10 Year ADSC – End of the World?

I don’t hold back when people ask me the best way to become a military pilot. The Ultimate Military Pilot Career Path is to get hired directly by a Guard or Reserve unit and let them send you to UPT. Ideally, you should enlist with one of those units as soon as you’re old enough and serve part-time while you complete college. This eventually allows you to retire a full four years earlier than any other military aviator.

While I continue to assert this is far better than becoming an Active Duty pilot through the USAF Academy, ROTC, or OTS, I worry that I’ve done people a disservice by making the Active Duty pilot career path seem too unattractive.

Today we’re going to compare the more common Active Duty career path with the Ultimate one that I’ve recommended so heavily. We’ll see that the Active Duty option is still a good deal, that the overall difference isn’t so great, and we’ll see why you’re better off pursuing either than trying to fulfill a non-pilot commissioning commitment before trying to pursue the Ultimate career path. We’ll also see some advantages of Active Duty and some options for cutting your time there short.

Table of Contents

1. Feeling Gun Shy
2. Case in Point
3. Comparison
4. Start With Why
5. Active Duty Benefits
6. Back to the Question at Hand

Feeling Gun Shy

The big gotcha of the Active Duty pilot career path is that on the day you earn your wings, you also get hit with a 10-year Active Duty Service Commitment (ADSC). For the next decade of your life, you will deploy a lot and have little or no control over your assignment locations. It’s a lot to ask.

The US Army recently changed its aviation Active Duty Service Obligation from 8 to 10 years and created an absolute uproar. (Yes, they say ADSO instead of ADSC because the Army and the Air Force refuse to do anything the same since they divorced back in ‘47.) I remember similar drama during my Fourth Class (freshman) year at the USAF Academy as we were forced to sign a paper accepting a similar ADSC increase in case of getting an Air Force pilot slot.

I’d always wanted to be a pilot and didn’t know anything else, so I said the Doolie equivalent of “Shut up and take my money!” (There was a lot more “Sir” and “Ma’am” involved.) However, many of my buddies weren’t sure yet if they were willing to commit to a decade of service in exchange for a pilot slot.

Now that I’m older and wiser, one of my many side-hustles is working as an Admission Liaison Officer for the USAF Academy. In recent discussions with some USAFA cadets, I’ve encountered several who actually turned down pilot slots because of that 10-year ADSC. This mindset is far from universal, but it’s prevalent enough that the Academy actually had pilot slots go unfilled a few years ago! This used to be unheard of. And yet, there’s a certain logic to questioning that 10-year commitment.

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Case in Point

One Academy cadet I spoke with (let’s call him Stan) has always wanted to be a military pilot. However, he missed out on that Ultimate Military Pilot Career Path and is concerned about a 10-year UPT ADSC. He was thinking about turning down an Active Duty UPT slot and fulfilling the alternative 5-year USAFA non-pilot ADSC as an engineer or something, then pursuing a UPT slot with a Guard or Reserve unit.

Stan figured that even spending 5 years in a non-flying job, this track would make him a military pilot well below the USAF’s current age limit (33 years old), and would actually get him to the airlines sooner than his Active Duty pilot peers.

As a good mentor, I knew to ask lots of questions and take the time to dig down to the primary factors motivating this line of thinking. I ended up discovering that Stan was most worried about frequent moves and long deployments stressing his family during an Active Duty flying career.

At first, his idea sounded reasonable to me. It does have the potential to get him to the airlines more quickly, and he’d do all of his military flying in the Guard or Reserve (with Quality of Life far superior to Active Duty, in most cases). However, after spending a few more minutes thinking about how these career paths might compare, I decided Stan’s idea might not be as advantageous after all. Let’s compare these options to see why.

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Comparison

In order to figure out the pros and cons of these different options, we first need to compare the timelines side by side. We’ll look at three cases:

1. Ultimate Military Pilot Career Path (Attend UPT as a Guard or Reserve pilot)
2. A “regular” Active Duty pilot career path. (We’ll assume a move to the Guard or Reserve after completing your initial 10-year UPT ADSC. I’ve also called this the Ideal Military Pilot Career Path.)
3. Stan’s idea (Do 5 years as an engineer, then fly for the Guard or Reserve)

Although each of these career paths has potential for almost infinite variation, this diagram represents likely versions of each:

Looking at these side by side, it’s clear why #1 is the Ultimate option. You get to the airlines sooner, and you spend more years at a major airline. However, on the surface, we see that Stan’s plan is likely to get a pilot to the airlines a couple of years before his peers. In the current COVID crisis, those years may soon make the difference between having a great job and getting kicked to the curb as a furlough. It turns out that even one year is a big difference. However, we have to look at more than just the number of years involved.

Stan was worried about his Active Duty career path (Option #2) because it would ensure several years of moves and deployments. In a worst-case scenario, he’s looking at:

1. Moving to a random Air Force Base for less than 1 year while Awaiting Pilot Training (APT)
2. Moving to his UPT base for 1 year
3. TDYs (multi-week business trips) for SERE and water survival
4. Possibly a TDY for Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals (IFF)
5. Moving to a base for 6-10 months for initial aircraft qualification
6. 2-4 more moves for assignments during his Active Duty career.

Wow, that’s a lot of moving and time away from home! Then it gets worse: Over the past 19 years, an Active Duty pilot has also been likely to spend half or more of those operational assignments deployed. Deployments are great flying, but terrible on a family.

While Stan’s Option #3 seems to bypass a lot of this, let’s look at what he’d have to do:

1. If Stan becomes an engineer in the Air Force, he’d probably have to attend some sort of training right after graduating from college. This could be a few weeks TDY, or a multi-month move.
2. Next, he’d go to his first assignment. He’d probably get 2-3 years at that assignment, but if he did a good job the Air Force would offer him the chance to get a Master’s Degree through the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at Wright Patterson AFB. This is usually a 1-year assignment, though it might be two.
3. After AFIT, Stan would owe a payback for school and might have to serve longer than his 5-year non-pilot ADSC. If he didn’t go to AFIT, he’d have to move for a second assignment anyway.
4. Stan is likely to do plenty of TDYs as an engineer and isn’t impervious to the threat of deployment. Unlike pilot deployments that can be as short as a couple of months, engineer deployments are usually 6-12 months.

• During this time, Stan would at least need to obtain his Private Pilot Certificate. Ideally, he’d also earn his Instrument Rating, and build as much experience as possible. (Read this BogiDope article for a discussion of these options and their advantages.) This is both expensive and time-consuming...tough to fit in around a 9-5 as an engineer, especially if he has a family.
• As Stan would be finishing up his 5-year ADSC, he’d need to be shopping for Guard and Reserve UPT board announcements on BogiDope’s job postings page. Once he identified some units in which he’s interested in, he’d need to start rushing each of them. These trips have to be funded at his own expense and would require him to use leave that won’t be available for family trips.

This plan assumes that Stan can get hired by a Guard or Reserve unit at this point. While it’s not impossible, and BogiDope can absolutely help you get there, this is far from guaranteed. What if Stan’s 5-year ADSC runs out as the next SARS/Swine Flu/COVID-type pandemic puts hiring on hold? Even just a year or two of delay erases any possible advantages of this career path.

Let’s assume though that Stan can get hired by a unit, and is scheduled to start UPT as soon as his regular ADSC is up. He’d still have to go through steps 2-5 from the Active Duty pilot career path above! That’s at least 2 moves and several TDYs in the space of about 2 years. Having been out of college for at least 5 years at the start of UPT, it’s more likely that Stan will have a spouse and kids...making the very busy year at UPT even more challenging.

Once Stan finally gets qualified in his aircraft, he’d get seasoning orders with his Guard or Reserve unit. These could range from 6 months to two years, depending on the type of aircraft he’s flying. This means a steady paycheck and decent home life, except that as the newest pilot in the unit Stan is at the top of the list to deploy if the squadron gets sent downrange. His deployment vulnerability continues for even a couple of years after his seasoning orders are over.

As long as he’s getting a lot of flight time, Stan should have enough hours for a Restricted ATP rating and a shot at a regional airline job a couple of years before his Active Duty pilot peers. However, has he really had a better home life than them?

Stan’s family has still moved several times...both as an engineer and as a pilot. He’s likely deployed at least 3 times, if not more, and has also spent many weeks TDY. On this career path, Stan is most likely to leave young kids at home with his spouse while he deploys. If he’d gone to UPT right after college, it’s more likely that he’d get a lot of his deploying done before his kids were that old, or even before they were all born. All in all, this track has the potential for less family stability than his Active Duty pilot counterparts.

Suddenly, Active Duty isn’t looking that bad, right?

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Start With Why

When discussing any big-picture career options, I always make sure to follow Simon Sinek’s advice and Start With Why.

For anyone facing a 10-year military pilot ADSC/O, this means asking yourself: “What is it about military flying that made you want to do it in the first place?”

For most, Top Gun played at least a little bit of a role. There’s no debating that the military has a near monopoly on the most exciting aviation available to humankind. The pay and benefits aren’t bad, and patriotism also factors in for most of us.