Navy Grapples with Slow Strike Fighter Training Output, Admiral Says
Posted on March 31, 2021 by Richard R. Burgess, Senior Editor
ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy is struggling with supplying the fleet with enough strike fighter pilots to fill its squadrons, but is seeing some progress after resolving some training aircraft issues.
The strike fighter training pipeline is “too darn long,†said Rear Adm. Gregory Harris, the Navy’s director for Air Warfare, speaking this week in a Navy League Special Topic Breakfast webinar, sponsored by General Dynamics. “We have had significant delays over a number of years inside that program. Flat out early, we underloaded the program because we were having difficulties, so we did not pull in enough aviators, which led to some of our strike fighter pilot shortfall that we have right now.â€
Harris also said the Navy has had “a number of different issues associated with different aircraft inside the series,†referring to the daunting problems with the T-45 strike training jet’s oxygen system, which resulted in a pause in training pending corrective actions.
“We made our way through that and started pushing up production in the T-45 line,†he said, “But we [also] went through some hiccups with our T-6. We switched vendors for the supply side of the T-6 and that caused perturbations down in the primary training. We have managed to make our way widely through the T-6 piece very successfully, pushing students through aggressively into the helicopter syllabus and now we’re getting all cylinders cooking in the strike fighter syllabus.â€
https://seapowermagazine.org/navy-grapples-with-slow-strike-fighter-training-output-admiral-says/
