Starting Flight School

All right, you’ve got your grand plans for commissioning and getting selected for aviation. You feel like you're set and ready for takeoff. But first, there are a few hurdles you'll need to clear.

So, what does the start of Navy flight school look like? In this article, I’ll walk you through the start of your journey, before the flying even begins, and mention a few land mines to avoid along the way.

Table of Contents

1. Medical Screening
2. Introductory Flight Screening (IFS)
3. Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API)
4. Conclusion

Medical Screening

The first thing I’ll address here, briefly, is one of the things that can be the biggest pain with regards to finalizing those orders to flight school: medical screening. This is a long topic that should be covered by someone whose expertise is medical (i.e. not me), but I’ll throw a couple of things out there as food for thought:

1)      They are going to find something wrong with you. Don’t freak out.

2)      The medical process’s function is to disqualify people right from the outset with minimum fuss. Don’t just take the first ‘no’ you hear. Investigate, get a second opinion, etc. And, finally, the golden rule: There’s a waiver for just about everything. The secret is to find the person who has the power to say yes, because nearly everyone in the process is empowered to say no. Find them, be nice to them, and complete any requests for information they have.

3)      Make sure you let your desire to fly be known with the medical professionals you’ll encounter if there’s anything that could be a concern. Sometimes this won’t matter, but sometimes it might. The medical world is a bit more ambiguous than its professionals will admit; if they know you’re gunning for something, they’ll be empowered to help you out.

4)      If you have mediocre vision, don’t panic. The Navy will do surgery on your eyeballs in many cases. Policy here changes from time-to-time; make sure you know the freshest instructions and policies. If you’re sufficiently cross-eyed that the Navy denies surgery, realize that Naval Flight Officers fly jets off carriers, too, and historically have much more relaxed vision requirements.

Table of Contents

Introductory Flight Screening (IFS)

Presuming you pass the medical hurdles (typically late in your junior year for ROTC or USNA students), your first foray into Naval Aviation will be via the Introductory Flight Screening (IFS). IFS is a program that is going to put you in the cockpit of a light civil, like a Cessna 172, with civilian instructors for about 15 hours of instruction. The function of IFS is very simple: It is a cheap and fast way to weed people out that have no business being there. IFS isn’t particularly hard or even really scored; it’s more of a pass/fail type of thing. Because I just love bulletized lists, here’s a short list of ways you can fail at IFS and end your Navy flight career early:

1)      Bad attitude. Study the things you’re told to study and be humble. If you clown around and don’t know your stuff, they’ll send you packing.

2)      No aptitude. If you work hard, but it turns out you just can’t read maps or talk on the radio, it’s better for everyone to know this early. It happens. If you work through it, great, but some people just can’t. A trajectory change at this early point in an officer’s young-career is no real detriment to anyone.

3)      Physiological or psychological issues. If you get really airsick all the time when you fly….honestly, it's not a showstopper. If you really want to press through, it will likely get better...eventually. It isn’t unknown for people to hurl just about every day for their first year or so of flight training, and if those folks can grind it out--respect. You may, however, discover this is not fun and suddenly decide driving subs sounds much better than it used to.  Some people also panic or freeze up when they’re in charge of an aircraft and life is whizzing by at several hundred miles per hour. Work through it if you can, but move on if you can’t.

IFS has flexed a little from year-to-year, but you can expect to complete it either in your senior year of college, shortly after graduation, or just before starting the first formal phase of flight school. It typically takes place at a civilian flight school near Annapolis, Quantico, or Pensacola.

A common question is whether or not a prospective Naval Aviator should devote time and resources to obtaining civilian flight time to make their flight packet more competitive and/or maximize their odds of doing well in flight school. I wouldn’t emphasize this too much, personally. If you have loads of time and money, sure—it won’t hurt. However, the Navy is going to want to teach you their way, and one of the functions of IFS is to give everyone a little bit of exposure (on the Navy’s dime) and level the playing field a bit. If you want to fly on your own, do it. If you already have some credentials, you may get to skip IFS. But, in general, your time and money might be better spent preparing yourself academically and doing whatever needs to be done to put your life in good condition to allow yourself to focus when the going gets tough and the scores start counting. Speaking of which…