Fixing the machine: Inside the Navy’s race to rebuild its aviator pipeline

This is the latest in a series of semi-regular columns by Robbin Laird, where he will tackle current defense issues through the lens of more than 45 years of defense expertise in both the US and abroad. The goal of these columns: to look back at how questions and perspectives of the past should inform decisions being made today.

Rear Adm. Max “Pepper” McCoy, the Chief of Naval Air Training, describes the system he runs as a factory conveyor belt: the test of whether it is working is whether it flows smoothly, without pools forming anywhere along the line. 

And right now, by his own account, pools are forming in several places at once, and the Navy is running triage and modernization at the same time.

I sat down with McCoy, who commands the Naval Air Training Command (CNATRA), on August 10, 2026 to talk through what it takes to fix a training pipeline from the inside while operational demands on the aviators coming out the other end keep escalating. McCoy and I go back to the F-35 community’s stand-up and his time commanding Carrier Strike Group Four, so the conversation ran less like a briefing than an admiral thinking out loud about a training system that must be sustainable and repeatable to deliver combat-ready naval aviators.

CNATRA has been underproducing against fleet requirements for the better part of ten years, driven largely by problems with the T-45. Students kept entering the pipeline faster than it could move them through, creating a growing backlog of newly commissioned officers waiting just to begin flight training. Public accounts have tracked this bottleneck for years as the ‘pre-NIFE pool’ which is shorthand for the queue that forms before students even reach NIFE, the eight-and-a-half-week screening program at Pensacola that is the pipeline’s first stage.

According to CNATRA’s Naval Aviation 2025 Playbook, Rear Admiral Richard T. Brophy Jr, McCoy’s predecessor, drove production back up to 105 percent of requirement across every type-model-series. But fixing one stage exposed the constraint at the next. 

The Fleet Replacement Squadrons (FRS) are now underproducing, creating a new logjam just before a winged aviator becomes useful to the fleet. Students arrive late to their first tour, and because career milestones do not move to accommodate that delay, the Navy is not getting a full production tour out of junior officers before pulling them for disassociated sea tours or to fill gaps elsewhere. The junior officers who would otherwise be back at the training command or FRS generating the next cohort are the ones being diverted. The system, in McCoy’s words, feeds on itself.

That is why McCoy frames his goal not as a production percentage but as time-to-train against entitlement, the interval between commissioning and fleet arrival a student is entitled to under the training pipeline. Compress it and first-tour officers complete their sea tours on schedule, roll into full length production tours prior to disassociated sea tours, and the self-feeding cycle starts to reverse.

McCoy’s framework for the constraint is a production stool with three legs: airplanes, instructors and students. None, he told me, are where they need to be; not enough airplanes, not enough instructors and, paradoxically, too many students in the pipeline at once, not because CNATRA is over-accessing but because time-to-train has stretched out so far that students are sitting in pools rather than flowing through.

McCoy is the single accountable flag officer for “Street to Fleet” across the Naval Aviation Enterprise, but his authority is not uniform across the pipeline: the schools command sits under the Naval Education and Training Command, rather than CNATRA directly. Everything inside CNATRA, he owns; once a winged aviator reaches the FRS, they belong to a Type Wing commander. His job is to take the strategic view across the enterprise and decide which levers to pull and in what order to get back to entitlement fastest. On aircraft, CNATRA runs entirely on contracted logistics support, so a large share of his time goes into getting to what the command calls “North Star,” the number of ready-for-training aircraft needed to execute the daily flight schedule or surge production if required while managing aircraft service life.

The instructor leg is where the shortage is most acute. McCoy’s active-duty cadre is built from first-sea-tour rollers, supplemented by permanent flight instructors off the normal command track, a reserve component, Marine Corps instructors and, in some cases, Coast Guard personnel. Layered on top is a tool he is leaning on more heavily than before: “SERGRADs,” selectively retained graduate wingers held in an instructor role while awaiting an FRS seat. 

McCoy currently has 15 Marine SERGRADs flying jet training at Kingsville and Meridian, freeing experienced instructors for advanced-phase work. He is also expanding contract instructor pilots — former Navy and Marine Corps jet aviators, many with T-45 experience — into the primary phase. The strategy is to pull the levers CNATRA has, so that instructor manning at the FRSs, where qualified first-tour rollers are scarcer, can be prioritized.

We spent a long time discussing Live Virtual Constructive training. McCoy described LVC as complementary to flight time rather than a replacement for it: using ground-based systems to build habits and get students to a “right training, right cost” starting point, so that when they climb into an aircraft they achieve first-pass yield rather than needing to re-fly events they were not ready for. He was careful to distinguish this from an add-on — his view is that LVC only delivers real value when it is woven into the curriculum, not treated as a separate module bolted onto an otherwise unchanged syllabus.

That distinction matters because of what McCoy called the age of urgency: a security environment with no clean line between crisis and peacetime, where a training system built on the assumption that there will be time to catch up later is no longer viable. What the fleet needs, in his words, is a dynamic training system, not a custodial one. He was explicit that fixing CNATRA’s current production shortfall is a necessary precondition, not a substitute, for that shift. You cannot build a dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture on top of a pipeline that is still struggling to produce enough aviators to fill fleet seats.

The part of the conversation McCoy returned to most was standards, and here his framing departs most clearly from the production-percentage logic of the previous decade. 

His response has been to tighten up the front end of the training pipeline: faster triggers to attrition in NIFE and Primary training. Attrition at advanced training will still happen, he told me, but at meaningfully lower rates, because the students reaching that stage will already have cleared a higher bar.

McCoy came into the job, in his words, as a TOPGUN graduate, former NAWDC and CSG-4 commander with a laser focus on upholding training standardization. He described his obligation to students as a reciprocal contract: he owes them the best training environment he can provide and clarity about what is expected of them; what they owe him is full effort every day, not perfection. He cited a “firm, fair and consistent” motto and was explicit about why it matters: expectations on a winged aviator escalate sharply the moment they reach the fleet, and the pipeline’s job is to condition them for that jump before it happens. When asked how CNATRA hits 105 percent of requirement without enough airplanes or instructors, his answer is that the instructor cadre flies seven days a week — one of the hardest jobs in naval aviation, he said, with no finish line and no offseason.

McCoy’s own method, applied at every command he has held, is reverse engineering: starting from what a first-tour junior officer needs to do at the fleet and working backward through the FRS, then advanced, then primary training, so each stage builds toward the next. 

McCoy also drew a firm line on culture. He does not want to outsource large parts of the training enterprise. Naval aviation is not a generic air force, and flying from ships imposes requirements a contracted model does not capture on its own. The Contract Operated Primary Training-Rotary program is his clearest example of squaring that circle: students are supervised by a Navy O-5, and CNATRA sends personnel through at elevated frequency so students see officers in Navy and Marine Corps flight suits who can reinforce cultural content a syllabus alone will not carry. The contract instructor pilots he is expanding into primary training will be former Navy and Marine Corps pilots; they simply do not wear rank.

McCoy flagged one development not yet visible in the public record: aviators returning from recent deployments as genuine combat veterans, who will move into the instructor cadre in the near term. There is no substitute, he told me, for a student naval aviator sitting across a briefing table from someone who has employed weapons in combat.

Overall, came through in this discussion was less a modernization narrative than triage performed with an eye already on what comes after it. McCoy was candid that a system in crisis makes innovation challenging, because so much of the available time and energy goes into simply making the machine run. 

However, CNATRA continues to innovate in parallel on initiatives to deliver production efficiencies, uphold standardization and improve training quality. His stated ambition is to hand his successor a pipeline with the right number of airplanes, the right number of instructors and time-to-train at entitlement, so the next Chief of Naval Air Training can accelerate modernization with a fully operational production line.