FORT RUCKER, Ala., - In the spring of 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Fort Rucker and suggested that more pilots should be trained faster.
"Today, the primary limitation on helicopter capacity is not airframes, but shortages of maintenance crews and pilots," Gates said. "So our focus will be on recruiting and training more Army helicopter crews."
The Army National Guard implemented a program mobilizing Guard instructor pilots after that visit that helped increase pilot training by 46 percent.
By the summer of 2009, Col. Mark Weiss, a National Guard member and the Fort Rucker deputy assistant commandant, was tasked with developing a program in which the Army National Guard would provide instructor pilots to serve on two- to three-year tours as flightline instructors.
By the fall of 2009, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Justin Mack of the Ohio National Guard was training students. Since then, the program has gained both awareness in the field and true momentum.
To date, there are 22 Army National Guard instructor pilots serving tours as flightline instructors. The program already has an additional 16 National Guardsmen programmed to begin their tours through the fall of 2011.
Increasing throughput has been a focus of the U.S. Army Aviation Center team. Due to the operations tempo over the past nine years, United States Army Aviation Center of Excellence (USAACE) has found itself with a backlog of flight school students.
"The delays are due to various seen and unforeseen reasons," said Col. Todd Conyers, the centers operations officer. "Aircraft availability based on maintenance, numbers of training aircraft at Fort Rucker, weather, instructor pilot availability, classroom scheduling, and even student availability - to name a few - have impacted or still impact the flow of students through the pipeline.
"The good news is we're seeing very positive results based on solutions we began applying more than a year ago."
Mobilizing Army National Guard or U.S. Army Reserve instructor pilots to improve the throughput of quality aviators directly supports contingency operations overseas by increasing the pool of available aviators and increasing the capacity of the states' to support their domestic operations.
Simply stated, training more pilots faster will greatly benefit all components, said Weiss.
The Guard's state aviation officers are the quality control for the program to insure that anyone who is accepted into the program is their best and brightest.
Though not all states have supported the mission to date, the current pool of instructors is made up from 22 states with a desired end-state of at least one from each state.
The program provides many direct benefits for the National Guard and the Army as a whole, and it improves ARNG readiness by expanding the depth and experience of our instructor pilot corps, said Weiss.
Unit readiness increases Army-wide by helping to increase the throughput of new Aviators and getting one of the Soldiers back to their formations faster. Every instructor pilot brought to the flightline results in an additional four to six new Army Aviators produced each year.
Precious training dollars are better utilized and the total time it takes to produce an Army Aviator is reduced.
Eliminating the current flight training backlog is one of the USAACE commander's highest priorities.
The training delays will not go away quickly, but this initiative exemplifies the concept of "One team: the Aviation Enterprise - active component Aviation partnered with the Army Reserve and Army National Guard teammates."
The multiplicative results will have significant impacts over time and once again the citizen Soldiers will have answered the call of both their states and their nation, Weiss said.