China is cutting down on the time it takes to train raw students to be fighter pilots and transitioning to a full fleet of fourth-generation training aircraft—but won’t have a fully modernized pilot training system until 2030, according to a new paper from Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
In the paper, analyst Derek Solen cited “new developments” in pilot training divulged by China in the last few months. The Shijiazhuang Flight Academy, one of three training centers for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, has “completely replaced an older training program and the aircraft used in it,” referring to third-generation fighters equivalent to Russia’s Mig-21. This change has cut about year from the four-year training program.
“Meanwhile, the Xi’an and Harbin Flight Academies are establishing new units to train recent graduates to transition to fighter aircraft, shifting the burden of that training from combat units to the academies,” Solen wrote. “Both these developments indicate that the [People’s Liberation Army Air Force] is steadily making progress in long-standing efforts to streamline and centralize its initial fighter pilot training program, efforts that should be complete by the beginning of the next decade.”
Solen told Air & Space Forces Magazine that China’s pilot training academies have been consolidated from six to three over the last decade, and that a further year could be cut from the curriculum because of the success of the Hongdu JL-10 trainer, a derivative of the Russian/Italian Yak-130. The fly-by-wire, glass cockpit trainer is the aircraft around which the People’s Liberation Army Air Forces seems to be building most of its flight instruction, he said. No other advanced trainer appears to be in the works.
Solen offered an educated estimate that China is producing about 400 pilots a year—and that number is increasing slowly. By comparison, the U.S. Air Force is producing about 1,350 pilots per year, though that figure is short of its goal between 1,800 and 2,000.
PLAAF pilot production “kind of bottlenecks at the university,” Solen said, and this limits the flow of students through the system. To substantially increase production, “it’s going to require more aircraft and more instructors,” he added.
China’s flight instruction program from basic aviation/officer student training to frontline service takes about four years, about twice as long as the Air Force’s program, in which students go from primary instruction to operational squadrons in about two years.
Solen said China is not yet mimicking USAF’s new plan of using simulation and individualized instruction to accelerate the time it takes for a flyer to go from undergraduate student to flight lead, with students progressing at their own pace. However, China is increasing its use of simulators, and they are becoming more advanced, with a high-fidelity cockpit surrounded by a video dome, used primarily at operational units.
Pilots chosen for transports and bombers are usually those who don’t succeed in the fighter track, Solen said. The PLAAF’s concept is to maximize the investment already made in those students, he noted. Each of the flying academies have separate programs within them for large, multiengine aircraft.
Solen noted in his analysis that China doesn’t have service academies or generic officer training schools. Rather, after three years of officer training and education at PLAAF’s aviation university, students begin primary flight training. They complete that school after a fourth year, after which they do a year of intermediate training, followed by a year of advanced training. Those that graduate go on to a year of specific instruction with the combat unit to which they’re assigned.
Shijiazhaung seems to be eliminating that intermediate year of instruction.
“The Shijiazhuang Flight Academy’s elimination of intermediate flight training and its retirement of the JL-8 indicates that almost all the academy’s training brigades now operate the JL-10,” Solen wrote in the paper. “The academy is almost certain to have one last training brigade operating the JL-9, but it is likely to retire the JL-9 next year after the last group of pilot candidates to have undergone intermediate flight training in the JL-8 complete their advanced flight training in mid-2025.” He expects the Harbin academy to transition fully to JL-10 instruction in 2026.
The J-10 is China’s equivalent of the F-16, and two-seat versions are used for advanced fighter and strike training.
“Although only flight instructors have been mentioned training in the J-10 at the Xi’an Flight Academy, it is likely that the academy will begin conducting transition training for new pilots in the autumn of 2024 if it has not already done so,” according to the paper.
“This would conform with past practice: the Shijiazhuang Flight Academy received the J-10 one year before it began conducting transition training. The Harbin Flight Academy is likely to have begun transition training with the J-11 by late 2023 because flight training commences in September of each year, so the air-to-ground attack training indicates the existence of a training program that began in the previous year.”
The PLAAF has not more radically accelerated or reformed its pilot training program because it’s largely locked into the traditional tempo of the instruction, Solen said.
“They’ve … retained that cyclical induction process,” he noted. “I suppose they could go more quickly, but if they do that actually kind of screws everything up,” because officer instruction paces flight training. The tempo calls for a September-to-July instruction period, followed by graduation, for each phase of instruction.
“They’ve worked to kind of separate some of the officer training and some of the aviation education, but it’s still kind of mixed together. It’s all at the same pace,” he noted. “And so every year, they’re inducting new potential pilots, but they do it at the very same time each year … because they can’t bring anybody on [at] a different schedule.” The idea is not necessarily to take more time to produce more seasoned pilots, but throughout their training, students get substantially more flying hours than their American counterparts, and the Chinese seem comfortable with that.
“The schedule dictates everything,” Solen said.
“It’s a very deliberate process,” he added. “It hasn’t been fast, but I can see steady progress.” Since the arrival of the JL-10, “that was really the final piece needed to really get this process moving. Until then they were … hindered by lack of an appropriate trainer. While they were trying to reform the curriculum, it wasn’t well matched with the aircraft that they had.”
That was problematic because the PLAAF’s trainers were preparing students for third-generation fighters as it was introducing fourth- and fifth-generation fighters like the J-10, J-15, and J-20. That extra year may have been necessary to help students make the transition.
“It didn’t really match,” he said. Even the JL-10 may be insufficiently advanced to prepare students for the J-20, China’s premier stealth fighter, Solen noted.
While the PLAAF will likely “retain some old trainers and the old training program for almost as long as it continues to operate some third-generation fighters given the progress of the PLAAF’s effort to replace such fighters, it is safe to predict that [they] will all be retired around 2030,” Solen said. The older fighter trainers “will probably be left to a shrinking group of experienced pilots whose retirements may coincide with the retirement of their aircraft,” Solen wrote.
“It is likely that the PLAAF will need until at least 2030 to establish enough new training brigades to completely shift transition training away from combat units,” he concluded. The pace of this effort “could increase as each flight academy acquires more experience and personnel to accomplish it.”