(radio static buzzing) - Roger 28-07, approaching runway 7 bravo. - The Air Force has announced the creation of a new information operations Technical Training School. (air swooshing) - The first command, simply must arm our airmen to out think, out perform, out partner, out innovate any potential adversary. - Air Force basic military training as an updated curriculum with a new focus on readiness and liberality. - The first command, The Air Force Starts Here. (loud thud) (upbeat tempo music) - Hey, hey everybody back at it on The Air Force Starts Here podcast and by the way, Episode number 23, if you're keeping track at home. Thanks for the subscribe stream or download however, you might be listening in if you have some extra time. We certainly appreciate some stars maybe even throw us a review of the podcast, let us know how we're doing bringing you timely and relevant info across the recruit train and educate spectrum. My name is Dan Hawkins from the Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs Office, and your host for this professional development podcast dedicated to bringing total force, big A airmen insight tips, tricks, and lessons learned from the recruiting, training and education world. On the second podcast of 2020, Jennifer Gonzalez from our AETC Public Affairs team sat down with Major General Craig Wills. His callsign is Pulse the Commander of 19th airports responsible for everything. Flying training here in AETC and he is no doubt one of the most engaging senior leaders you will run across, and it was simply a great conversation. And one of the big topics that, Jennifer and General Wills talked about on the pod is the operational waiver process for height, which has been a major focus area for General Wills, and the 19th Air Force team. So a little bit of background, the current height requirement to become an Air Force pilot is a standing height of five foot four inches to six foot five inches tall. However, according to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, almost 44% of females in the United States, between the ages of 20 to 29 years of age, have a stature of 64 inches or less, which in essence means if you just look at the black and white of it, many potential pilot candidates self eliminate themselves, just based on their actual height. But don't fear, the Air Force actually has a waiver process in which applicants who don't meet the standing height requirement can apply for what's called an anthropometric waiver, or basically a height waiver. And it's really important to note, there's been a little bit of mischaracterization out there that the operational safety of everyone involved is priority number one when it comes to granting any waivers. It's not if you apply for a waiver and it's going to be granted, that's not actually how it works. A team of experts from 19th Air Force, the Surgeon General's Office and the 19th Air Force staff, including AFRL, they get in the game with some measurements. There's a whole team that is part of this process, and General Wills is going to talk to an in depth and they're going to talk about why you shouldn't let just the numbers on a website, stop you from applying for a waiver. And what's also interesting is this waiver process has actually been in place for some time now it's just really starting to get some publicity as General Wills and his team have made it such a priority. So you don't want to miss any of that conversation, especially if you're thinking about applying for pilot training whether you're in the Air Force right now, or even if you're thinking about joining the Air Force and you want to fly. We didn't just talk about anthropometrics though with Generals. Jennifer talks to him about flying a bunch of aircraft when he was up recently Altus Air Force Base up in mobilities hometown with the 97th Air Mobility Wing, he flew the KC-46 Pegasus for the first time. Of course he also flew the KC Tim, or excuse me, the KC-135 and the C-17 while he was up there as well. And we also talked to him, just a little bit about his Instagram life as the Commander of 19th Air Force he is all over Instagram, he also has a Facebook page as well. So there are lots of conversation here, packed into a short amount of time with General Wills. So let's jump right in Episode 23 of The Airport Starts Here kicks off right now. (air swooshing) - So good morning General Wills. Thank you so much for joining us today. - Good morning it's pleasure to be here. - Thank you so much. - I've heard a lot about the podcast. I'm really excited I was finally invited to join. - Oh wonderful, we're going through a rebrand right now so we're happy to have you, as one of the first guests. - Excellent. What's the new brand. - You'll have to listen to find out. (laughing) - Fair enough. - All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself. - So I'm, University of Arizona graduate joined through Air Force ROTC. Started out as a backseater in F-15Es. Did some backseat flying which was great and then I decided I want to go to pilot training and did that. Flew F-15Cs, most of my career and then my favorite assignment was my time as the Ops Group Commander Laughlin flying the T-6. And so I'm really thrilled to be back here. I have a great family, I've got a couple of great kids, a wonderful wife, about 29 years of service, and still having a great time. - Wonderful. We're happy to have you here at AETC, especially at the 19th. So tell me a little bit about how things have been going since you've been taking command here at the 19th. - Well, it's been a crazy six months. And so I just passed the six month mark the other day and I have to say it's really been busy and it's been exciting. There are a lot of exciting things going on in 19th Air Force, starting with our amazing staff. We have about a little bit over 200 folks, right now in the 19th Air Force staff and for those of you that have followed the news over the last few years, you know 19th Air Force was a pretty small staff once upon a time. The old joke was there were 19 people in 19th Air Force. It briefly went away, we made a rule what I would describe as a terrible decision, to get rid of 19th Air Force for a couple of years. And then it was recently reconstituted, and then most recently, the decision was made to fully resource the staff. And so we went through a pretty large reorganization. Unfortunately, you know the reorganizations never go as smoothly as you'd like them to go. And unfortunately I think we didn't do as good a job of talking to our folks and making the transition as smooth as it should have been but I'm really excited to have our team together and we're doing pretty great stuff, we have amazing people. - Well it looks like you got a chance to really go out there and see your wings. I'm following you on Instagram and seeing a lot of wonderful selfies. - Well you know it's great. That's the best part of the job is getting out there with the people who are really on the front lines of the mission. I haven't made it. I'm really, 19th Air Force is big enough I've only made it to about 65% or 70% of the wings. So I'm excited to get out and see the rest of the folks, early in the new year. But you're right, the people you meet are really amazing and I love the Instagram part of it not because I'm a social media junkie but because it gives me an opportunity to connect to the airman. And then what I found is people actually, I used to think selfies were really goofy. And actually as a 51 year old male, the selfie thing is something I discovered late in life. But what I what I found was that actually the young people really like it. And most people just like seeing authentic pictures of what's really happening. So, I'll keep doing it as long as people enjoy it, and it gives me great memories too. Sometimes I go through the pictures on the phone and I'm reminded of really amazing airmen and families that I meet on the road. - And you get a chance to fly the KC-46, is that right? - I did up at Altus with our 97th Air Mobility Wing and mobilities hometown. It was amazing in three days I flew the C-17, the KC-135 and the KC-46. And what an amazing group of people. The airplane will be fantastic someday. It's a great, I mean it's a great airplane in the making. There's some issues that are pretty well documented. But I'll tell you the avionics and the flying was really, I think folks that are going to the KC-46 will be really excited about it. We've got some work to do to get the kinks worked out but it's going to be amazing. That our workhorse the KC-135, man that airplane is just crushing the mission every day. Our tanker folks are just amazing. The real miracle by the way the Air Force, as a fighter pilot I can say this. You know what makes us special is really not our fighter airplanes. Although we have the best fighters in the world. But what really makes us special as an Air Force is our ability to project power. And that's our mobility force that does that for us. It was fun to meet those guys. - So when you're out traveling and seeing parts of the wings that we've been able to reach out to what innovations have you seen. - Wow. So we had a spark tank winner up at Altus had designed a cushion for KC-135 boom operators, which really is going to make their physical health a lot better. Takes a lot of load off of their back, I thought that was pretty amazing. We've seen lots of people working on virtual reality. Much like you know the revolution that was sort of started with power turning necks, you see a lot of local efforts on virtual reality and ways to improve our simulation. So I think that that's pretty neat and then if you go, for example up to Columbus they they had a spark or still have a spark cell that had done some 3d printing that helped different parts around the wing. So it's pretty neat. And then of course on the pilot training innovation side with respect to the way we do our syllabus we've been part of a major innovation effort on that front as well. So it's, it's always cool to see what the airmen come up with. - You never know what you're going to get. (laughing) - You never know, that's a fact, that is a fact. - One of the things you've been working on and very vocal about has been the height waiver process to become a pilot. Can you tell me a little bit about that initiative. - Yeah, absolutely. We discovered that the Chief of Staff has been very adamant that we've got to get serious about improving rate of diversity. And it's interesting if you look at the numbers our rated diversity hasn't really improved much over the last couple of decades. And frankly, we're a little bit at a loss as to why that is. And so the team is trying to figure out, how do we make sure that all Americans regardless of their race or their sex, understand that there's a career path for them in the Air Force and especially in the flying business. So we're working on how to figure that out. One of the things that came up pretty early on, Major General Leavitt, the Recruiting Service Commander brought it to our attention. Is that a lot of women in the United States are below the height standard. And frankly I'm of the taller vertical variety, so as somebody who's six foot four and had to worry about being too tall to fly, I never really gave it much thought how it was going at the other end of the spectrum. But it turns out that almost half of the women in America are below five foot four, and five foot four is our published minimum. So I asked my team here at 19th, we've got some amazing folks as I mentioned. So Frankie Newsie leads up our waiver process. And what I learned is we actually have a really good process for evaluating candidates to determine if they might meet the standards, or if they might be able to be waved to fly. But as I went through these meetings, I kept explaining, "Hey we have a really great process "but it turns out, nobody knows about our process." And in further discussions with the general officers and with the folks doing the work around the command, we learned that in fact we think a lot of young men and women, read the article, or they see the numbers on the website and they decide not to apply for pilot training. So that's obviously not what we want. Height standard is really important. There still is a height standard. You still have to be tall enough to fly. The question is, in every case five foot four is that always the right answer? In the end, the answer is no. In fact, we've given about 90% of the people below five foot four over the last five years have received a waiver. And it has to do with the fact that we're all made a little bit different. So you might be five foot two. Two people of five, that are both five foot two, one might qualify for the waiver one might not. And that has to do with how long your arms, how tall is your sitting height, et cetera. So what we decided to do is get after it from a marketing perspective to make sure that people know that the numbers on the website aren't absolute. And so that's why you see the social media posts from around the 19th Air Force wings. The wings have done a great job on that. And we think that there's some positive buzz that's been generated. The message is really simple. We want you to apply if you want to be a pilot. Don't eliminate yourself, based on some numbers on a website. So pilot training next, has done some great work some exploratory work. The question is what can we do to produce a high quality pilot, and if possible faster. You know I look at the innovation efforts, first and foremost as a way to make a better pilot. And then second, it's important if we can to make that pilot faster. Our Air force is about 2100 pilots short of the goal. That's a big deal. And it's hard to picture that or visualize what it means but essentially if you look down the road, 10 or 15 years and ask yourself, "Will we have enough pilots to command "and to leave flying squadrons "and to bring up the next generation," those are real concerns. So, if we can... Make pilots faster and produce more pilots that's obviously good for Air Force. But at the very beginning and the end of that process has to be a high quality pilot. A lot of people in the command have equated innovation with syllabus cuts. That's an unfortunate result of some of the, there was a confluence of factors in 2017 and 18, early 2019, where we did have to make some syllabus cuts. Unfortunately we've got a lot of people in the command that that don't quite trust us on the innovation front. They think that when I say innovation that it's code for syllabus cuts. That's not the goal, that's not the plan. I'll prove it to everybody over time that I'm not just interested in cutting the syllabus. But we have to really get after it to bring the innovation to bear fruit. If you think about it, Jennifer and I know you probably haven't thought about this yet, but the T-37, which was our original jet trainer, that we use for many, many years. That was filled in 1959. The difference between horse cavalry and the T-37 trainer was 19 years. We still had a horse cavalr as a primary fighting element in the U.S. military in 1940. Just 19 years later we had a twin engine jet trainer. If you look at the way we've trained pilots, since 1959, it has changed very little. So the question you have to ask yourself in the age of the iPhone, the age of the internet, quantum computing is just around the corner. We're on iPhone 10 or 11. - I don't even know. (laughing) - It's amazing it's like, it's amazing. And the things that you can do with with your phone. We call it a phone, it's not a phone, it's a computer that has a phone in it. If you think about that. The world is changing really really fast, but we haven't really changed the way we train pilots in decades. And whether people like it, or hated the idea of changing it. It's hard to deny that we need to get with the times. The fact of the matter is that there's no substitute for experience, there's no substitute for great instruction. But our Air Force really needs to bring the 21st century technology into our 21st century Air Force. The kinds of things we're going to expect from our pilots, when they go out to fly in a near peer environment. They're going to face some pretty amazing challenges. And we simply have to up our game with respect to training. And I think virtual reality, artificial intelligence those things are all elements of it. And that's what we really need to get after in 20. - Those technology aspects are very important, but our IPs, our instructor pilots are just as huge of a factor when it comes to producing that high quality. - Absolutely. In fact, the IPs are the most important part of it. The instructors across AETC is certainly in my command, those who are teaching flying. I'll trade all the computers, all the simulators, they can have it all. I'd rather have high quality IPs. They make the difference for us every day. They have an incredibly difficult job, and I really really appreciate them. The question is how can we make them more effective, how can we give them better tools to help them do their job. And one of the things that we're getting after is called the Master Instructor course. So we want to stand up a new training program here at Randolph. AETC has more instructor pilots than any other major commands, but we're the only major command that doesn't have a dedicated instructor development program. We have instructor development stories that we fly. We have something on paper. But we want to start something here where we can provide a path to greatness for our IPs. It's going to be about a six week course here Randolph. We're still working on the, the outlines of it. But the idea would be that we take experienced instructor pilots from the wings. They come in to Randolph, they get a top off, they become true experts in their field, and then they go back to our flying wings, and they work on making all the instructors better. This is much, it's a lot like the weapons school, the weapons instructor course model that the Air Force uses in the combat Air Forces. And in Air Mobility Command and AFSOC. We don't want to necessarily recreate the weapons school here in AETC, that's a totally different thing. But we want to model our program after the weapons school. We want to have humble, approachable, incredible instructors. We have better instructor force we'll make better students and the whole Air Force gets better. So I love what our people are doing every single day. I think we owe them a little bit better when it comes to develop. - Sure. So, I guess, is there anything that I haven't asked you. Either about your current initiative with height waivers. The future of where you see things going that you might want to add before we close out. - The one thing, I appreciate the question I think the one thing I'd just bring up is that change is really hard. And we have a lot of people who really support, trying to make our force better every day but in some cases the way that we rolled out the changes have have been counter productive. We've made a lot of folks feel like we're threatening some of the things that they value the most and that's the quality of Air Force training. So I really would just tell folks to lean into the change part of it. It can be a little bit uncomfortable. We need the expertise and the experience that lives in our command. We have all the people who know how to train pilots, and what we need to figure out is how do we take the best parts of their experience as we go forward and innovate and keep the best part. The goal is, is to make better pilots and better combat system officers and better air battle managers and RPA pilots and sensor operators and all of the things that we do in 19th Air Force. And so I think if we embrace the need for change. Embrace the need for improvement. Embrace the fact that our Air Force needs to get better every day. This is all going to go great, and I look forward to being part of it. - Nothing like the new year to start. - Nothing like the new year. (laughing) - Well thank you so much, sir. - Thank you. It's a pleasure. (air swooshing) (upbeat tempo music) And that's a wrap, just like that Episode number 23 is in the books. So great to have our senior leaders out, connecting with airmen General Wills, again all over social media. And we're glad to have him out there. Really tried to dispel all the myths, to include the anthropometric height waiver myths that are out there. So we want to say thank you to both Jennifer and General Wills for taking time out of their schedules to talk about this very important subject. As a reminder, you can follow Air Education and Training Command in the AETC command team via social media on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well as on the web at www.aetc.af.mil. We'll also plug the 19th Air Force Command team as both General Wills, and Chief Thompson are on Facebook and Instagram. You know it's them because they have the blue check, they're officially verified so give them a follow. And you can stay up to date with what's going on out in the flying training community. Thanks for checking out the podcast as we dive into the world of recruiting, training and education. For entire AETC Public Affairs team, I'm Dan Hawkins, so long to talk we'll talk to you next time on The Air Force Starts Here. (upbeat tempo music)