The Pilot Pinch

As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara never tires of pointing out, Viet Nam has necessitated neither the mobilization of reserves nor the imposition of wage-and-price controls at home. Yet the war has inevitably caused strains and shortages, none of them potentially more perilous than the dwindling supply of military aviators. Ironically, the attrition has resulted not so much from the hazards of Hanoi's MIGs and antiaircraft batteries as from the built-in competitiveness of American society in the jet and space age.

All four services--Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force--are flying thin. Though there are pilots enough to fill every cockpit in Southeast Asia, the same cannot be said throughout the rest of the world. Marine Corps Commandant Wallace Greene last month told the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee that his service is now 851 aviators short and by 1968 will be 1,021 pilots in the hole; Chief of Naval Operations David McDonald admits to "urgent pilot needs"; Air Force Chief of Staff J. P. McConnell worries about the "down ward trend" in pilot retention. The Army, whose 3,800 helicopter pilots in Viet Nam have virtually revolutionized the art of warfare, has more than tripled its output of chopper jockeys in the past year, but still lacks enough trained pilots to man all of its birds in Europe and the U.S.

Bright Young Men. Two factors account for the present pilot pinch: low training quotas in the early 1960s, plus the serious drain imposed by the U.S. civilian airlines, which need 6,000 new pilots every year to man rapidly expanding jet fleets and get 85% of them from the Navy and Air Force (which spend more than $150,000 to train each of them). "Look," explains one frustrated Air Force general, "we send a guy to Viet Nam for a year. Then he's supposed to be reunited with his family, but he's sent to Spain and spends an awful lot of time doing gunnery practice in Turkey or Libya. He's still away from his family 270 days out of the year. Pretty soon his wife remembers the American Airlines ad and says, They're looking for bright young men and you're a bright young man . . .' " To stop that drain, the Navy recently proposed a three-year moratorium on airline hiring of military pilots.

Already the services have replaced some bright, energetic young men with older, more senior pilots who normally would be flying subsonic desks in the Pentagon or stateside bases. McNamara himself recently ordered a screening of 1,864 Washington-based flyers to see if their jobs could not be held down by nonaviators. Stepped-up recruitment and training programs in all services should overcome the slump eventually, but as one Navy captain lamented: "We won't be well until sometime between 1971 and 1974."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.