Air Force changes course in pandemic
SAN ANTONIO — On just about any pre-pandemic weekday, before the term “social distancing” had ever been heard, the 559th Flying Training Squadron would be bustling.
Planes would speed down runways. Groups of officers would break away at lunchtime for burgers at Chester’s, a popular restaurant a short drive from Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph.
Clusters of students in dark green flight suits would be briefed before or after their missions by instructors like Capts. Cate Miller and Glen Gibbs, who would lead them to the flight line and back after a day in the air. They might meet later in the Heritage
Room, tugging a jet-plane control joystick to draw cold beer from a keg.
With COVID-19 crowding San Antonio-area hospitals and the threat of the disease choking social and economic life, the squadron, which trains pilots to teach others to fly, might not be recognizable to instructors who learned the trade just a year ago.
Far fewer airmen are here.
The Heritage Room is closed. Things are different at home, too, right down to the way pilots care for their kids or socialize.
The Air Education and Training Command oversees 30,000 people in various training pipelines, including for undergraduate and instructor pilots. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in a message at the outset of the pan
demic, said training is mission essential, an understatement to anyone who’s served in a military that’s been at war since 9/11.
As airmen leave the service, they have to be replaced, and the AETC in San Antonio produces many of the officers and enlistees needed for 309 career fields. Randolph’s two runways saw 207,000 takeoffs and landings last year, 43,130 more than San Antonio International Airport.
Aviators are chronically in short supply. Last year the Air Force was 2,100 pilots below what it needed. Early in the pandemic response, undergraduate pilot training slowed to 50 percent of capacity but had largely recovered by late May, an AETC spokeswoman, Marilyn Holliday, said.
“We’re confident in our ability to operate with a virus in our midst,” she said in an email, but there was “no question” the pandemic’s recent spike will affect the pace of training, so the command’s expectation that 1,200 new pilots will be produced by the end of the current fiscal year is “purely an estimate.”
Instructor pilots, though, are graduating roughly on schedule, with 250 new ones expected by the end of the fiscal year.
Pilot training squadrons scattered at 11 bases, including Randolph, have had “a very small number” of coronavirus cases among pilots, but like other service branches, the Air Force doesn’t provide exact numbers for particular units, Holliday said.
More pilot retention
The COVID-19 crisis that has scrambled training across the armed services has also improved pilot retention because it has hammered the airline industry, a constant source of competition for pilots.
A little more than a week ago, 222 Air Force pilots had been approved to remain past their original retirement or separation dates, including 153 who chose to stay beyond Sept. 30.
The myriad complexities, and sobering risks, of training pilots in a pandemic become clear at the 559th’s front door, where a sign reads, “Essential personnel only.” These days Lt. Col. J.C. Gorman might see roughly a third of his 120 airmen — when he’s there.
Like everyone else, the commander works in his office three days a week and from home the rest of the time, a concession to the risks of too many people gathering in one place as the worst pandemic in a century sweeps through San Antonio.
There are other concessions, but the work at Pilot Instructor Training — or PIT, as it’s called — gets done.
“We view this as a national security priority, to continue pilot production, and that’s what we’re going to do. So my goal as the commander of the 559th, only within my scope, is to not eliminate risk — I can’t eliminate risk,” he said. “If I did that, I would just stop flying.”
Calculating risk
There was a rhythm before and after the coronavirus for Cate Miller, 32, and her husband, Lt. Col. Drew Badgett, 41. Both instructor pilots in the squadron with a 10month-old son, Dylan, they’re spending more time at home but on different schedules.
They used to work Monday through Friday, with Miller coming in early, around 6 a.m., to fly once or twice a day and heading home early in the afternoon.
“You only really see one half the squadron at a time,” said Miller, a 10-year Air Force veteran with 1,700 hours in the T-6 and C-130. “There are people you haven’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic because they’ve been on the opposite shift of you.”
“All of our classes and academic instruction that we used to do … in the classroom or on the flight line with the students, we just do via Zoom or Microsoft Teams or one of the other platforms that allow video conferencing.”
The squadron has switched to 10- to 12-hour shifts but only three days a week, so Miller now goes in on Tuesdays, Thursdays and weekends. Badgett, a C-130 cargo plane pilot who instructs in the T-6, works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Gibbs also works every other day. He packs a lunch at his home before heading to Randolph to brief his students before taking off. Those in the squadron not only wear masks in the building but also don them when they exit the T-6 after landing.
He’ll fly with an average of 15 instructor pilot students a month, going up twice a day. A KC-135 tanker pilot with 750 combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan, Gibbs is well aware of the pandemic risks. It hit his family — a great aunt in her 70s died of COVID-19, while an uncle made a full recovery.
He’s single and lives alone, yet another stress point. Civilian friends help, dropping off groceries and other necessities at the front door.
“Living by myself and social distancing, it gets a little lonely sometimes. I’ve been using a lot of the technological tools we have available, like I’m sure everybody else has,” said Gibbs, 33. “That’s helped a little bit. And then just trying to get creative with staying in shape.”
Gorman’s order to reduce the number of instructors is a riskmitigation measure that brought the squadron from 120 airmen on any given day to 40 or 50.
A major focus for Gorman, 39 of Cibolo, has been on communication. He mapped plans to use video teleconferencing for instructors to conduct flight briefings, but shelved them because in-person sessions are better. But he’s using video conferences to talk not only with fellow pilots but families as well, explaining the risks being taken in the squadron and why.
Married, with a 7-year-old son, he knows the stress is everywhere.
“It is incredibly difficult for our family, and I would say that’s not just true of my family,” Gorman said.
For Miller, the on- and offschedule at the squadron puts time with her husband at a premium. They have one full day together per week and must juggle caring for Dylan, who was born three months early. The family got a taste of the current precautions after his delivery during flu season. They stayed home a lot.
These days, they get food delivered and do curbside pickup at a restaurant. One of the big stress relievers, for them and many other Air Force pilots, is getting into the cockpit and flying. Another is simply having a steady job.
“I feel very fortunate that, one, we don’t have to be worried about where our next paycheck is coming from and that we’re still able to work there,” Miller said.
Gibbs, who majored in math at the University of Georgia and holds a master’s in engineering management, follows the news but tries to limit screen time by reading a good book.
He’s on the third season of the series “The Americans,” doesn’t date, and hangs out with only one friend.