No to both questions. The USAF's pilot retention is actually a bit better than the USN and USMC. Then again, that's not saying a lot since pilot retention in the entire US military is pretty bad at this point in time. The USAF is apparently short 2,000 pilots. As for why all the branches have having trouble keeping pilots, there's a multitude of reasons for that but the general ones that applies to all the branches are (ok most of this is USAF but still applies in some way to the USN and USMC):
1) Our old friend sequestration. To meet the budget cuts required by sequestration, all the branches had to cut down on maintenance for existing fighters. Which meant both letting go of experienced maintenance personnel and regular maintenance in general. All that means that as a result of sequestration, a lot less fighters and other aircraft were ready for flight. Which means...
2) Significantly less flying hours than needed in order to maintain skills. Since there's a relative lack of planes, that means that there's more pilots fighting for limited flight time among the existing fighters. Pilots who don't fly often will end up making major or fatal mistakes when they do get to fly. Basically, they don't get to fly as often as they should, need, and want to. One becomes a fighter pilot to fly a fighter jet, not a desk.
3) Pilots can't be just pilots. Simply put, a lot of the branches eventually forces pilots to becomes staff officers if they want to stay in and promote in service. If you want a chance at flying again, you have to fill in a whole bunch of staff positions and hope that you don't get too old or too long in service before being able to fly again. In addition, even when they're are still pilots, they still have to take on a lot of ground duties that have little to no relation to their actual real job of being a pilot. In fact, these ground duties involves so much work in that pilots are easily working 50 to 60 hours weeks with none of those being related to being a combat ready fighter pilot. IOW, pilots are effectively taking on two demanding jobs.
4) A skewed/screwed up promotion system: Pilots aren't judged/promoted based on their ability as pilots. They're judged/promoted based on the ground duties they're forced to do. Which also tells the pilot that their main job as pilots doesn't mean anything to the upper leadership at all. In addition, if you fail to promote multiple times, that effectively ends your flying career.
5) A lot of air bases are in areas where people do not want to raise a family in or where their spouses can not find good paying jobs and/or jobs related to their fields.
6) Far far too many deployments means pilots are missing out on time with their family. This is further exacerbated in that pilots are regularly sent to another squadron that's being deployed to beef up deployment numbers.
7) Aggressive airline hiring. Airlines are offering massive pay bonuses to military pilots since it's actually harder and harder these days for regular people to become airline pilots.
8) With a promotion system based on ground duties and not the jobs of pilots, you now get a force that's even more focused on the non flying jobs and less respect for the pilot job. IOW, imagine a cooking school where all the administrators and staff have little to no cooking ability and/or no experience related to cooking at all.
With all of the above issues combined with an airline offering you easily double or triple your current pay and the ability to see your family often while still being able to fly in the air, a lot of pilots are going the airline route. And the worst part is? The USAF may be experiencing all the above issues but it's still in a better place than the USMC. In fact, the aviation community in the USMC is so fucked, a lot of USMC pilots were transferring to the US Navy or USAF since those branches were still far better than the USMC for fighter pilots. The sheer number of transfers was so high, the USMC actually
stopped approving inter-service transfers:
The above "ban" also applies to WSOs. Which leads me to the next topic....
Since the USMC has decided to transition the F/A-18D to the F-35B/C, it basically hasn't provided any ounce of plans/advice for the remaining WSOs in USMC service. The WSO are effectively left on their own to figure out what they were suppose to do next. A few have gone on to UAVs. A lot of them were transferring over to the USAF and USN. Especially since the USN has this little
program that allows NFOs to become pilots. But with the USMC banning inter-service transfers for ALL aviators, the WSOs has a few less options open to them. At that point, they're already looking for jobs in the civilian sector.
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