Send Us Four Pilots, Make Two Combat-Ready
Hardly a day goes by without some new extraordinary crisis confronting us. Sometimes it is a natural disaster, sometimes a manufactured evil, and sometimes a natural disaster set in motion by that very evil, dragging its victims in its wake. Worse still, we are not experiencing these one by one—we are living through them all at once. The cries of those devastated by the earthquake are intertwined with the anguish of children with cancer forcibly separated from their mothers. And the administrative system established to prevent such tragedies has itself become their primary cause.
The issue I want to address here is a recent announcement by the Ministry of National Defence: the recruitment of civilian-source pilot candidate officers for the Air Force. In truth, this debacle is nothing new. They had been loudly advertising this outcome for years—publishing page after page of dismissal lists under decree-laws (KHK) in the Official Gazette.
As far as I was able to track, by 2020 alone at least 620 pilots had been effectively purged through those decree-law lists. More than 200 additional pilots were dismissed by the Ministry even though they did not appear on those lists. In recent years, I stopped keeping count. And it was not only experienced pilots who were pushed out. More than 900 air cadets training to become pilots were expelled, and Işıklar Military Air High School—one of the country’s premier institutions, which had trained over 800 future air cadets—was shut down. At the same time, they hollowed out the Flight School, which was NATO-accredited, trained candidates from several countries, and met not only the Air Force’s needs but much of the demand from Turkish Airlines and the civilian aviation sector.
In doing so, they not only lost roughly 70 percent of their existing pilots, but also destroyed the Air Force’s own pipeline for producing new ones. Worse, by crushing the confidence of capable young people who might have pursued an aviation career, they eliminated their chances of attracting high-quality candidates. A lack of trust does not just drive outsiders away—it also becomes one of the biggest obstacles to cooperation among the few aviators who remain. The Air Force, which once met its own needs and even supplied pilots to the civilian sector through retirees and those completing their service, has now been reduced to openly recruiting from outside the system.
Of course, one might say: total war is unlikely anyway—wouldn’t an Air Force that exists just for appearances, staffed by whoever remains, be enough? Certainly. But then, when you deploy troops into a region where you do not control the airspace—as in Syria—regardless of the justification, the bodies of soldiers killed by someone else’s air strikes are handed back to you by locals in the back of a tractor. You have a provincial governor announcing the number of fallen, and you cannot even establish an accurate casualty count. When you cannot immediately deploy your transport aircraft and surge search-and-rescue teams and equipment into an earthquake zone, you leave people to freeze to death under the rubble.
The devastation inflicted on the pilot corps goes far beyond the question of whether someone can fly a fighter jet. What has been destroyed is the Air Force’s operational capability—damaged in a way that cannot simply be rebuilt. This is not a problem you can solve by throwing money at a handful of mid-career recruits or dragging people back in by force. A combat-ready air force exists only when personnel trained at every level operate in harmony within a functioning system. That kind of institutional experience is built over decades.
For example:
It takes 4 years to replace a senior air cadet pilot,
6 years to produce a combat-ready second lieutenant pilot
9 years to develop a flight-lead-qualified first lieutenant pilot
11 years to train a mission commander,
12 years to produce an instructor pilot,
14 years to produce a senior instructor pilot,
22 years to develop a squadron commander,
26 years to train an operations commander,
28 years to produce a general serving as an air base commander.
And that is only if you still have the qualified staff officers to make decisions, the instructors to train them, and candidates of the same caliber. This does not even begin to address the cost. For instance, excluding all pre-flight training, it takes roughly $5.6 million to train an F-16 pilot to the point where he can be assigned to an operational squadron. At that stage, he’d still be junior enough to fetch tea for the lead pilot in a two-ship formation.
Meanwhile, those pilots who were dismissed and managed to leave the country before losing their freedom needed no more than one or two years to establish themselves in other sectors offering comparable or higher income, quickly recovering their financial losses. But has the Turkish public, even after seven years, managed to replace what was lost? Judging by the Ministry’s announcement, it is clear they are still searching desperately for what they destroyed.
As long as the mindset remains, “Send us four pilots—make sure two are combat-ready,” they will be waiting for a long time.
One can only hope they come to their senses before facing a disaster that forces them to fully grasp what a pilot shortage really means, and that they acknowledge the damage they have caused and submit themselves to a truly independent and impartial judiciary when one is finally established. Whether those pilots—who chose to serve despite having far more comfortable career options, and who were subjected not only to ingratitude but to outright persecution and the unlawful seizure of their rights—would ever agree to return, even if asked for forgiveness, is another question entirely. And whether they would forgive those who carried out these actions—and those who applauded them so eagerly—is something no one can answer.
Air Force Colonel (Ret) Yüksel Akkale
Sources:
https://rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2400/RR2415/RAND_RR2415.pdf
