Same in the US military. To fly anything is pretty stringently rigorous and high competition.
“Easiest” flight pipeline is probably the Army’s “High School-To-Flight School” which takes exceptional high schoolers and places them as warrant officer helicopter pilots. But in ten years of existence it’s only produced maybe 80 pilots.
Conversely, for Navy Aviation (say, fast jets for example) you have to graduate in the top 50% of your class from a top 200 university, preferably with a BS, within a certain seated height and uncorrected vision acuity, pass the officer qualification test, the aviator qualification test, officer school with a high proficiency, two years of flight school finishing in the top 20%, select fast fixed-wing jets, hopefully find an open seat, then qualify on catapult and cable retrieval. All for a total of about 1800 seats. After that it’s trying to qualify and be elected to Top Gun and hope it doesn’t ruin your career.
Then I guess all those people getting 31 on the test and joining the air force just sit around on base and become pencil pushers, maintenance, or janitors?
No wonder it's nicknamed the chair force.
Can't say South Africa is any better, for general military stuff they'll take anyone between the age of 18 to 22 with a pulse. You need the equivalent of a 1.5 GPA to get in (17 out 42 APS score). If you're over the age of 22, any tertiary qualification will do. Luckily no more conscription since the end of apartheid.
yeah, like for every pilot there's probably 50 bozos filling up generators with diesel and accidentally putting it in the wrong tanks while huffing the fumes and like 100 guys with jobs like "handing out socks in a tent" or "load cargo planes with frozen hamburgers and white phosphorous."
To clarify, this is the AFQT which is a seperate subtest from the ASVAB and specifically for USAF service that you actually have to put a modicum of effort into, but for the good jobs — and by good I mean interesting, stimulating and potentially lucrative as a civvie — no. 30 won’t get you into special operations, specialized maintenance/aircrew, or the good “chair force” jobs like combat engineering, space, medical, scientific support, cyber, weather…etc. It’s also probably going to ding you for officer or hinder the climb to higher NCO, which is similarly equivalent to warrant officer in other services.
No, it’s going to be stuff like “light vehicle driver,” or “airport maintenance” where you ride around in the bed of a pickup and shoot a shotgun in the air to scare off birds. It used to not even qualify you to be a cop it’s so low.
They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.
The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.
We love our poorly educated 
In South Africa it's the opposite, to join the air force (as a pilot at least) you have to be super smart and have good grades to even be considered.
Same in the US military. To fly anything is pretty stringently rigorous and high competition.
“Easiest” flight pipeline is probably the Army’s “High School-To-Flight School” which takes exceptional high schoolers and places them as warrant officer helicopter pilots. But in ten years of existence it’s only produced maybe 80 pilots.
Conversely, for Navy Aviation (say, fast jets for example) you have to graduate in the top 50% of your class from a top 200 university, preferably with a BS, within a certain seated height and uncorrected vision acuity, pass the officer qualification test, the aviator qualification test, officer school with a high proficiency, two years of flight school finishing in the top 20%, select fast fixed-wing jets, hopefully find an open seat, then qualify on catapult and cable retrieval. All for a total of about 1800 seats. After that it’s trying to qualify and be elected to Top Gun and hope it doesn’t ruin your career.
Then I guess all those people getting 31 on the test and joining the air force just sit around on base and become pencil pushers, maintenance, or janitors?
No wonder it's nicknamed the chair force.
Can't say South Africa is any better, for general military stuff they'll take anyone between the age of 18 to 22 with a pulse. You need the equivalent of a 1.5 GPA to get in (17 out 42 APS score). If you're over the age of 22, any tertiary qualification will do. Luckily no more conscription since the end of apartheid.
yeah, like for every pilot there's probably 50 bozos filling up generators with diesel and accidentally putting it in the wrong tanks while huffing the fumes and like 100 guys with jobs like "handing out socks in a tent" or "load cargo planes with frozen hamburgers and white phosphorous."
To clarify, this is the AFQT which is a seperate subtest from the ASVAB and specifically for USAF service that you actually have to put a modicum of effort into, but for the good jobs — and by good I mean interesting, stimulating and potentially lucrative as a civvie — no. 30 won’t get you into special operations, specialized maintenance/aircrew, or the good “chair force” jobs like combat engineering, space, medical, scientific support, cyber, weather…etc. It’s also probably going to ding you for officer or hinder the climb to higher NCO, which is similarly equivalent to warrant officer in other services.
No, it’s going to be stuff like “light vehicle driver,” or “airport maintenance” where you ride around in the bed of a pickup and shoot a shotgun in the air to scare off birds. It used to not even qualify you to be a cop it’s so low.
And pray that you don't go through all that only to be given the keys to a brand new, sparkly F-35 that nobody knew was never built to fly.
They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.
The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.