In the wake of a string of deadly military aviation accidents over the past several years, the U.S. Army is launching a major overhaul of how it trains new pilots that focuses on getting back to the basics.
The overhaul includes rethinking the type of aircraft used for training, along with a likely shift to a contractor-owned-and-operated schoolhouse.
“I think I have one sacred responsibility and that is to deliver competent aviators to the government,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence Command, said at an Army aviation conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last month. “I’m not sure that I’m doing that in spades right now.”
The fatal Jan. 29 collision of a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and a spate of Army aviation mishaps over the last several years have been at the forefront of the minds of Army aviation leaders as they attempt to rein in the crisis and improve aviation safety.
In addition to other efforts to try to reemphasize a culture of rigorous training and safety, the Army began taking a hard look at redeveloping its basic training program at Fort Novosel, Alabama, fueled by the most mishap-heavy years in Army aviation history since 2007.
The Army found inexperienced crews were “out-driving their headlights, out-training the experience that was in their force at whatever level,” then-commander of the AACE, Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, told Defense News on a 2024 trip to Fort Novosel, Alabama, home of Army aviation training.
Now, the Army is in hyperdrive to reimagine how it trains aviators in an increasingly complex world where combat proficiency is waning and experience gaps at the highest levels are growing.
Pivoting the chopper
The motivation to make changes was compounded by the Army’s decision in 2013 to retire its TH-67 training aircraft and replace them with more expensive LUH-72A Lakota light utility twin-engine helicopters.
The decision was a matter of necessity. The Army faced the choice of either needing to comply with congressional sequestration requirements that mandated cutting every program evenly across the board or making tough choices internally to avoid making salami slices across its budget.
But critics worried the Lakota was too exquisite and pricey for basic training.
“It is a very good helicopter,” Gill told Defense News in a recent interview. “But in some cases, it assists the student in things that we wouldn’t want the student assisted in.”
For instance, the automated flight control system “will help you with heading control. If you jumped in a very simple aircraft … if you don’t push the pedal commensurate with how you apply the collective, you will start spinning in a circle and then if you push too much, you go the other way,” Gill said. “So that’s the first time you learn to hover. It’s a little bit of that dance. They don’t have that challenge in the Lakota because it helps them.”
Army aviators coming out of basic training now “don’t have that early struggle, where you really have to kind of learn to control the airplane,” he added.
The easier-to-fly Lakotas are also turning out to be harder to maintain. Airbus, the Lakota’s manufacturer, is headquartered in France. Calling in a company maintenance engineer when a fleet-wide issue needs to be addressed is sometimes up against the tyranny of distance, Gill said.
But Airbus says its lead Lakota program managers based in the U.S. work diligently via phone with the Fort Novosel team “every day to help work through any maintenance issues that arise,” according to an Airbus official.
Airbus Helicopters North America is based in Grand Prairie, Texas, and has offices across the U.S. to include Alabama. Lakota maintenance technicians are located at Fort Novosel along with a senior Airbus program manager. The factory where all Army Lakota are made is in Columbus, Mississippi.
A twin-engine helicopter also requires twice the components.
“You don’t need to be a helicopter pilot or mechanic to understand that there are more things to maintain,” Gill said. “Sometimes that means more things can break.”
The Lakota has cost the Army roughly $3,000 per flight hour, which is nearly the same as the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk, Gill said. Some of the training aircraft that the Army is taking a look at now could potentially cost between $500 and $1,300 an hour.
In 2020, the Army commissioned a study through Boston Consulting Group that determined the service could save “hundreds of millions of dollars” by transitioning to a single-engine trainer.
An additional study with a College of William & Mary MBA fellowship program determined that a contractor-owned, contractor-operated, or COCO, model would be preferable to the current government-owned and operated method.
Boston Consulting has been rehired, Gill said, to dive deeper into a business case analysis for a basic aviator training COCO model.
Course correction
The Army is now running a pilot program with Robinson Helicopter that began at the beginning of April where it is sending some of its current flight students to Marianna, Florida, to learn to fly using a Robinson R66 helicopter and to go through a Federal Aviation Administration private pilot training program.
As part of the program, the students will log five solo flight hours. An FAA private helicopter certification requires 10 hours.
“I think that flying in that unsupervised fashion is just critically important to the development of the mature aviator that we expect we would generate out of the world’s greatest flight training program. The FAA is doing it, why in the world wouldn’t we do it with Army aviators,” Gill said.
“So the question is what’s going to happen on the back end of that final program? Are we going to produce a less proficient aviator than I’m building at Fort Novosel in the UH-72,” Gill asked.
“I’m very interested in what this pilot program is going to tell us,” he said.
Should the Army choose a COCO model to train its aviators, much of the daily headaches schoolhouse leaders face would transfer to the company hired to train them.
“The brilliance of the COCO model is that it’s not my thing to worry about,” Gill said. “Now all I say is, ‘I want 1,350 pilots at the end of the year; you figure out how.’”
The number of helicopters needed in the fleet, maintenance requirements, the number of instructor pilots and their experience levels and every other aspect of training aviators will be determined by an industry partner.
Industry will need to come with the tools that produce solid aviators.
“The need for better stick and rudder skills is at the core of both battle readiness and even just safety,” David Smith, Robinson Helicopter CEO, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We talk about a high degree of automation in some of these products that doesn’t produce a great stick and rudder aviator.”
Opting for a simpler helicopter, like the R66, will also “drastically reduce the cost,” Smith said, “because our products just don’t have as many things that can fail, so they tend to be more reliable in service.”
Textron’s Bell is also looking to get back into the Army aviation training game after the service retired its TH-67 in favor of the Lakota.
“We fully intend to give them a turnkey contractor-owned, contractor-operated flight school solution,” Carl Coffman, Bell’s vice president of military sales and strategy, told Defense News at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference last month.
Bell is pitching its 505 Jet Ranger X as part of the package, but Coffman said, “We’re not trying to sell the Army an aircraft. I’m trying to sell you a service.”
Lockheed Martin also announced last month it would be pitching a turnkey solution.
Spooling up the rotors
The Army spends roughly $1.5 billion to run its flight school annually and produces 1,350 aviators, Gill said.
To transition to a new flight program, the Army will have to, for a time, pay to keep Lakotas in the fleet, he acknowledged.
“The challenge for the Army is, in order to do this, it costs more money up front,” he said.
The Army announced last month it would be ending some programs, consolidating commands and restructuring formations, including eliminating 11 air cavalry squadrons from the force.
Gill sees opportunity in the elimination of those squadrons. Money freed from operational flight hours could potentially go toward training hours instead.
Industry also has to be prepared to “own a good amount of the risk,” in addition to the funding the Army would provide to establish the new training program, Gill said.
The Army wants to move quickly to establish the program. Gill said the plan is to release a draft request for proposals this month. Another industry day will be held in July where companies can bring their capabilities for demonstration opportunities.
Then the service will release a final request for proposal in the fall or winter of calendar year 2025 and evaluate proposals in 2026.
“I would like to get this thing going early in [fiscal] 2027,” Gill said.
Companies have estimated they could likely get a program up and running within two years, but Gill said he has directed industry to try to truncate that timeline by half.
“We cannot do this fast enough,” he said.
This story has been updated to include comment from Airbus on its maintenance efforts and U.S. based organization.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.