The Air Force is losing pilots to the private sector and must improve their pay and benefits to keep them, senior Air Force officials said this week.
The high rate of contingency deployments around the world and the resulting family concerns are the major reasons pilots are resigning after their obligatory eight years of service, officials said. At the same time, a hiring boom in the airline industry is giving Air Force pilots an alternative to staying in the service.
After their first eight years of service, pilots can receive bonus pay if they commit to five additional years. The percentage of pilots accepting the additional five year term dropped from 77 percent in 1995 to 59 percent last year. Only 32 percent of pilots have accepted the additional term so far this year.
To combat the pilot outflux, the service has embarked on a plan to make a longer career in the armed forces more appealing. First, the Air Force is looking at ways to decrease pilots' deployment time during contingency operations from 90 days to 45 days in many cases. Pilots would also be given vacation time immediately following deployment.
"What we want to do first is concentrate on the individual and the family and give them some down time where they can renew their relationships with the kids and make up for some lost time, fix the car and the lawn mower and so forth," a senior DoD official told reporters Tuesday at a Pentagon briefing.
The Air Force is asking Congress to increase pilots' bonus pay for agreeing to stay in the service beyond the obligatory eight years. The service may also offer smaller bonuses for pilots who would commit to an additional one to three year term but not the five year term.
Officials said the problem had not reached crisis proportions, but that the service expects to be short several hundred pilots next year.
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