Service Commitment for Army Pilots to Increase from Six to Ten Years

Well, you can get people to sign for a LONG time if you promise to train them on cool aircraft.
Not surprising, although I wonder how the retention rates will be affected.
 
Well it’s not like our retention could be that much worse. Now at least they have to wait longer until they lose pilots...

Honestly, while it’s absolutely horrible to think about, COVID and the resulting airlines contraction has probably been the single best thing for Army pilot retention that has happened in the last decade
 
Casey said:
Well it’s not like our retention could be that much worse. Now at least they have to wait longer until they lose pilots...

Honestly, while it’s absolutely horrible to think about, COVID and the resulting airlines contraction has probably been the single best thing for Army pilot retention that has happened in the last decade
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For those of us in '24 right now who are eyeing aviation, it's ironically the perfect storm. With the increased commitment likely to stay, those who were on the fence for aviation probably won't choose it, and those who really want it have a better shot of getting it. We have an 8 year obligation, anyway.
 
Flevvy said:
For those of us in '24 right now who are eyeing aviation, it's ironically the perfect storm. With the increased commitment likely to stay, those who were on the fence for aviation probably won't choose it, and those who really want it have a better shot of getting it. We have an 8 year obligation, anyway.
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I don’t blame you guys, but accessions has never been an issue for Army Aviation and I don’t anticipate the increased service commitment to attend flight school to change that. To expand on what I was saying a bit flippantly in my initial response, there will always be enough folks interested in flying to fill the relatively fixed number of slots in a given year at flight school. This fixed number can’t be easily increased based on maintenance, aircraft availability, instructors, etc.

Retention is a separate issue in some ways as it’s the convincing folks once they’ve already made it through the pipeline to stick around past when they have to. Currently, the Army is doing this poorly and that “fixed” number coming through flight school couldn’t keep up with the bleeding off of folks to other opportunities.

The ten year ADSO in my mind doesn’t change the retention problem; it just moves it down the road a bit to hopefully when it will impact the branch less. Not having a job to move over into the airline industry currently directly (or really a suffering outside job market as a whole) does impact retention as the grass no longer looks as green on the other side that it might have been to aviators looking to bounce a year ago
 
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