Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, highlighted a point about the average age of the service’s aircraft—23 years, in case you haven’t been paying attention—by noting that he had just come from a trip to Hickam Air Force Base, where he saw the F-15 Eagle he flew in 1976 now being flown by the Hawaii Air National Guard. Moseley maintains the Air Force needs new airplanes, but he cautioned against thinking that the replacement will be on a “one for one” basis. There is no need to replace every current aircraft, he said, because the capability of the new aircraft far exceeds that of older aircraft. “For every F-15, we don’t need an F/A-22; for every F-16 we don’t need an F-35,” Moseley said.
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
