (AETC) expect will reduce overall course time while achieving, within two years, USAF’s elusive goal of producing 1,500 new pilots annually.
AETC has for years struggled to increase pilot production. Its aging trainers—the T-6 Texan II and T-38 Talon—can’t deliver the necessary flying tempo, and their replacement—the T-7A Red Hawk—is mired in development delays and still years from operational service.
To cope with that, AETC’s new plan offloads much of the basic, initial instruction to a commercial, university-based program, while retaining military-specific elements at Air Force training bases. That combination should increase throughput.
“If the plan comes to fruition, as we think it will, this will be the new way of doing Undergraduate Pilot Training,” said AETC Commander Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson in an interview.
The new construct will give flight students 110 flying hours over 139 days at one of four flying universities, in a course now called Initial Pilot Training (IPT). Upon completion, students will receive their private pilot licenses—with instrument and multi-engine ratings—under FAA Part 141 standards. They will then transfer to one of USAF’s four UPT bases, where they must complete a military-specific course in the T-6 and the T-38 Talon. Silver wings will be awarded to officers who successfully complete both courses.
The expected 1,500 additional pilots a year will fill both fixed-wing and rotary-wing cockpits and also include some international students. The 1,500 is “inclusive of the entire requirement that we have,” Robinson said.
The Air Force tested the concept, completing “Small Group Try-Outs” with two private training programs: the Brunner Aerospace flight training program in Georgetown, Texas, and the University of North Dakota’s Aerospace Foundation flight training program in Mesa, Ariz. About 32 students went through each program.
“Every school is slightly different, but the FAA part 141 requirements are standard,” Robinson said. The first group finished in September 2024, and went from there to an abbreviated UPT program at Columbus Air Force Base, Miss. All but one received Air Force wings in early 2025; one candidate decided flying for the Air Force was “not for them,” Robinson said. A second group of students started their follow-on UPT course at Columbus in March.
The program will ramp up fast. The Air Force expects to produce about 100 pilots via the new hybrid system in 2025 and 750 in 2026, Robinson said. By 2027, all Air Force pilots will go through the new program.
“We’ll be running … the legacy UPT and the IPT at the same time,” for about a year, “just because ramping up all at the same time is not really doable,” Robinson said. “We have to do it one class at a time, and then one base at a time as we expand it.”
Beginning in 2027, each of the Air Force’s UPT bases—Columbus; Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas; Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas; and Vance Air Force Base, Okla.—will train about 425 pilots a year.
UPT 3.0?
The new approach comes only two years after AETC rolled out UPT 2.5, which was meant to both bridge from the old mix of trainer aircraft to the new, while injecting more simulation and technology in the program. The idea then was that students could have the flexibility to surge ahead if they mastered a particular phase of instruction quickly, or spend more time if needed on another phase. The aim was to reduce washouts if students didn’t keep up with their class’ progress.
That plan also depended on the T-7 for more of the overall training effort. But delays to the T-7 and flying hours deficits forced a further rethink.
In the most recent curriculum, students completed basic flight screening and then went to a UPT base, “where we would take somebody with really no flying hours … and take them all the way through [becoming] a fully qualified pilot in the T-6,” said Brig. Gen. Matthew Leard, director of plans, programs, and requirements for AETC.
“This is where we’ve been challenged,” Leard said: “getting enough flying hours in the T-6 to actually get 1,500—roughly—pilots a year.”
The Air Force’s trainer aircraft all reported mission capable rates below 65 percent in fiscal 2024, well below the intended 70 percent threshold. The mission capable rate for the T-6A slipped 8.57 percentage points from 2023 to 2024, while the T-38 dropped by 1.02 percentage points and the T-38C declined 2.68 percentage points.
The Air Force retired its last T-1 Jayhawk trainer in December without a direct replacement.
Different Tracks
Plans call for future mobility students to follow a simulator-heavy curriculum after IPT, while those on the fighter and bomber track will train on the T-38 until the T-7s come on board. The T-38 is now more than 60 years old; it was to have retired in 2022, but is being extended as the Air Force awaits the T-7.
It could be a while: The T-7 won’t start low-rate initial production until the spring of 2026 at the earliest, and initial operational capability is only tentatively set for 2027. Software issues, escape system design challenges, and supply chain bottlenecks have contributed to delays. To speed up testing, the Air Force bought four additional “production representative” test aircraft last year.
In working up to the new construct, Leard said, “we looked at … what are the things we really need those [military] flying hours to focus on … and then let’s save the flying hours and [instructor pilots] to focus on that.” Leaders concluded they did not need to spend precious T-6 hours on “basic airmanship … instrument procedures, navigation,” he explained. So they looked to civilian institutions that could do that well: “Places like Embry-Riddle, UND, all of that,” he said.
After students transition to UPT, they’ll get 108 training days comprised of 55 hours in the T-6 and 50 hours in its simulator. Combined with the 140-hour IPT program, pilots will graduate UPT with nearly 200 hours of actual flying time, compared with about 127 hours under UPT 2.5—a 57 percent increase in flying hours.
“They actually get more flying hours, total, between the two than they get today,” Leard said. The T-6 portion of the syllabus “is actually shorter than it is today … because they’ve [already] accomplished the competencies that we need them to understand … general aviation science, instrument skills, private pilot certificate, and then the multi-engine,” he said.
Same Money, More Pilots
The cost difference between the old and new system is a wash, Robinson said.
“At the individual level, per pilot, it actually is cheaper,” he said. “It’s faster … and we think it’s going to be better. We’re still collecting the data on that, [but] because we are going to … get … about 250 more pilots through the system in a year, it’s about a break-even.”
Leard said AETC was able to move quickly, because “we are literally just paying the tuition for the students.” A longer-term contract will be negotiated, he said, but the Air Force bought “education service agreements, where we can go to these universities and just say, ‘Hey, look in the course catalog. … We’d like 27 of those.’”
Long term, he said, “this is an integral part of our future pilot training pipeline.”
The new system should also help the enduring challenge to “burn down the glut of officers awaiting pilot training,” Robinson said. Air Force Academy and ROTC students all graduate “in a very condensed period of time” each spring, but pilot training classes have to be spaced out, forcing some pilot candidates to wait. Using four external programs can reduce that waiting time.
Creating more new pilots only solves part of the problem. Training them to be effective operators will take more time, money, and effort, as well. For more information, see “Fixing the Air Force Pilot Crisis,” p. 48.
IPT Is Not College
The IPT students train in flight suits, live in university-provided housing, and eat in the university dining halls. “They still have a senior ranking officer that’s there [to] make sure that everybody remembers that they’re still in the military,” Leard said.
Student housing is not in dormitories, but “two-bedroom apartments,” Robinson explained. “These are commissioned officers, and we want to make sure it’s kind of a step above a college.” Time is compressed, though. “I’ll tell you what: With 110 hours in 140 days, they don’t have a lot of spare time.”
Trainer aircraft will feature “an all-glass, integrated avionics suite” to acclimate new pilots to the kinds of displays they’ll see in aircraft like the F-35 and KC-46, Leard said.
“We need to start building pilots that learn from day one how information is visualized, ingested [and] acted upon,” he said. “Most of the schools are going with, like a [Cessna] 172, Piper Archer, or like a [Diamond Aircraft] DA-40 … and then mostly [Piper] Seminoles or DA-42s for the multi-engine phase. But again, the same avionics throughout the pipeline.”
But once those pilots get to the T-6, an early 1990s design with multifunction displays presented in a more traditional format, there could be some regression, Robinson said.
“Each school has a little different take,” Leard said. Some use more advanced simulation than others.
But the FAA Part 141 syllabus “is fairly standard.” The Air Force changed the T-6 syllabus to adjust to the new program.
For the duration of the IPT phase, students are on temporary duty from their final UPT training base. There will be just a three-week break between IPT and the T-6 phase to accommodate the change in station, to ensure that students don’t get rusty.
Lingering Issues
The pilot enterprise has never had a shortage of volunteers for pilot training slots, Robinson said. With plenty of candidates, the Air Force can afford to be highly selective.
But UPT production has been held back not only by sustainment challenges, but by a shortage of simulator instructors. With uniformed pilots needed in operational cockpits and staffs, the Air Force has gradually added more civilian instructors at UPT bases—when they can be found.
“There’s just a shortage of people wanting to go [be] the sim instructors at [the Laughlin and Columbus] locations,” Robinson said. When that happens, military instructor pilots have to fill in.
Here Come More Pilots
Robinson said the changes coming with IPT are interlocked with an ongoing servicewide Aircrew Crisis Task Force, which has been laboring to increase the number of operationally trained pilots available for all kinds of assignments.
“We’re working on multiple … segments” of the UPT pipeline “at the same time,” he said. Air Force headquarters is working on ensuring units will be ready to take on more pilots as the system matures.
Fighter Training Units in 2027 must have the capacity to absorb the additional pilots, Robinson said. That means increasing their weapon sustainment funding now and ensuring enough adversary air is available for training later.