Shortage of personnel could affect Afghan Black Hawk ops, says SIGAR

The Afghan Air Force (AAF) and Afghan Special Mission Wing (SMW) risk not having enough trained pilots and maintenance crew by the time the United States completes deliveries of 159 Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk multirole helicopters in 2023, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in an audit report published on 5 February.

AAF UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters performed their first operational mission on 7 May 2018. (438th Air Expeditionary Wing)

SIGAR John Sopko said in the report that the US Department of Defence (DoD) has expressed concerns about the speed at which it can train Afghan pilots to keep pace with the new aircraft joining the AAF, and made some decisions that “have hindered pilot development”.

For instance, Sopko pointed out that the decision to hold UH-60 qualification training only in Afghanistan may mean that pilots who complete their initial pilot training outside Afghanistan would have to wait up to a year to complete the required additional training.

He also stated that the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) assumes that future training classes will have no attrition, even though current pilot training has an attrition rate of about 26%.

Moreover, Sopko pointed out that the CSTC-A, which originally intended to train 477 UH-60 pilots, now plans to train only 320. “Based on our analysis of actual training costs, CSTC-A overestimated its cost for rotary-wing training by as much as USD1 billion,” he stated , adding that the CSTC-A may also not achieve the 320-pilot target because the number of pilots going through training is already falling behind planned class sizes.

Sopko highlighted that Train, Advise, Assist Command-Air (TAAC-Air) is at least 16 pilots (or 8 crews) behind the level the CSTC-A thought it would achieve by November 2018.