In the past several months, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reported and released information about new developments in its effort to modernize the PLA Air Force’s (PLAAF) training of prospective fighter pilots. One of the institutions that conduct that training, the Shijiazhuang Flight Academy, is poised to completely replace an older training program and the aircraft used in it, thereby shortening prospective pilots’ training there by a year. Meanwhile, the Xi’an and Harbin Flight Academies are establishing new units to train recent graduates to transition to fighter aircraft, shifting the burden of that training from combat units to the academies. Both these developments indicate that the PLAAF is steadily making progress in long-standing efforts to streamline and centralize its initial fighter pilot training program, efforts that should be complete by the beginning of the next decade.
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