 Good morning Chiefs, everybody good for about 30 minutes or you guys need to take a break now? Good? Okay, so we're all adults here, if you guys need to go up, if you guys need to go go, we'll ridicule you as you walk out and as you walk back in. I know that every single one of you woke up this morning thinking about one thing, how do we make more pilots? I know that every one of you, because that's what I woke up thinking about today. I'm Eric Thompson, I'm the 19th Air Force Command Chief. And in 19th Air Force, which we have about 20 folks here from 19th, that is 90% of what we do on a daily basis is make pilots. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit, I got a couple of slides I want to show you. I don't have a wiring diagram, I'm sorry I can't keep up. But I want to talk about what we do, why we do it. And then I want to talk about how we are working together across AETC to do a holistic approach to creating airmen, airmen that fly specifically. And then make sure that we're all capitalizing off each other's gains. So, I had a clicker here it is. For those of you that are TED Talks nerds, this is the cool clicker that they always use at TED Talks, I always like this one. So 19th Air Force, yep. Mission and priorities, you guys can get that off the website. So, 19th Air Force didn't, well, really kind of went away for about five years and then started back up about two years ago. This is a lot of words that talks about the fact that aviation training was a train wreck because without a NAF to kind of corral 11 wings and a whole lot of cats moving in different directions, we just, there was so much going on, we had maintenance problems, we had airplane problems, we had discipline problems, we had airmanship problems. We had just straight administrative problems, right? So finally, the AETC commander said enough, I'm tapping out, I need a NAF there again. Started up the NAF, started with 19 people. 19th Air Force now has 265 people assigned to the headquarters. Now, who can tell me why that's weird? Zero to 99, thank you. Another nerd that has read their PDG enough times to know that without a headquarters A1M waiver, you're not supposed to have more than 99 man power positions. We do have the waiver, thank you. Alright, so what do we do? We create aviators. If you wear wings in the United States Air Force, you are a product of 19th Air Force. I don't care if you're officer or enlisted. There's also a couple of enlisted AFSCs that fall under us as well. So one Charlie Fives and weapons directors, anybody, any of those in here? Yeah, and then Sear also falls under 19th Air Force. So where does it all start for us? It starts with how do we create instructor pilots and instructor aircrew members that are going to build the force, right? So we do that at Randolph Air Force Base under the 12th Flying Training Wing and the 340th Flying Training Group, which is one of our total force partners. And then we take young officers and their first step is introductory flight training at Pueblo, Colorado. Now this is actually a contract vehicle. It costs us about $14,000 per pilot candidate to send them through anywhere between a three-week and a five-week course, depending on where they're going, to help, believe it or not, push stick forward, houses get bigger, pull stick back, houses get smaller, right? Push throttle forward, you go faster. These kind of basic aviation skills. And then they go to their undergraduate pilot training wings or undergraduate CISO training, right? So this is their first year of their life where they learn to fly. They learn the things that are required as far as flight discipline, academic requirements, crew coordination, working in an aviation airspace, like Class B, Class C, Class D airspace, all of these things that are very important in an aviator because it's not just about this, right? You can teach a monkey to do this. How do you teach a monkey to understand everything that's going on around them, be able to assimilate all that data and make smart decisions so that you don't put two airplanes in the same airspace at the same time, which is not a recommended technique? And then after they do their undergraduate pilot training, somewhere along there, they're going to track, right, to a specific type of airplane and then a specific airplane, and then they're going to get their assignment, right? So if they're going to go to the MAF branch, to the Mobility Air Force, they're going to track out to a formal training unit at one of these, probably one of these three locations. If they're going to be soft, special operations, then they're going to go to Kirtland, and they're going to spend some time at Kirtland, and then some will follow on to Holbert Field and do some of the training at Holbert Field. If they're going to be pointy-nosed that go fast and hack their watch and eat all the food at Happy Hour at the bar, right, that's a fighter-pout joke, I got a lot of them, believe me, I work with fighter-pouts all day long, then they're going to go to one of these places, right? So if you're in 19th Air Force, you're at one of these 11 wings, and you're creating air power every single day. You are generating air power for our Air Force every single day. This is where we do it, all across the United States. Part of what makes my job great is the same thing that makes my job challenging. I have 17 locations across the United States that I'm trying to keep tabs on, and try to get touch points with all of our airmen throughout the year. So it's tough, but it's amazing because we've got folks everywhere doing great stuff. So these are the numbers. I want to go back to Chief Lee's slides a little bit. How many line officers do we assess every year? 1,200, yeah. How can I make 1,500 officer aircrew out of 1,200 accessions? What are we missing out of that number? What? What other pool do I get officer accessions out of to make pilots? The Academy, the United States Air Force Academy, right? Probably one of my largest pools is aviation cadets out of the Academy. So you can see I make three different types of general officer aviators. I make pilots. I make CISOs, which are combat systems officers. That's kind of a catch-all term for WISOs, NAVs, EWOs, right? Not a pilot. Let's put it that way. And then I make ABMers, Air Battle Managers. So Air Battle Managers are kind of the ones that are playing the big chessboard game in flight in the back of an AWACC, so they're vectoring airplanes around to try to make sure that we're doing a 3v4. We're always doing a 4v2. You know, we always want to be winning when we do that. I make RPA pilots, make RPA sensor operators, right? And then you can see some of the other breakouts on there, to include enlisted aviators. So we have a lot of production. About 25, between 2,500 and 3,000 airmen a year, and I use big A airmen, get their wings through a 19th Air Force program. So a pretty big part of what we do is an Air Force, and you guys are a part of that engine. That's a terrible slide, I need to get rid of the gray background, sorry. What are my priorities? Support the wings. So our NAV is weird because my boss spent a lot of time as chariot. For those of you that have not deployed and not seen that, chariot is the call sign for the director of the KOC in CENTCOM, right? So he believes in the KOC concept. He believes that the NAV should exist to support the wings, and if it doesn't support the wings, there's no point in the NAV being there. So we're not allowed to say no, right? We get a check right every day from our wings, so our wings tell us whether we're doing the job right or not, and we have to justify every single day how we are supporting the wings and how we're doing what the wings need to be done. And if we can't do that, then we need to change our process and get after them. So great boss, Major General Doherty, he's phenomenal. So that's the prepared slides. I want to get into what we're doing to kind of make some of this stuff better right now. So how many of y'all have heard of pilot training next? Yeah. All right. So we finished version one. For those of you that have not heard of pilot training next, right now it takes between 14 and 29 months to make a pilot. Think about that for a minute. 29 months from the day they put bars on their collar to be in a pilot. They're almost captains by the time they get mission ready and can deploy. If they're on a 10-year commitment, we've wasted 40% of our time. 40%. That's not acceptable, right? So what we need to do is we need to make sure we're doing that a little better, a little smarter, a little faster, and we need to stop trying to train people like we did back in 1956 and we need to at least get in this century. So instead of 12 to 14 months, we said, hey, let's do it in six months. Let's get some AI in there. Let's get some VR in there. Let's do some deliberate instructor-to-instructor training, right? And let's just break the mold. So instead of 14 months, we did it in seven months. We did it with T6 only. We have those people in F16s and F35 FTUs right now, and they're doing great. That was a pretty big eye opener, right? So we learned some other stuff that we shouldn't do about talent management in a session, right? We went right after IQ. That's not the right answer, right? In fact, the smartest person in the testing was the first one to drop out of the class. Maybe we don't want pilots that are too smart. Maybe we want pilots to be a little dumb. That's how you get them to fly into threats. Version 2 is going on right now. Much better assessment, right? So we think we're tracking on that one. The 20 candidates all made it through introductory flight training. They did a great job, and they're doing pilot training next right now. And then we'll do version 3 down at Randolph a little later on this year. So that's one part of what we're doing to partner with everybody else. The second part is the airmanship next program at the academy that we're working with. So you guys have seen the gliders and the Cessnas and the jump at the academy, right? If you haven't just nod and pretend you haven't, then go Google it later. That's how we generate enthusiasm and begin creating professional aviators at the academy level. Now the question is how do we thicken that pool, right? How do we make sure that the pool of candidates that we're getting in aviation are the best candidates that we can get? And so I'm going to go off on a little tangent here for a minute as we talk about how we select pilots. So I was at an introductory flight training day one class about a month ago. 87 candidates sitting in that class. 87 brand new second lieutenants getting ready to become aviators. Of those 87, 79 of them were white males. There were six females, no I'm sorry, seven females and one minority. Now I'm not going after diversity just for diversity's sake. I'm going after the question of who are we missing? Who are we not getting in the aviation world because of the way that we assess pilots? We assess pilots based off AFOQT scores and something called a PIXUM score. Anybody heard of PIXUM before? So that's your pilot navigator stuff, right? And then we give special bonus points to people who have a private pilot's license. We're going after inadvertently a pretty specific demographic. So we need to reassess that, we need to re-look at that. Chief Gudgel's up at the headquarters, they're looking at that a little bit. We're looking at that a little bit in 19th Air Force and we're partnering with USAPA and the Airmanship Next program to widen that base and get more candidates in VR airplanes so that we can go, hey, I know you were thinking about being a comm officer, but man you're actually really good at this flying thing. Maybe you should look into, we'll do some little training with you, we'll try to work on getting your PIXUM score up and we'll try to get you into a cockpit. I think it's really important that we don't miss people just because inadvertently we have looked for a very specific skill that only certain people may have access to or may not have access to. Does that make sense? So we're doing pilot training next, we're doing airmanship next. We just did a sprint at AFWORKS at Las Vegas where we looked at how we make ABMers, we looked at how we make RPA pilots and we looked at how we make vertical lift pilots and we think we can cut 30 to 45% out of that pipeline just because the way that training is set up right now is when you show up at day one of pilot training, you may have 30 to 40 days before you actually start training because everybody's got to get there and everybody's got to start together. Do you think I would give you your books and let you start reading ahead? Absolutely not because then you would have an unfair advantage over your classmates. Let's stupid, right? So I have lieutenants sitting around with money and nothing to do. It keeps my first sergeants busy, which is great, right? But at the end of the day I'm wasting days. I'm wasting training days. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 lieutenants, aviation candidates in some form or training or another that are in casual status right now across the Air Force. That is wasted manpower. That is air power that could be in operational units and so we've got to fix that, so we're trying to get after that. And so we're trying to take all these lessons, push them into the FTUs and figure out how to make the FTUs a little better, a little stronger, and a little faster. And then the last thing we're doing is we're trying to partner with Second Air Force who's going to come up here and speak a little bit. I know Chief Bass is going to tell us some great stuff about what tech training is doing, but trying to federate what we're doing with VR, right? A lot of people are doing, who's got some kind of VR, AR going on in their wings right now? Yeah. What is the Air Force doing for VR, AR? That's a great, right? So what we're doing right now is we're trying to move together as one on an Air Force program for AR, VR. And the one that we're looking at right now, I don't know it's the one we're going to buy, but it's one we're looking at, is called the Virtual Hanger. And when you step into the virtual world, you're literally in an aircraft hanger and there's planes in there and you can have whatever plane in there you want. I don't care, right? But you can have an instructor from another state, heck, somewhere across the world, in the hangar with you, students from all over the Air Force together doing that on an airplane. So for maintainers, for aircrew, that's awesome. What if you're a firefighter and you want to detail with your brand new fire dogs how to appropriately approach a burning building or do egress for a specific airplane that they may never have seen before, right? You can do that all on VR. What if you're a 2T2 and you need to teach your students how to drive a payloader up to the back of the C5 or C17? You can do that in VR from across the Air Force together, right? So we are working very hard with our partners in AOTC to make sure that we are bringing this out as one and not just everybody doing their own little thing. All right, so I'm going to stop there. I'm going to shut up and I'm going to turn it over to you if you guys have any questions for 19th Air Force. Pausing or reassessing? So the question, his question was, can I give an update on enlisted RPA pilots in the future of that? And the answer is no, not because I don't want to, but because that is a secretary of the Air Force and half program that is delegated to AFPC for execution and I don't actually own it. I can tell you that the designated goal was 50% of our Q4 pilots. We're going to be enlisted pilots. I think we're close to that goal is the last word I heard from AFPC, but I don't know where we're going from there. I would defer to Chief Gudgel for anything else on that one, but I'm sure there's something coming on that one. I just don't know where we're going. Who's next? Hey, Chief. Chief Rubio 351st Special Warfare Training Squadron out of Kirtland. We suffer the same situation as far as length of pipeline training. Right now some of the thought is going after the curriculum itself. Hey, how do we cut down? How do we reinvigorate and make it more effective? But really the waste is found within the pipeline itself sequencing. If you can get into a little bit more of how you guys are getting after that aspect of it, where your bottlenecks may be and what you're looking at. Absolutely. Great question. Here's what we found when we started looking at some of these pipelines. Too many different people control too many different aspects of the pipeline, and there was no one single person that was kind of taking a holistic look from day they enter service to day they set foot in their combat squadron as an MR whatever. We'll just say pilot because it's all about pilots. They start and they go to UPT and they show up to the UPT base where we Air Force are not starting the clock on them. We don't have any way of seeing that. Now Second Air Force does a great job with what's called the T-Talk, and I'll let Chief Pass talk about that. We're trying to get there. We're not there yet. We can't look at every single aviation candidate that's in training right now and I think we should be able to do that. They show up at one of the UPT bases, there's four of them, and their clock technically starts, but they're just kind of sitting, they're churning, they're waiting for their class to start. They go through all that and then they have between six and ten months from the day they graduate UPT before they actually start their FTU class. Now in theory there's some things that go on in there, but really it's just ten months of churn time. They're sitting around, you've seen casual attendance everywhere, they're filing papers or they're doing whatever that base has got their casual attendance doing. So what we've gone and done in 19th is we've taken certain pipelines and we've broken out the core competencies that we want them to have and then we've made them individual achievements. So I'm going to use video game language at this point to where you go through and you can rapidly, you can prove that you can do this to a 3C level, which is aviation training speak. Now you've unlocked the next level. So you can now step into it. So it doesn't matter when you do it, I don't care what timeline you do it with, it's not time-based, it's competency-based. Now, it's harder, it's more expensive, scheduling is tough, right? Because now you don't have people walking through together, now you have people going at different paces all the way through the grouping. But what it does is it allows people to learn at their pace using the tools that they learn best with and then demonstrate that capability and that capacity to the satisfaction of an instructor or evaluator and then move on to the next block. So that was really the key for us was to get rid of the time constraint and say that pilot training, for instance, is going to take 12 months because it's always, because we've built a curriculum that is 12 months long. Instead we say pilot training is the mastery of these skills and once you've completed all these and mastered all these skills, then you get wings and you go on to the next step. So that was the big key for us was to get rid of time constraint and go to capability-based. Good question. Anything else? Yes, ma'am. Okay, listen, real quick because I still have two minutes left. Congratulations. Awesome. Being a chief is an amazing thing. Being a part of this level of leadership in our Air Force is an amazing thing. The reason we're doing this MAGCOM breakout today is for you to understand all the different parts of what the AETC machine does so that you as strategic senior leaders in our Air Force can communicate that to your formations because your airmen are going to look at you and expect you to know the answers, right? And so you can at least talk to them a little bit. You can at least say, hey, that we have ground training in Second Air Force and we have aviation training in 19th Air Force and we have Air Force Recruiting Service and then we have Air University, which is everything continuation in PME, right? You can talk about all the things that AETC is doing on a daily basis. We have the 59th Med Wing and the 502nd Air Base Wing. We have these aspects in AETC and you're a part of that machine. So that's the whole point of today. I hope you guys get a lot of benefit out of it and congratulations again. Awesome. And Chief Gudgel said you're on break. Be back in 10, 10 minutes.