Pilots Bail Out of Military at Rate Pentagon Calls Alarming

Former Navy pilot Daniel E. Hartman calculates that if he had stayed in the service for 20 years, he would have spent at least 5 years away from his wife and children.

At 32, he looked ahead to 12 more years of deployments on aircraft carriers, where for six months at a time he would be “locked into a giant sardine can with five or six thousand other men.”

The price, he decided, was too high. In September, Hartman left the Navy and joined a growing number of young pilots whose departures from the military have become a cause for alarm at the Pentagon. With an estimated $1 million spent training each pilot, Navy and Air Force officials have watched anxiously over the last year as near-record numbers of highly skilled fliers bolted for private industry at the first opportunity.

“The outlook for next year looks to be even a little bit worse,” said Cmdr. Harry Allen, the Navy’s aviation community manager in Washington. The number of pilots who have filed requests to leave the Navy in 1989 is already 3% higher than 1988, Allen said.

Airlines Hire More

“The primary reason that we focus on is that airlines are hiring pilots,” he said. A decade ago, commercial airlines in the United States hired about 2,800 pilots annually; in 1988, the number will be more than 10,000, he said.

Figures kept by the Future Airline Pilots Assn., a private clearinghouse, show that in the first six months of this year, 64% of the pilots hired by major U.S. airlines were lured away from the military.

The Navy, with a shortage of about 1,400 mid-grade pilots, is particularly hard hit. Nearly half of the Navy’s 11,868 pilots are in the critical mid-grade group, in their sixth to 12th years as fliers, according to Allen. Experienced and gaining in maturity, these lieutenants and lieutenant commanders are the backbone of Navy aviation.

Figures for fiscal 1988, which ended Sept. 30, show that only 34% of the mid-grade group opted to stay in the Navy, down from 35% in 1987 and 54% in 1984.

The Air Force is doing somewhat better, with a 1988 retention rate for mid-grade pilots of 43%, but that figure is far below the 62% rate the Air Force considers a safe minimum. The Air Force rate has also been declining steadily--78% opted to stay in 1983--and projections for fiscal 1989 are not encouraging.

“We conducted a relatively exhaustive computer-assisted telephone survey of pilots,” said Maj. Lou Figueroa, an Air Force spokesman. “We do have a serious problem. It’s the most serious problem the Air Force faces.”

The wave of airline hiring is in part a result of 1978 deregulation that brought lower fares and increased air travel. Compounding the problem is the fact that many pilots who began working for airlines after World War II are reaching retirement age.

The Navy, the Air Force and Congress, scrambling to find ways to hold on to their multimillion-dollar investments, have come up with a variety of incentives, including yearly bonuses of up to $12,000 and increased flying time for pilots.

Whether the measures will work is uncertain.

“The biggest problem is family separation,” said Hartman, who has signed up with Trans World Airlines and is at the airline’s new Charles Lindbergh Flight Training Center in St. Louis. “Over a 20-year career, you are actually gone from your wife and family for 5 to 7 years,” Hartman said. “All that separation causes marital strain. . . . I have met guys who have gotten out of the Navy simply because their wives have said, ‘Get out or else.’ ”

Hartman and his wife, who plan to live in St. Louis, have two children, a 9-month-old boy and a 2-year-old girl they adopted while he was stationed in the Philippines.

“I couldn’t stay in, and I’m sad that I couldn’t stay in,” Hartman said. “The Navy offered security. I have never doubted that a paycheck was coming, and I had many good times in the Navy. We met a lot of people, and we would have never have adopted our daughter.”

Critical of Navy

Still, Hartman is critical of Navy policy that stations aircraft carriers at distant points on the globe, necessitating the long tours of duty at sea. “My own opinion is we ought to operate off the coast of the United States more,” Hartman said. “If we went out for a month and came home for a month, there would be some continuity for the family.”

If an aircraft carrier is needed somewhere, it “could basically steam anywhere in the world in a matter of days,” Hartman said. “We can make a retaliatory strike. We don’t need to be out there flexing our muscles in the Mediterranean to keep those sea lanes open.”

Hartman, who was a lieutenant, was making $42,500 in the Navy and took a huge pay cut to go to TWA, where he is making $22,140, he said. (This is comparable to the starting salaries other airlines pay pilots.)

It will take Hartman about seven or eight years to return to the level of his Navy pay and, in the meantime, he, like dozens of other former Navy pilots, hopes to fly for the Navy Reserve several days each month to bring in extra money.

In the long term, however, Hartman and other Navy fliers believe the move to a major airline, where captains can earn $150,000 a year or more, makes economic sense.

“I’ve been around the Ready Room and heard multitudes of pilots say, ‘If they paid me more money, I could better justify going out for eight months,’ ” Hartman said.

But, he added, to many pilots, the new $12,000 bonuses that are supposed to become available for some fliers are not adequate incentive to make up for the hardships of Navy life.

“Consider what it costs to train a new pilot to replace me--over $1 million,” Hartman said. “They’re spending taxpayers’ money like crazy instead of paying me.”

Among the non-monetary incentives that the Navy is trying is a Fly-Only program designed to appeal to pilots who may think they are spending too little time in airplanes and too much time behind a desk or performing other duties. Under the program, “a pilot goes into the cockpit and that’s it,” Allen said. However, the program is not available to all fliers and is not seen as the solution to the problem.

Instead, the Navy is counting on the new bonus system approved by Congress earlier this year as its primary incentive. Beginning Jan. 1, Navy and Air Force pilots in certain specialties where the shortages are centered will be eligible for yearly bonuses of up to $12,000. Although all the details have not yet been worked out, the bonuses generally will be paid only to mid-grade pilots. Once the pilots begin their 12th year, the bonus will be cut off.

“I think this program will go a long way to help us reduce the shortages,” Allen said.

As of last July 1, the Navy also has increased to seven years the required time a pilot must stay in the service after completing flight school. The Navy had already raised that requirement from five years to six in 1986 after the release of the movie “Top Gun,” which glorified Navy fighter pilots.

‘Top Gun’ a Draw

“Since ‘Top Gun,’ we’ve had plenty of people knocking on our doors wanting to be aviators,” Allen said. “We can throw this additional two years of obligated service at them, and we will get more utilization out of them.”

The Air Force has also been increasing the number of years a pilot must serve after completing flight school, at least in part because of “Top Gun.”

“Our studies show that people who have seen ‘Top Gun’ think it was an Air Force movie,” said Lou Figueroa, the Air Force spokesman. “It definitely has an impact, these types of things, very MTV, sexy type of movies. It gets their hormones and adrenaline going.”

Aspiring pilots entering Air Force flight-training programs after June 15, 1987, have to make a commitment of seven years’ service after they get their wings and those entering after June 14 of this year are obligated for eight years, Figueroa said. “Flying aircraft in the Air Force is still attractive. We feel confident we can demand eight years of service.”

No Regrets

For Lt. Thomas Rice, a “Top Gun” pilot at Miramar Naval Air Station, his five-year obligation was enough. He is also leaving the Navy to work for TWA.

“I enjoyed the heck out of my Navy tour, and I don’t have any regrets,” said Rice, 29, who is single and lives in Scripps Ranch. But he too decided to leave largely because of the extended sea duty.

“When you’re at sea, the world revolves around you,” he said. “You’re where you’re supposed to be--the cutting edge of the sword--and you feel good about it and you want to be there. When you (land) late at night and the deck’s pitching in bad weather, you feel good. There’s lot of camaraderie.

“But you realize that life went on without you back here. . . . I don’t need to be home by the phone. I don’t mind being out of town. But this way I’ll have more time to run my life.”

Rice said he made the decision midway through his second extended cruise “after spending a long time in the Indian Ocean with no money to fly and everyone expecting miracles out of you.” Because of budgetary constraints and attempts to conserve expensive jet fuel, flight time was severely cut back.

‘Dangerously Current’

“I was keeping dangerously current at night flying,” Rice said. “The more you fly at night, the better you get at it, but we had one night carrier landing per week. One night trap is scary because the weather is not always that great. They call us current, but it’s dangerously current.”

Rice said he also had some differences with the Navy about his career path and feared that in order to advance in the service he would have to spend years “pushing paper” rather than flying.

Rice’s concerns were echoed by Geoffrey Grimard, a lieutenant who had planned on making the Navy his career but is attending classes with Rice and Hartman at TWA’s training center in St. Louis.

“I liked the Navy a lot too,” Grimard said. “I’m an avowed fence-sitter, and I spent years making up my mind.” But, with current budget constraints, “people aren’t getting the flight time they want,” he said.

Grimard also was not getting the career opportunities he wanted. “I’m single, and I’ll be the first to admit it--I didn’t mind cruises and I didn’t mind going to sea,” Grimard said. “I wanted to stay in a tactical squadron. Instead, I was sent to Texas to instruct in a training command. The assignment I got wasn’t what I thought I deserved. You have little or no control over your career path. . . . If they wanted to keep people, they could offer them better assignments.”

The Navy and the Air Force are preparing a joint report to be presented to Congress by Dec. 1, outlining the scope of the pilot-retention problem and describing measures that could help slow the exodus.

Among measures attempted by the Air Force is a new personnel evaluation system intended to halt a chorus of complaints about stalled careers, Figueroa said. “There was a lot of consternation over the evaluation system,” he said, adding that officers, including pilots, had the perception that they had to know somebody to advance in the Air Force.

“The key to success in the Air Force is those evaluations you get every six months for our junior officers,” he said. In the past, those evaluations could include statements of endorsement from any Air Force official, regardless of whether the official had direct knowledge of the officer’s work, he said. Under the new system, such endorsements would not be allowed and “the emphasis would definitely be on the job you’re doing,” he said.

“We want them to do the best job they can. They should concentrate on being the pilot during their assignments instead of worrying about how they can ‘game’ the system.”

The new personnel system will require that commanding officers pay closer attention to the career progress of their staffs “so that people aren’t feeling they’re the victims of big bureaucracy,” Figueroa said. “They’ll suddenly become aware there’s a new way of doing business.”