600-ship navy, he said america's strength is the bedrock of the world's security. for the freedom we guard is not just our own. freedom is worth protecting. you know that because you made a choice to do something for a purpose. to be air men. god bless you all and god bless the united states of america. [ applause ] >> happy birthday to my fellow airmen. i am director of the task force

and welcome to the panel on overcoming the national pilot shortage. our nation is currently not producing the number of highly trained pilots needed to meet national commercial and military needs. u.s. commercial airline exceeded 4,000 pilots in 2018 as expected to increase for the foreseeable future. the boeing company in july of this year released their 20-year outlook that stated the requirement for commercial pilots will double the 635,117 in north america and there will be an additional requirement for over 97,000 business pilots over the same period and in the next ten years, 42% of the major carriers of the united states pilots will retire over 22,000. in the air force where it is to fly and win, it will rely on a healthy ecosystem to maintain readiness and lethality in order to meet the national defense strategy.

the u.s. air force is currently over 2,000 pilots short of requirements. in the face of increased demand for industry, pilot retention has steadily decreased over the last five years. additionally the air force reserve and the national guard have failed to meet the full-time affiliation goals in the past several years. the decline in aviation professionals is a result of several factors caused by the nature in how we attract, produce and retain pilots. in increased operations tempo, a shift in resources from the conventional aviation and budgetary pressures tloed an underproduction of new pilot combined with the commercial aviation hiring. in the face of the current pilot shortage the air force must work to retain current pilots while growing and producing a great number of new pilots at the same time they're competing to find, attract or grow or risk grounding plane, closing routes and losing market share. the current pilot shortage is a

challenge that our panel is exceptionally qualified to address. before we begin our panel discussion today i would like to introduce our panelists who bring diverse perspective from active duty to the national pilot challenge. i will give each panelist an opportunity to share their thoughts and perspectives and that will open up the discussion for the audience for q and a. >> they'll have the opportunity to submit questions via text and to whom on the panel your question's directed to start thinking of questions now as we introduce the panel. on my left, lieutenant jern ral wright director of the national guard and responsible for formulating approximately sees and plans affecting more than 405,000 guard members. general wright's a command pilot flying over 4300 hours. mr. gene colabofkio and

president of cae and appointed president of cae? june of 2012 and he has more than 25 years of experience in the defense industry and has held leadership positions in both military and the private sector. the cae was the leader in aviation education providing high-fidelity simulators and other teches to that can be leveraged to impact the training pipeline. general miller is the commander, any she's response imfor more than 123,000 air force reserve member and dod civilians. general miller was chief of the air force reserve headquarters and the command. the command pilot with over 4800 hours with numerous aircraft. >> captain jim graham is the vice president of operations and chief pilot of delta airline and the overall conduct of delta's worldwide daily flight operations which includes overseeing 14,000 pilots and 876 aircraft and the delta has held

subsidiary and afill ats on 5400 daily flights and it was naval aviator, and the final panelist, general mike holmes, and the command operates more than 1100 aircraft, 27 wings and 12 bases and more than 315 operating locations worldwide with 158,000 total force and civilian personnel. general holmes piloted 4,000 hours and 530 combat hours in a, b, c, d and e. >>. >> general wright, would you like to start us off with the opening comment. >> thank you for that introduction, and it's great to be in this line up of the panel because it is a great opportunity for us. >> we'll talk about the air crew crisis task force for the reserve component specifically the air national guard and this is a problem and not a crisis

and the crisis is coming, though, if you talk about the production and the use of pilots and the pilot affiliating against guard active and reserve and with our industry partners that total affiliation it does go in waves and cycles and right now, our cycle is fortunate that our economy is not doing well according to the airlines and they're doing well and that's an incentive. my issue and my problems as they turn into a crisis and we're talking about general goldstein talks about and that is the quality of service and the quality of life and it may be slightly different than an active duty lens and nevertheless, all of the things that we talk about can be put into one of those two categories where an air national guard can receive a quality of life of say, not moving and affiliated

with one place, one location and one mission and having the opportunity to fly for a long period of time and it's one thing the reserve component acts as a quality of life and the quality of life and the quality of service and the professionalism and the standards is relatively the same and exactly the same as the active duty and the amount of deployments we do in terms of the quality of the deployments is the same as across the total force. it's just maybe the quantity of deployments might be doifrpt how and when we deploy. so as i look at quality of life and quality of service, one of the things that i focused on a lot in having a desk and office in the pentagon is process. i spend a lot of time on process and one thing i'm working on is affiliation. it takes me months and sometimes almost years to affiliate a

pilot into the reserve component from the active service and particularly for other services where we have a current and qualified pilot say in the army or the navy. it literally takes months and months to go into the air force and that also goes with active duty members that want to affiliate where roughly last year in the order of magnitude in the 500 pilots left the service and we had roughly 25% of those did not a fail yat because of that barrier to affiliation called time and time being months and months into the reserves or guard is something that we want to pull the thread on and say how do we streamline that process? and there there's another piece on the back end, too, as we look at continuity of service and i define that as i can have the opportunity to pick a service i

would like to work for and a different period in time as my family evolves and as my need evolves whereas there is a time and place where we might join the military service and say i'm red for an adventure and you might find a spouse and say i'm ready to settle down for a little while, whether it be five years, ten years, 15 can i affiliate to a different model and go back into, say, active service where having the continuity of service to flow will be of great value to us as we looked at the future to provide opportunities for people to serve in the way that they can serve given their tremendous balance that industry might provide to each other that your immediate family and those that you love provide for you and the

passion and the heart and soul you have to be a patriotic part of the military where all of us provide that. with that, there are a lot of things we can do now for the quality of service and the quality of life that together with our industry partners as well as across the components as well as across the services we can do together. >>. >> thank you for the invitation to speak with the panel. the fact that we have members of industry here with uniformed members of the air force proves an important point in that this is a systems-level problem and we're a proud member of the total force solution to this problem and just a moment about the problem or the challenge before us. as the company involved in spending all of our day every day thinking about aviation and specifically aviation training and we think about what this

means to our partners in the military and our ability to help them achieve their mission specifically through the generation they need to put men and women in the cockpits of aircraft of all type we take an even broader perspective in that as we know, aviation is a tightly coupled ecosystem between the military and civil and commercial aviation. so as a corporation we take a look at that and understand that the ecosystem is worth inspecting because as the general mentioned there are new ways to think through this problem to ease some of the problems to increase throughput and finally, we believe that aviation is intrinsic and it's a vital component of our economy and our industry and it's an enabler of any other industry in the nation. so it's a serious issue for us

to work and every single day we think about what we can do as an industry partner to help improve the situation and we think about recruiting and training and development and ultimately about retention as part of that cueing model, that flow and we focus our time on the training and development perspective. our legacy and a lot of our brands for the last 70 years has been tied up in training devices and i would say that is very much true up until about ten years ago where cae in particular was involved in the high ed training devices and that was a supplement for flight training and they would never replace the training done in the actual cockpit. today, our reality as a company is quite a bit different in where most of our business today is the integration and the actual conduct of training and we use our flight training devices and in fact, we use

other flight training devices. we, of course of course use aircraft and we use the tools required to get the most highly qualified pilots and the men and women who would fill any position in the cockpit or as part of air crew fully qualified for their job. so what do we do today? a lot of what we do is we help by augmenting our air force customer and our air force partner by supplying highly qualified men and women to be instructors to do training management and to do training records and today, we're a big player on programs like the kc-135 and the c-130 and the variances of the c-130. and the remotely piloted aircraft and the m-2 and now the m-29 and there are other programs we participate in, but in some cases it's we're not

there and nor can we replace the uniformed members who have a role to train and also evaluate the younger members of the service because we know there's a lot more going on in that military school or in that training than the rudder skills. this is where members are being assimilated into the service and it will be the first contract with the military culture and ethos. we are very careful to make sure that we are a very solid contributor and overstepping the boundaries of what makes sense in the context of a military flight training enterprise. when i look to the future we find more and more opportunities and we're finding this is the business reality today. >> five years ago, cai on the defense side would have light training and now it is approaching 25% and our company today has grown for the last 50%

in the last five or six years and we've had this period of growth and it's by training and the defense placed on us by the fourth generation for remotely piloted aircraft and in fact, the air force's willingness to outsource and provide contracting support that were done traditionally by uniformed personnel. we do classroom training. we do certainly train personnel in the simulators and increasingly we're working along service members in the cockpit simply because the necessity is the mother of that invention. i expect as an industry we will do more and more of that up to the point it makes sense for the air force to allow a contractor to man a position that might not be an intrinsically government

function. >> i fully expect that that's where we're going as a business. >> when i think of the things we're doing to think ahead of the problem, we have the benefit of working in about 30 nations and we train about 125,000 pilots per year. that's a pretty large sample set and we very actively look for customers that may not have as much money or as many resources or have a similar through-put problem and we are constantly looking for best practices we can claim for our partners and the air force or another industry member and that is working for another part of the problem. the other part, of course is can you continue to upgrade the technology we provide whether that is technology in and around the aircraft. whether it's a high-end flight simulator all of the way down to devices that exist on a mobile device or a desktop so we can

very actively make the flow and make the training a curriculum and the training enterprise a little bit more efficient, maybe sometimes a little bit quicker and ultimately work all components of the problem and it's the gin put and that gets us the output and we are committed to the transform function with being as effective and efficient as possible. >> thank you, sir. >> senator miller? >> thank you. this is great conversation today and i look forward to your conversation so i'll make this brief, quick points. we are just too small for the missions that we've been asked to carry out and i read the policy paper on the mitchell institute from june of 18 and this year overcoming the pilot shortage and two highlights stand down and it is the new normal. the other piece and our airmen have declared that they're just worn out from the unrelenting, deployable tempo and the little white space in their lives and

let's look at the numbers for the math and the mobility forces, each year if i look back 15, 16, 17 and we lose roughly 416 and i need 420 a year to re those walking out the door. math pilots overall, 5,500, we are 44% of the pilot force. we are 40% of the air force losses each year. when you look at the aviation bonus take rates, we have historically '15, '16, and '17 followed in this line of acting component. for '18 we are half that number for the take rate. that's got my attention. when you look at the goal for pilot arc affiliation, the goal was 60% to 70%. we've been in the mid 60s for years. we are now at 35.7%. in '18, i haven't seen the number yet or the trend. what's amc doing with this? of course we have our aviator retention task force, general dewey everhart put this together last year in may. look at it -- six lines of

effort. and you'll recognize these and have heard them before. improve communication between the pilots and the families. additional duty reductions. fly-only track. we can talk about that a little bit. protect the white space. families, can we seek accommodations with assignments, we're working hard at that. and deployment. can we reduce the non-command 365 by 20%? we're going after that. my focus is going around and visit the wings. i've been in the job ten days, so i have yet to do that, but i'll get out and hit all the wings in the next couple of months. it's to talk about the meaningful conversation about the value of serving this country and the value of making a difference. that's where we're going to make the difference. thank you. >> thank you, ma'am. captain graham? >> thank you. first i want to tell you how much i -- i'm honored to be on this panel. i do have to question a little the security screening because a naval aviator was able to sneak under the wire and into this panel -- i'm being -- without being tested one time. we can talk about that

afterwards. but what i do want to talk about this morning, you know, delta, currently we have a very strong contingent of military pilots, former military pilots, in our pilot ranks. as i look around this room, i know the words that you all live by -- honesty, integrity, leadership, teamwork. these are the same things we value at delta airlines, it's what built our culture years ago. and so the military pilots at delta are certainly a fundamental piece of our success and will be for some time to come. currently we have about 45% of our 14,000 pilots who are paramilitary and 55% who are civilian. that percentage of military pilots is actually decreasing because, frankly, we don't have the same number of military pilots that are exiting that we had 10, 15, 20 years ago. but i can assure you that delta looks at all of the military pilots as a tremendous asset.

what we need to understand is that that is a pipeline that will be open -- as long as i'm in this job, and for the foreseeable future at delta airlines. but it can't be the only pipeline that we have coming in. right now at delta we have 14,000 spotlighpilot, as i saidl have to hire 8,000 pilots, to be politically correct, for a generational tap-out. that's hitting age 65, mandatory retirement. we have pilots that will have to mandatorily retire. we'll have to replace 8,000 pilots over the next ten years. every -- every airline, every industry group out there runs its own study, and of course delta has our own. what we project over the next seven years, actually from 2020 to 2027 is that this generational retirement will create a need for over 80,000 pilot jobs in the u.s. and if we stay, take a snapshot

at the current number of pilot starts and those who actually go forward and then move into the airlines or move into some sort of form, whether the major airlines, the regional arlts, the charter operations, we could find ourselves 20,000 pilots short by the end of that 2027 time frame. we have stepped in, and we are actively hiring from the regional airline groups, the charter airline groups as well as the military, and we've also found that it's necessary for us to actually reach out and create outreach programs. so we're in the schools now. we're in the high schools, we're in the junior highs. we've actually come up with a program for our own delta employees that if a decide to transition into the pilot life, we can mentor them along the way. we just kicked off our newest program, and i think the one that will be very, very valuable for our college pilots out there, prospective pilots. and that's called our propel program. and the propel program started off with eight universities.

we hope to run this at about 300 pilots per year. and we would actually go through an interview process that would allow that pilot in that university to get a qualified job offer at delta airlines, to have a mentor assigned with them that is a delta pilot, who will help and create their professional experience as they move through flight instruction, going to a charter or regional outfit. i'm happy to see we also have a military avenue there with either the guard or the reserve. so at the end of a designated time frame, currently we're stating 42 months, then that pilot would be able to come to the delta pilot seniority list. we think this is going to be a tremendous program to entice the pilots out there to be able to take a look at delta airlines, certainly the airline life compared to the military life, when you choose the airline hear that -- airline that you're going to go to, you do it with the best information that you

can. typically a seniority-based system. it is one that you make the decision very clearly before you step in, and we want to make sure that delta is able to answer all the needs of the prospective pilot for their entire career. i can also say that we have to work on our diversity within the airlines. and -- >> national commissioner of cyber patriot, brigadier general bernie scotch -- [ applause ] >> thank you for being with us this afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we're delighted that you're part of this conference. and so far it's been terrific. i think you would agree. this afternoon's exception is about transforming large enterprise enterprises in at internet-of-things world. you hear from the chief about transformational ideas. we have general witch, vice chief of the air force, the chief executive officer of at&t business, and anthony greco, the global trust strategy