C-17 weapons instructor course set for July

  • Published
  • By 2nd Lt. Dustin Hart
  • Air Mobility Command Public Affairs
SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. (AFPN) --  This summer, a very select group of C-17 instructor pilots will head back to school in an effort to earn their Globemaster III doctorate.

Starting July 3, the four students will become the first class at the new five-and-a-half-month C-17 Weapons Instructor Course at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J.

“The C-17 WIC is intended to be a Ph.D.-level course,” said Maj. Johnny Roscoe, Air Mobility Command chief of C-17 tactical policies and procedures. “Its goal is to produce the most highly trained C-17 weapons instructors in order to improve our combat capability through superior training and instruction.”

The C-17 course will join the already existing C-130 WIC and KC-135 Combat Employment School to make up the U.S. Air Force Mobility Weapons School, which will also stand up in July.

“We (mobility aircraft) are unique in the fact that we have a global mission,” Roscoe said. “The (U.S. Air Force) Mobility Weapons School will be based on the same heritage and standards as the Air Force Weapons School, but using the AMC expertise to specialize the training to our mission.”

The intensive curriculum of the C-17 course consists of more than 300 academic hours and 25 flights, broken down into four phases: advanced tactical maneuvering, direct delivery, joint operations and mission employment.

“We will take the basic skills the pilots already possess and tune them up,” said Roscoe, who will become the course’s director of operations. “We will expand their spectrum of abilities and make them experts in all phases of the C-17.”

The advanced tactical-maneuvering and direct-delivery phases expose students to many different flying, airdrop and airland techniques, including threat reaction, aerial refueling and dual-role airdrops.

Once students complete these two phases, they will be exposed to different types of joint operations. These can include large, airborne operations with Army paratroopers.

Finally, the students will join the other Air Force weapons schools at Nellis AFB, Nev., for mission-employment simulations. These two-week exercises tie together all assets of air warfare and put all the skills learned during the course to the test.

During this phase, students get to practice the large-scale operations seen during operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, Roscoe said.

Between flying missions, students are continually evaluated on academic subjects, he said. This includes a student paper that is very similar to a graduate-school thesis.

Once the pilots graduate, they are sent back to their units to teach their fellow instructors and pilots.

“Developing a corps of instructor personnel that can in turn go back to their wings and instruct their aircrews will pay multiple benefits,” said Lt. Col. Pete Higgins, AMC installations and units branch chief and a former C-130 WIC operations officer.

“This is a flying course designed to make students better instructors, better pilots and expose them to everything they can do in their aircraft,” Roscoe said. “We also give them an understanding of the threats that are out there.”

Roscoe, who was a 1996 graduate of the C-130 WIC before transferring to C-17s, said it is this kind of knowledge that makes the WIC and weapons officers such a high commodity.

With the tactical role of the C-17 continually increasing in recent operations, the standup of the course was put on an “accelerated process,” he said.

Standing up a unit like this can sometimes take up to two years to implement, Roscoe said. The C-17 WIC will be established only nine months after getting approval from AMC leaders.

He credited the course’s fast start up to having the ability to use the C-130 WIC’s infrastructure as a reference point. It gave the C-17 WIC cadre the framework on how to develop and evaluate its syllabus. (Courtesy of AMC News Service)