![]() ![]() You might be assigned to command a flying squadron later in your career because your record, on paper, looks very competitive. If you fail to take care of your pilot career progression, everyone around you will know about it. There’s no way to hide it, and word gets around. ![]() Whether you’re flying in a formation or flying next to another pilot on a crewed aircraft, someone always sees if your skills aren’t up to par. Unlike many other professions, aviation is based on “street cred” and your performance comes with immediate feedback. However, their success in that job can suffer if they failed to take care of the pilot side of their career development. Many of these pilots do get assigned as flying squadron commanders. Many pilots pursue those non-flying opportunities thinking they can easily return to command a flying squadron when they reach the appropriate rank. However, there are opportunities to spend a lot of time in non-flying assignments and get promoted anyway. Up to a point, yes, you have to check some of the pilot career progression boxes we’ll discuss here as part of your officer career progression. You’d think that the opposite would also be true: you must be a good pilot to get promoted in the Air Force. It was a fight for him to get promoted to O-6. He missed out on opportunities because he was so focused on the pilot side of things that he struggled on the officer side. He wasn’t great with people and didn’t meet the Air Force’s ideals as an officer. Unfortunately, Boyd was sort of a terrible person. You might think that the Air Force would have sung his praises and promoted him all the way to 4-star General. And that was just one of his major accomplishments in the Air Force. He developed fighter doctrine and tactics, based on hard science, that USAF fighter pilots still use to this day. More importantly, he was the first fighter pilot in human history to use thermodynamics and computer analysis to figure out the math behind dogfighting. ) He was inarguably the best fighter pilot of his time. ![]() ( Here’s a fantastic biography about him. Perhaps the most poignant example of this was Colonel John Boyd. The Air Force is very fond of reminding its pilots that, “You’re an officer first and a pilot second.” You could be the greatest pilot in the world, but if you aren’t a “good” officer in the Air Force’s eyes you may not get the career progression opportunities you want. įor better or for worse, it’s necessary to look at your Air Force career progression from both of these perspectives. If you haven’t already read Part 1 about career progression as an officer, I recommend you click here and read it first. Welcome back to Part 2 of our series about career progression for Air Force pilots, from the pilot perspective. ![]()
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