Enlisted airmen might fly drones — and manned aircraft

"Enlisted airmen might fly drones — and manned aircraft": my guess is that this will occur in the Air Force immediately after Pigs fly.
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Reading that they have a date set to make a decision and are already anticipating an enlisted training start date......it looks like those Pigs may be warming up their wings.

Although I agree, it seems like the Officer Corps will fight this one hard.

I think they would need to go the way of the Army, all enlisted Drone "Operators", (Still have issues calling them pilots) and no officers, that would be the only way to prevent the strain between the two ranks.

As far as Enlisted in manned aircraft, I don't think there are wings big enough for that pig to fly.
 
Not a pilot, so hard to see why "flying" should remain exclusive domain of commissioned officers?
 
"When you first start, you're probably OK then, but after you've been in the business for 15 years, you're probably not going to be as happy about putting up with that because you're going to know an awful lot about the business — more — than that new commander does and they're making a lot more money."

I don't get this statement in the article. I know I've been out for a bit now but isn't this true about EVERY career field in the military? Hell I saw a Major lean out of his cube once to tell the new butter bar to shut the hell up when he was trying to tell Chief how to do his job.
 
How is this a shocker to anyone regarding RPAs? The AF is having issues with officer retention in that career field.

The article does not address how they will fix the pipeline. There are enough of officers via AFROTC waiting months for training, adding enlisted makes it even more clogged.

The true RPA problem is too many are leaving at a faster rate than they can refill them.
 
Its about time for the AF to start considering enlisted RPA operators. The Army has proven that its not necessary to have a commissioned officer "flying" these aircraft. In fact, its actually hurting us in terms of retention which ultimately will impact our ability to perform the mission effectively.

Manned aircraft on the other hand is a different story. Unless we bring back warrant officers, you will never see an aircraft commander who isn't commissioned.
 
WO/CWO would make sense, but the AF doesn't do that, for some reason.

...the "poor personnel management" bit rings pretty true though. Even in the last year we've seen the AF fire a bunch of pilots, then panic that they don't have enough pilots in different airframes...
 
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