Maureen DeFelice is executive director and CEO of the Order of Daedalians, a nonprofit order of military aviators that offers free flight training to young people, including some too young to get a driver’s license. DeFelice said the COVID-19 pandemic has hindered the group’s ability to recruit.The U.S. Air Force is struggling to recruit and train as many pilots as it needs, repeatedly falling short of its goal to train 1,500 new pilots a year.
Last year, the Air Force’s director of training and readiness for operations, Maj. Gen. Albert Miller, told the Federal News Network that the force was short about 1,650 pilots. DeFelice, whose father served in the U.S. Army, spent parts of her childhood in California and Germany before her family settled in Xenia, Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The people that we serve are kids that are wanting to go into the military; they just don’t have the financial means to learn how to fly. It’s kind of a different approach for military organizations. Most of them are about those that have already served. In our case, we’re about the future. That ties us to Air Force recruiting, Navy recruiting, Civil Air Patrol. They’re trying to do a lot of that right now because military aviation is a really big need.
What happens is, there’s a pipeline. First, you’ve got to get somebody that’s qualified, has gone through the education, is physically able to serve. Then you have another pipeline where they have to go through their training. Well, training is a huge issue. It’s very costly, because of the cost of fuel, the cost of aircraft — there aren’t many, they’re older. So they’re trying different things to train them, a lot of virtual technology.