China cuts fighter pilot training by 1 year, on track for full overhaul ‘by early 2030s’

By 2026 most PLA fighter pilots could have initial flight and transition training in 3 years: US military think tank

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The PLA’s JL-10 trainer jet is helping cut training times for Chinese fighter pilots. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00am, 5 Dec 2024Updated: 9:26am, 5 Dec 2024

China’s military has trimmed at least a year off its fighter pilot training programmes, with one US source predicting that the PLA will have “completely modernised” its pilot instruction system by the early 2030s.

The reduction in the pilot programme from at least four years to three comes as the People’s Liberation Army steps up combat readiness and overhauls its fighter fleet, adding more stealth J-20s and commissioning the J-35A, an upgraded version of the fifth-generation multirole fighter.

Training has been fast-tracked by the addition of the JL-10 trainer jet at China’s flight academies in recent years, allowing the older JL-8 to be phased out.

The PLA Daily reported in June that the JL-8 officially retired from the Shijiazhuang Flight Academy’s fleet of training aircraft after over 20 years of service. The last group of pilot candidates to train on the JL-8 had finished their training in early summer at the academy, one of three under the PLA Air Force, the report said.

It marked the “full roll-out of the new flight talent development model” at the academy, where trainees would only require three years of flight training to qualify as fighter pilots for third-generation aircraft, the academy leadership was quoted in the report as saying.

The air force’s Harbin Flight Academy has also started training pilot candidates with the JL-10.