Originally Posted by
Lomon
This isn't the 1950's, when a pilot was purely employed to "go up tidlly up up." These days in a massively reduced Air Force ...
Ironically, in these days of a massively reduced air force, that's increasingly all we are employing pilots for. The fact we haven't consistently been able to field a full nine Reds for several years now is a bit of a giveaway as to the state of the pilot workforce at flt lt and sqn ldr ranks. The training system is barely able to keep pace with outflow when outputting its full capacity; every student chopped creates another front line gap which won't be filled, so arguably the *only* criterion we can afford to be selecting on right now is the likelihood of the candidate being able to pass flying training.