“We’re cooked,” one Army aviator said recently, describing the reactions of fellow students at the service’s helicopter flight school to Sikorsky’s new
uncrewed Black Hawk. “Why are we even doing this, for real?”
As the Army races to realize the promise of unmanned aircraft—more platforms, more flexibility, less risk to aircrew—it is shrinking the units that fly and maintain the helicopters that have long been central to the service’s way of war. Some pilots worry that their careers and expertise will be lost in the transition, even as some express optimism that the Army’s new contractor-run training approach will make tomorrow’s smaller aviation community better than ever.
The Army has said it will will cut 6,500 of its 30,000 active-duty aviation-community soldiers over the next two years, mostly by removing one aerial cavalry squadron from each active-duty combat aviation brigade, as part of the effort to build “a leaner, more lethal force by infusing technology, cutting obsolete systems,” as Secretary Dan Driscoll and the service’s top uniformed leader Gen. Randy George put it in a May 1 letter.
Panels are already scrutinizing the skills of pilots and other aircrew, some of whom may choose to leave their jobs, Maj. Gen. Clair Gil, who leads the service’s flight school, told reporters at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., last month.
At the same time, Sikorsky isn’t slowing down. The defense company announced last week it taught an enlisted soldier, not a pilot, how to fly one of its autonomous helicopters. The sergeant oversaw the software-flown helicopter’s more than 70-nautical-mile cargo mission from a tablet. It took him less than an hour to learn the program.
Current Army aviators are trying their best to stay optimistic, but fear that decades-worth of experience will be lost in the culling.
“I’d like to believe the future won’t include completely offloading aerial resupply and air assault missions to unmanned aircraft, but maybe that’s my bias,” the aviator said in a message. “I think the bigger challenge is integrating technology (inevitable) to reduce risk to soldiers without losing the generational knowledge required to fly these complex systems.”
But the Army doesn’t just want fewer pilots, it wants better-qualified ones; and it's looking to the defense industry for a solution. The service plans to turn its longtime entry-level helicopter education into a new contractor-owned and -operated model called Flight School Next. Officials and contractors said the new model will offer a simplified approach to training, develop better aviator skills, and save money by taking helicopters, instructors, and maintenance out of the service’s hands.
While some current and former pilots are skeptical about the Army’s broader aviation strategy, they viewed a flight-school revamp as a much-needed opportunity for the military to reinvest in its future aviators and make training more efficient and competitive.
“When you have our current experience to compare it to, you have to imagine that there's a better way,” the aviator said. “The Army has a reputation for saying ‘Hey, if we need 1,000 pilots, sure as shit, you're going to give me 1,000 pilots.’ But are those all pilots that we want to be walking across the graduation stage with? I can tell you, on a personal level, that I don't feel that right now.”
Keeping it simple
The deadly Jan. 29 collision of an Army UH-60 Black Hawk and a commercial airliner outside Washington, D.C., further increased scrutiny on pilots amid rising mishap rates.
There were 17 class-A mishaps, the term for the service’s deadliest and costliest incidents, in fiscal year 2024 alone—the most the service has seen since 2007. Army leaders have repeatedly said declining aviator skills has been a factor.
“One of the things that we've noticed over the last couple years is our accident trends are moving in the wrong direction,” Gil said, saying senior leaders identified shortcomings among some aviators and told him, “‘We have a very talented population that's coming out. They're inexperienced, they're very good at systems operations. They're not very good at flying fundamentals.’”
He said that’s partly because the helicopter used to train new Army pilots since 2015—the twin-engine Airbus UH-72 Lakota—doesn’t allow aviators to practice certain techniques.
“We're looking at single-engine trainers. Those are aircraft that we've flown in flight school for years before we went to the current UH-72. Where we trained maneuvers like auto-rotations and things we call stuck-pedal or anti-torque maneuvers—things that we don't train in a dual-engine aircraft. This is going to give us an opportunity to go back to that,” Gil said at AUSA.
And, he added: “A single-engine, two-bladed aircraft is going to be fundamentally cheaper to operate than a twin-engine, four-bladed aircraft.”
Defense companies have been eager to pitch their ideas for Flight School Next. Leonardo and Boeing are teaming up to offer a “turnkey, innovative approach” using Leonardo’s AW119T training helicopter and Boeing’s experience with the AH-64 Apache.
Defense contractor Bell has pitched its single-engine 505 helicopter and the expert instructors at its Bell Training Academy in Fort Worth, Texas, as a possible solution.
“Not only do we believe we have the right aircraft for this program…but also Bell has been training pilots, including Army pilots, for a long, long time. We trained the first Army pilots in 1946,” Matthew Dorram, capture lead for Flight School Next for Bell, said in an interview on the sidelines of AUSA.
Several contractors are reportedly vying for the contract with single-engine training helicopters, including MD Helicopters, Enstrom, and at least two teams, including Boeing and Leonardo and Robinson and M1 Support Systems. Airbus, who is also making an offer for the new contract, has defended its UH-72 Lakota helicopters from the Army’s criticisms, saying its stability and autopilot features can be easily toggled off for a more rigorous training experience.
“With its unmatched safety record, superior training versatility, the UH-72A Lakota remains the premier platform for preparing America’s next generation of Army aviators,” the company said in a July statement.
Lowering costs, raising morale
Problems with the Army’s training system are perhaps exemplified by the recent news that maintenance woes will extend new aviators’ required decade of service to 12 years or even more.
In July, Army officials announced that flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, was moving slowly, “largely due to maintenance challenges with the AH-64 Apache helicopter.” Flight school students from the 2023 group were still waiting to finish their courses while the Army Aviation Center of Excellence was waiting to receive the class of 2026. Instead of starting the 10-year service clock after graduating flight school, officials announced they were moving it forward to begin after completion of Initial Entry Rotary Wing training.
“This means it may be over two years before some students graduate flight school, so their 10-year ADSO grows to 12 or 12 and a half years, at no fault of the soldier,” said Kenneth Hawley, the center’s organization and personnel force development director, in the news release.
It’s hard to keep spirits high when training pilots are grounded, the Army aviator said.
“The sentiment broadly among current flight school students right now is that flight school is dealing with a multitude of maintenance, timing, and aircraft issues,” the aviator said. “Morale, specifically in the Apache course, is rock-bottom.”
Older veterans, like Dan McClinton, have also seen concerning trends in Army flight school. The retired Apache pilot and 1987 flight school attendee said the Army made poor choices with helicopter training in the past, speculating the service was prioritizing costs, not quality.
“There's always a desire to do more with less, because it's a money game,” McClinton said, but added he seemed less worried about the cost-savings angle of Flight School Next.
“It's not like they're doing that solely for the reason to save money, it just happens to save money,” McClinton said. “Because if the Army had to buy all those helicopters, obviously the cost would be a lot more. So, they're putting that on the contractor.”
While both McClinton and the Army aviator in flight school remained optimistic about changes to flight school, they expressed some skepticism about the Army’s inevitable pivot to unmanned systems.
“I understand, you know, technology is changing and I'm fully on board with trying to take advantage of technology when you can, but I am concerned that they may be going too far, too fast,” McClinton said.
At AUSA, Boeing announced it was designing a tiltrotor drone wingman concept to support the Army’s helicopter fleet, with company officials saying it comes as service leaders evolve the Apache’s role in battle.
Unmanned technology will evolve. But until they’re fully replaced, Army aviators say they’re focusing on becoming the best pilots the service still, hopefully, needs.
“It’s a really interesting time,” the aviator said. “We will look back at this year for Army aviation and think of it as a really pivotal time in the future of this transformation that we're in the midst of. Because, at the same time that we are focusing on those unmanned systems and we recognize the value they’re playing in the modern battlefield, we're still trying to provide good, extensive training for the pilots that we have.”
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