updated on the heartbeat of the CAF
[Combat Air Forces],’
Huebinger continues. ‘We try to keep
each squadron refreshed with a new
Weapons O cer every so often. We don’t
send somebody new to each squadron
after each class, but after a few classes a
typical squadron will get a new weapons
o cer — in general we tend to graduate
about six Raptor weapons o cers
every year.’THE COURSE
The F-22 WIC runs twice a year and lasts
some 23 weeks. It kicks o with a week of
‘core one’ academics, which brings
together every squadron in the school
for a period of tuition across the board.
The second week sees the start of
platform speci c academics, and then
the students start ying. ‘Later on in the
course, around week 20, they have ‘core
two’ academics,’ explains Huebinger. ‘This
is a week of larger scale integration
academics with the entire WeaponsSchool. In between, our goal is to make
them experts in the F-22.’
The ying part of the course takes a
traditional building block approach,
beginning with Basic Fighter Manoeuvres
(BFM), 1-v-1 Raptors, students
dog ghting instructors. ‘It takes a whilethen the Commander. He explains how
pilots are selected for the course. ‘Young
Raptor pilots will go through their
upgrade sequence from being a
wingman, to being a two-ship lead, a
four-ship lead, mission commander and
then an instructor pilot [IP]. The Weapons
O cer at a squadron is the chief
instructor and they are monitoring the
new pilots as they progress through their
upgrades to keep an eye on who stands
out from the crowd. We are in touch with
them for the word of mouth regarding
who those guys are. Then [twice a year]
we’ll send our instructors out to the
squadrons to y with them — it’s like a
ying interview — we call it a ‘WIC look’
and we’ll get a sense for who they are as
an instructor and how they’re doing. We
then bring that data back and there’s an
o cial selection board that take our
inputs as they conduct a formal process
to select from the applicants that are
available. We like getting out to the
di erent bases because it keeps usRAPTOR^7572-81 Weapons School C.indd 75 28/09/2017 15:01