The US Army is moving to outsource the first stage of helicopter pilot training in a substantial shift that will hand a role long filled by military aviators over to a private contractor.
M1 Support Services, a Texas-based aviation contractor, will provide entry-level helicopter training, the Army announced last week.
The new “Flight School Next” program will provide the aircraft, equipment, simulators, and classroom, as well as the flight training for between 800 and 1,500 new pilots each year at Fort Rucker, Alabama, for up to 26 years as part of a deal worth up to $10 billion. The service says that the shift is intended to modernize training and save money.
The change comes as Army leaders have questioned whether the current training model is sufficiently preparing junior pilots for more advanced flight training. Turning the training over to a private company upends a foundational piece of Army aviation training. Traditionally, senior Army helicopter pilots have trained their junior counterparts, serving as instructors in yearslong assignments.
“Flight School Next delivers a critical improvement in our Initial Entry Rotary Wing Training model. Simply put, it delivers new military helicopter pilots with far better foundational skills,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, the commanding general of the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence, said in a press release. “The fact that it delivers this increased capability at a significant long-term savings to our Army is a great added benefit.”
While M1 Support Services will handle the early flight training, the Army will continue to oversee follow-on training for pilots, depending on what type of helicopter they’ll eventually fly. All military aviators, whether they’re destined to fly jets, cargo aircraft, or attack helicopters, begin with basic rotary-wing or fixed-wing training before moving on to learn to fly specialized military aircraft that require advanced skills.
The new Army announcement did not say when the new program would begin training students.
The Army has said it wants a simpler training aircraft to help new pilots develop fundamental flying and aircraft maintenance skills before progressing to the military’s advanced helicopters.
The service currently uses the UH-72 Lakota for basic training, but Army aviation leaders have previously said that the aircraft is too easy for inexperienced students to master, according to Army Times reporting.
Speaking of Army transformation, Gill, who is overseeing changes associated with the new contract awarded to M1 Support Services, said earlier this year that the Lakota basic training helicopter produces pilots who are “good systems managers but not good stick and rudder pilots.”
“We really need to go to something simpler to teach the fundamental skills of our pilots,” the general said last year of flight training, adding that the Army had hit an “inflection point where we either need to recapitalize what we have and do more of the same, or we can look at ourselves and say, are we delivering the capability the Army needs in the most effective and efficient manner here?”
The new helicopter pilot training contract comes as the Army, Navy, and Air Force are offering large bonuses, in some cases up to $280,000, to retain some of their most experienced aviators, even as the services increasingly invest in uncrewed aviation.
