What happens if you fail army flight school

Sgt Join to see. Posted 10 mo ago. Simple answer: Failure is not an option. Do what it takes to complete the training. Failing or quitting should not be your mindset. Have you talked to a recruiter? It stands to reason that if you failed, that you would have an obligation to fulfill. You state that you know you will not fail the course, so why are you asking this question? Below is old data so talk to a recruiter if you feel that you will fail. If you're already in the Army the paper work you fill out basically says that upon being accepted into the program you will owe the Army 6 years pass or fail, because even if you fail your came from an MOS and can be sent back, and after completing flight training you have a 6 year commitment.

As far as the street to seat guys, the ones that are in my class told me that because they have no other Army job to fall back on, they would be discharged if they could not complete the program for some reason.

If you're looking at the web site and have questions or are confused about the wording, just click on the "contact us" link and send them an email Vote up. Vote down. SPC Join to see 10 mo. I know that when it comes down to everything I can do it. Lt Col Jim Coe. I taught Air Force pilot training for 3 years. We had many student pilots fail. The Air Force training system is set up to deal with small or transient failures. You might fail at accomplishing a maneuver to standard.

If it's your first attempt, then the failure is almost expected. It won't be ground to fail you on the entire mission. Later on as proficiency is expected, failing a maneuver leads to a failed mission. Normally a student who fails a mission is retrained in the maneuvers they failed.

Sometimes it is simulator training, ground learning, or actual flight training. Then they are retested on those maneuvers. If everything goes okay, and it usually does, then the student continues on. The problem comes when a student fails a major training phase event or evaluation. The first of these in fixed-wing training is soloing out in the primary trainer. To solo the student had to accomplish three safe takeoffs and landings by themselves.

Cadets, who have not experienced the Army for even one day as an officer, are now asked to commit up to eleven years for the opportunity to fly for six years—if they are lucky—while spending the rest of that time on staff, in professional military education, or in broadening assignments.

Furthermore, for cadets who may want to pursue a civilian career after a stint in the Army, the opportunity costs are higher the longer they stay. These cadets may not be willing to forgo an extra four years of civilian work experience to serve as aviation officers.

The impact on warrant officers may be as severe as the impact on would-be aviation lieutenants. Prospective warrant officers can see that the Army is having trouble retaining pilots, and they can also see that increasing the service obligation by four years works against their best interests. If pilots today are so unhappy that they are leaving in numbers higher than expected, why would prospective pilots accept a much longer service obligation for that same experience?

There are also discussions within the Army aviation community of additional changes that would make becoming a warrant officer even less appealing. Although neither has been officially announced, the Army is rumored to be considering two proposals: a provisional status for warrant officer candidates until they graduate flight school and an increase in time-in-grade to make chief warrant officer 2. However, Army aviation should not be compared with the other military branches—not least because of the widely varying costs of producing pilots.

The Government Accountability Office reported , for example, that it can take two years and three to eleven million dollars to produce a mission-ready fighter pilot. These figures do not include initial training—they solely account for the time and cost associated with the platform-specific training. For the Army, the costs are much cheaper. To create a mission-ready helicopter pilot, the Army invests between six hundred thousand and one million dollars during approximately one year of flight training.

Again, 70 percent of Army pilots are warrant officers, while Air Force pilots are all officers. The severity of the decline in recruiting will be unknown until the recruiting data comes in from the first affected class of cadets and warrant officer candidates.

But if online discussions are any indication , this ADSO will turn away a lot of prospective pilots. If retention suffers too much, the Army will face a pilot production shortfall that will add to the existing shortage.

If the Army rescinds this ADSO and reverts to the original six-year obligation, it will have six years to develop solutions to increase retention. The first step the Army must take is to implement exit surveys for pilots to determine why they are leaving. With this data, the Army can tailor solutions to address the issues that cause pilots to leave.

Furthermore, the Army should implement quality of life and quality of service surveys for every pilot who remains. Exit surveys are important, but those only capture the opinion of those whom the Army has already lost. The Army must also capture the opinions of those it can still retain. Lasting solutions must come in the form of quality of life and quality of service improvements. With survey data in hand, the Army will likely find that it needs to continue to invest in its aircraft fleet to ensure pilots receive adequate flight hours to remain proficient.

It must continue to remove burdens that plague the warrant officer community, such as non-pilot-related duties and frequent deployments to combat training centers. And finally, the Army will likely find that it should increase flight pay beyond what has already been offered. The future of Army aviation depends on retaining the pilots in whom it invests so much. However, increasing the service obligation of new pilots is the wrong course of action.

It involves no effort to understand the underlying factors that cause Army pilots to depart and is nothing more than a surface-level solution to a fundamental problem. By collecting data and then improving quality of life and quality of service with targeted retention initiatives, the Army will not just increase retention—the positive changes will increase the appeal of serving as a pilot in the Army, and recruiting will increase as well.

He is the author of the jumo brief , a free weekly newsletter for Army leaders. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense. Raising the service commitment ignores the actual root causes. Reading this in Jan 21, after 10 months of pandemic lockdown.

One of the reasons for the increased ADSO was related to demand from the private sector for pilots. Given the pandemic's direct and indirect effects on the aviation industry, is that even going to a concern going forward.

Though I agree that there is a retention problem, especially within aviation, I'm not sure the Army is focused on the right issue here. While a longer ADSO may help from looking solely at the numbers, it won't be effective at retaining quality talent. Aviation has always been a highly desirable branch, and gaining a slot has been a matter of performance or differentiation from peers whether OML or via a competitive application process. While there are some top performers that will elect to pursue the branch because they plan on a career from the beginning, there are far more that may be hesitant or undecided about committing to a decade of their professional lives to a niche field when they're only 22 or 23 if they aren't already passionate about everything aviation.

That hesitation will open up slots for others further down an OML or with less stellar accomplishments, potentially creating other issues related to performance or aptitude. In the last decade, retention has always been a hot-button issue. The root cause cited by those transitioning at various levels has related to toxic climates, mismanagement of professional profiles, quality of life, and unit culture.

I still don't understand how this ADSO extension is going to fix any of those issues, though it may act as a "gotcha" to get people "over the hill" in their Army career where they wouldn't feel like a transition at years of service would be a good decision. Ultimately, the Army needs to focus on the retention of quality talent; not on retaining mediocre talent for a longer period of time "because they can mandate longer ADSOs.

There will always be external factors and organizations that draw quality talent from the Army, but the Army should have more flexibility in their ability and measures to retain quality talent. Especially if they view retention as a big enough problem to justify an additional 4 year commitment from aviators. His administration's definition of readiness was turning maximum amount of red chicklets on spreadsheets to green, sending people over and over to the field and CTCs without any break, and endless rotations to Korea and Europe.

It's almost as though he completely and totally ignored the concept of morale and esprit de corps. I've been in the Army for a long time, and it's never been worse than now. One year dedicated to reset, one to training, one to deployment. Although busy, it left plenty of downtime for people to have actual lives.

On the reset year, units focused on team building, socializing, individual skills, and professional development. It also left plenty of time to have a normal life and spend time with one's family. That is completely and totally gone. This is anecdotal, of course, but nowadays there is no appreciable down time. It never ends. There is no reset. This is doubly applicable for aviation formations. Due to the extreme demand produced by the GWOT, ground formations are insatiable with their demand for aviation support.

Guess what? This means that aviation formations get screwed doubly — they have to support everyone's demands, while being vastly outnumbered. Their workload is increased several fold versus the units that they are supporting. So why are aviators getting out? Because honestly put — the lifestyle sucks nowadays. People have no time to actually live their lives. A large number of aviation personnel have a lot of passion and dedication to the mission, but that can only last so long when your life consists ONLY of the mission.

From this mid-grade officer's perspective — this constant obsession with readiness is actually detrimental to readiness. In an all-volunteer force, you won't be ready if most of your personnel in a critical branch want to get out. If people don't want to serve, you are actually harming readiness, not helping it.

You're losing highly skilled aviators that took millions of dollars and years to train. The increased ADSO only harms this effort further.

It further acts as a disincentive to those who would like to do the mission, but are unwilling to sacrifice a decade of their time in the event they don't like the lifestyle. Final thoughts — the social aspect of the Army has never been worse. My formation barely ever conducts social events. We are always either training or deploying.

There is no down time, no time to build family and relationships and the team. People are tired. The increased ADSO shows that senior leaders fundamentally do not understand the issues, and it will do nothing to address the attrition as the years go on.

It will harm recruiting and we will continue to bleed talent into the civilian aviation market. Why would you stay in the Army where you barely get to be a normal human, where you could make twice the pay, work half the amount, and actually get to live a somewhat normal life?

The answer is clear. Reading your first paragraph and skimming the rest I couldn't agree more. I transitioned from infantry to aviation and have had off-and-on heartache with it ever since. I have done more CTC rotations and in general "useless bs" since being aviation than I ever did infantry. I'm retiring in two years and it's not even to go to the airlines! I just want to stop leaving my family all the time! Just so we know I'm not a whiny do nothing: seven deployments, six combat for a total of 70 months and 66 months respectively.

Yes, that is 11 combat stripes. I see three and four star Generals with less, HOW?! Just to end it and walk away.. Not sure. Yes, they will retain aviators when the quality of life increases for aviation, not just grinding us into the ground until a new command comes along every months and does it all over again. Think about approving some ETPs. Look down — many of us are after something a little more challenging than the admin tasks of a 1SG or CSM. You must understand, the Army has an ace in the hole when filling the Warrant Officer aviation pipeline.

The Army is the only service which allow non college graduates in being Officers and pilots as we know. More than likely, the aviations slots will be filled by personnel lower on the OML. We need people with your background, dedication and professionalism in the warrant officer cohort. The best pilots I have served with were prior NCOs.

They used their experience to mentor and groom all the other warrants around them including myself. Very true. I'm about to retire from the Air Force as an engineer, O-4, mostly dest and staff job. I spend almost 20 years missing opportunities due to family, deployments, school, and fear to change.

I'm very healthy and fit, I would like to fly helicopters. We should approach our congressmen to change the re-entry rules to allow ATPs. I don't want to mess with my retirement, but would love a chance to fly for my country. Why not allowing retired personnel to do what they always wanted? If ATPs are granted, I'll be the first one to sign up as a warrant officer. Can you hear the roar of approval erupting from Army doctors across the globe serving out their decade plus commitments?

After working several years in the corporate sector in various strategic positions, I recently came back on active duty due to the strong desire to serve. It is extremely frustrating to see some officers and senior NCOS make such short sighted decisions to solve complex issues without finding the cause, and not conducting any type of research.

Often times these decisions being made do more harm than good, and cause a tremendous amount of work just look at our administrative packet processes. Well, when you have a system that initially punishes critical thinking, then requires it later on down the line, you're creating your own problem that ends up causing its own problems.

I think it would be a great idea to leverage senior NCOs to enter pilot training with a waiver. One problem with pilots is that we don't age well I'm not a military aviator, just a private pilot so there would be an issue of reaching a physical condition expiration date at some point. I retired in