There are always rumors that one group (especially Academy grads) favors their own unfairly. From here on out, all that matters is how good of a person and a pilot you are. The honest truth is that it doesn’t matter how you earn your commission. For pilots smart enough to go directly to the Guard or Reserve, this will mean OTS (now called TFOT). For many, this is the USAF Academy or ROTC. Let’s examine what this career progression looks like, and then figure out how to do it well.Ī military pilot’s career starts at a commissioning source. You need to be good as a pilot if you want to be an effective officer. It’s a lot of work to check all the boxes required for development as both an officer and a pilot, but that’s what you signed up for. This means both parts of this series are important to you. If you have to spend part or all of that time struggling just to regain credibility (or even earn it in the first place) you will not have a successful command. Air Force squadron commander tours are usually only two years long. Your performance as a squadron commander weighs heavily on your subsequent assignments and promotions. Fail to earn that upgrade, and a lot of leadership opportunities will just be closed off to you.) (In a fighter squadron, you must be an IP to serve as a DO or Squadron Commander. However, if you lack credibility in your aircraft, your ability as a leader will be greatly diminished. You might be assigned to command a flying squadron later in your career because your record, on paper, looks very competitive. If you fail to take care of your pilot career progression, everyone around you will know about it. There’s no way to hide it, and word gets around. Whether you’re flying in a formation or flying next to another pilot on a crewed aircraft, someone always sees if your skills aren’t up to par. Unlike many other professions, aviation is based on “street cred” and your performance comes with immediate feedback. However, their success in that job can suffer if they failed to take care of the pilot side of their career development. Many of these pilots do get assigned as flying squadron commanders. Many pilots pursue those non-flying opportunities thinking they can easily return to command a flying squadron when they reach the appropriate rank. ![]() However, there are opportunities to spend a lot of time in non-flying assignments and get promoted anyway. Up to a point, yes, you have to check some of the pilot career progression boxes we’ll discuss here as part of your officer career progression. ![]() You’d think that the opposite would also be true: you must be a good pilot to get promoted in the Air Force. It was a fight for him to get promoted to O-6. He missed out on opportunities because he was so focused on the pilot side of things that he struggled on the officer side. He wasn’t great with people and didn’t meet the Air Force’s ideals as an officer. Unfortunately, Boyd was sort of a terrible person. You might think that the Air Force would have sung his praises and promoted him all the way to 4-star General. And that was just one of his major accomplishments in the Air Force. He developed fighter doctrine and tactics, based on hard science, that USAF fighter pilots still use to this day. More importantly, he was the first fighter pilot in human history to use thermodynamics and computer analysis to figure out the math behind dogfighting. ) He was inarguably the best fighter pilot of his time. ( Here’s a fantastic biography about him. ![]() Perhaps the most poignant example of this was Colonel John Boyd.
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