My class at the U.S. Air Force’s undergraduate pilot training (UPT) numbered about 50 students, 43 of whom were USAF Academy graduates, with seven ROTC graduates. I had no idea how competitive the academy grads were until one of them took me aside to explain. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.
So for a full year, I was around dozens of competitive student pilots who really had little incentive to work with each other, although we ROTC student pilots studied together, implementing the “cooperate and graduate” idea. In general, though, UPT was dog-eat-dog, with each student trying to one-up the others. If a student pilot started to flail, people stayed away from that pilot, hoping whatever was afflicting the failing student was not contagious: “Pilots eat their own,” I heard once.
