The U.S. Air Force’s fighter pilots are not getting the number of sorties per month necessary to be deemed combat mission ready, a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies expert said, down from around five and a half a month in fiscal 2023.
For combat readiness, the average fighter pilot needs about nine or 10 sorties a month to be considered combat mission ready, according to past service statements.
But based on conversations with commanders and line pilots, John Venable, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute, said pilots are being afforded the opportunity to fly only one sortie a month for nondeployed jets in the country and “other locations.”
During a Friday Mitchell Institute roundtable event, Venable said that the last time the Air Force released data on sortie rates was in fiscal 2023, when pilots flew around five and a half sorties a month, roughly 60% of what they needed.
“That has withered again in the last couple of years, and the Air Force has stopped reporting it,” he said.
Venable noted that the official pilot shortage number is 2,000, but anecdotally, it has risen to about 2,400.
Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under the Biden administration, reallocated funding from 6,000 aviation-related maintenance positions to other priorities in fiscal 2025, which Venable says “exacerbated itself into the readiness scheme.”
During Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer — military operations conducted by Israel and the U.S. in June 2025 against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure — U.S. air superiority “came on the backs” of the Israelis because their pilots were flying significantly more sorties.
Venable said that Israelis are flying 20 sorties a month, with line pilots getting 25 to 30 hours.
In Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. has 25 squadrons, comprising of about 325 aircraft, Mitchell Institute data provided at the roundtable showed. That is out of the total active inventory of 1,084 aircraft with 634 mission capable jets as seen in fiscal 2024.
Venable compared that figure to Desert Storm, saying the number of aircraft is about half of what the Air Force alone used in the Gulf War operation.
“If you look schematically at the whole picture, 325 aircraft, combat-coded fighter aircraft, is half of what we had in Desert Storm, and it’s about all we can muster today,” Venable said.
By the time an April White House release was published, more than 10,200 total air sorties had been flown in Epic Fury overall, with more than 13,000 combat flights.
Flying hours have been a topic for Air Force officials for years, with pilots previously getting around 17 hours a month in fiscal 2017. More recently, in the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2027 budget request, the service allotted funding for 1.1 million flying hours in the Flying Hours Program, which is the “maximum executable level for the total force.”
Cristina Stassis is a reporter covering stories surrounding the defense industry, national security, military/veteran affairs and more. She previously worked as an editorial fellow for Defense News in 2024 where she assisted the newsroom in breaking news across Sightline Media Group.