The U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that U.S. Air Force fighter pilots are not getting enough training for the full range of missions they support and their training plans might be outdated.
By U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Ben Bloker [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Unit commanders told the GAO that high deployment rates, manpower shortfalls, lack of serviceable aircraft are some of the reasons for the shortfall. In some cases, pilots are being trained to play red air, which takes away their time to train on their core missions.
As for training plans formulated by Air Combat Command, the GAO found that the branch had used assumptions dating as far back as 40 years for when it update the plans annually.
Although the service has an ongoing study to determine if training requirement were met, the GAO concluded that ACC did not collect data to determine if its effective.