By Robbin Laird
I published an overview piece, “Street to Fleet: How CNATRA Is Working Naval Aviation Training,“ ahead of this interview deliberately. That article was built entirely from public sources: CNATRA’s own releases, Proceedings essays going back to 2002, the “Warrior Ethos” letter to incoming students, DVIDS features on the FITU/HITU instructor pipeline. The point of publishing it first was to show what the record looks like from the outside, before I sat down August 14, 2026 with Rear Admiral Max “Pepper” McCoy, the Chief of Naval Air Training, to hear what it looks like from the inside.
The two pictures coincide, but they are not the same picture. The public record describes the modernization effort: new airframes, mixed-reality trainers, a contract-operated rotary track that could significantly reduce training time. What McCoy described to me is the prioritization shift and necessary triage to stabilize operations and incorporate modernization into the training pipeline. Under his watch, McCoy is finding ways to remodel aviation training, without the luxury of choosing one task before the other.
McCoy and I have a history that predates this conversation. We worked together going back to the F-35 community’s stand-up, and again when he commanded Carrier Strike Group Four. That history matters here because it shapes the kind of conversation this was: not a briefing, but an Admiral thinking out loud with someone who has spent three decades watching militaries try to modernize, about what it actually takes to fix a system from the inside while the requirement to change what comes after it keeps growing.
Breaking the Self-Feeding Cycle
McCoy’s own description of what he is running is blunt: a conveyor belt in a factory. The test of whether it is working is whether it flows smoothly, without pools forming anywhere along the line. Any stagnation, anywhere in the system, is diagnostic. It tells you the machine is not working.
The diagnosis he offered me traces back more than a decade. CNATRA underproduced against Fleet requirements for the better part of ten years, driven in large part by problems with the T-45 in the strike pipeline. Accessions were not adjusted to match, so students kept entering a machine that could not process them at the rate they arrived, and the backlog that resulted is the “pre-NIFE pool” that shows up in the public accounts of this period. In 2022, a production shift strategy was implemented that drove production up to reportedly 105 percent of the requirement by 2024 across every type-model-series, pushing students through to the fleet replacement squadrons in volume.
But the fix at one stage of the pipeline exposed the constraint at the next one. The FRSs are now the ones underproducing, which means a new log-jam is forming just before the point where a winged aviator becomes useful to the Fleet. Because students arrive late to their first Fleet tour, and because career milestones do not move to accommodate that delay, the Navy is not getting a full production tour out of its junior officers before it has to pull them for disassociated sea tours or to fill gaps created by under manning elsewhere in the Fleet. The junior officers who would otherwise be back in the training pipeline as instructors, generating the next cohort, are the ones being diverted. The system, in McCoy’s words, feeds on itself.
This is the reason McCoy frames his goal not as a production percentage but as time-to-train against entitlement. If he can compress the interval between commissioning and Fleet arrival down to what a student is actually entitled to under the syllabus, first-tour JOs complete their sea tours on schedule, roll into full length production tours prior to disassociated sea tours, and the self-feeding cycle that has been starving the training pipeline of its own workforce starts to reverse itself.
The Three-Legged Stool
McCoy’s own framework for the constraint is a production stool with three legs: airplanes, instructors, and students. Right now, he told me, none of the three legs are where they need to be. There are not enough airplanes. There are not enough instructors. And there are, paradoxically, too many students in the pipeline at once, not because CNATRA is over-accessing but because time-to-train has stretched out so far that students are sitting in pools rather than flowing through.
He is the single accountable flag officer for Street to Fleet across the Naval Aviation Enterprise, but his authority is not uniform across the pipeline. NIFE and the schools command sit under the Naval Education and Training Command, not under CNATRA directly, though McCoy works closely with that command to align the underlying math. Everything inside CNATRA itself, he owns. Once a winged aviator reaches the fleet replacement squadron, they belong to a Type Wing commander answering to a Type Commander. McCoy’s job, as he described it to me, is to take the strategic view across the whole enterprise, identify where the system is efficient and where it is not, and decide which levers to pull and in what order to get back to entitlement fastest.
On the airplane side, CNATRA runs entirely on contracted logistics support rather than Sailors and Marines turning wrenches, so a large share of McCoy’s own time goes into aircraft readiness, what the command calls getting to “North Star,” the number of ready-for-training aircraft needed to execute the daily flight schedule or surge production if required, while managing aircraft service life.
The instructor leg is where the shortage is most acute, and where the workaround has required the most improvisation. McCoy’s active-duty instructor cadre is built from first sea tour rollers, supplemented by permanent flight instructors who have gone off the normal command track to stay in production full time. Beneath that sits a reserve component split between selected reservists and full-time TARs, Marine Corps instructors supplied through the Marine Corps Training Command, and, in some cases, Coast Guard personnel. Layered on top of that structure is a tool McCoy is using more heavily than in the past: what the command calls “SERGRADs,” selectively retained graduate wingers, high performers held in a limited capacity instructor role while they wait for an FRS seat to open. McCoy currently has 15 Marine SERGRADs flying jet training at Kingsville and Meridian, which frees his more experienced instructors to fly the advanced phases, air-to-surface and air-to-air, that SERGRADs are not yet qualified to lead. And then there are the contract instructor pilots, former Navy and Marine Corps jet aviators who McCoy is now looking to expand into the primary phase of training.
What ties all of this together is a deliberate reallocation strategy rather than a single fix: pull the levers available inside CNATRA so that instructor manning at the FRSs, where CNATRA has less flexibility, can be prioritized. CNATRA has more variety in where it can source instructors from; the FRSs need first-tour rollers with specific type-model-series experience, a much narrower pool.
Standards Instead of a Number
The part of the conversation that McCoy came back to more than any other was standards, and it is here that his framing departs most clearly from the production-percentage logic of the previous decade.
McCoy’s response is to institute faster triggers to attrition, so struggling students reach a review board sooner and leadership makes the call earlier rather than later. Attrition in advanced training will still happen, he told me, but at meaningfully lower rates than in the past, because the students reaching that stage will already have cleared a higher bar.
McCoy is candid that he came into this job as, in his words, a TOPGUN graduate, NAWDC commander, and CSG-4 commander with a laser focus on upholding training standardization. The way he described his obligation to students is a reciprocal contract. He owes them, first, the best training environment he can provide with the resources available, and second, clarity about what is expected of them. What they owe him in return is not perfection but full effort every day: showing up ready, learning in the debrief, correcting deficiencies, and making new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. McCoy stated that he is always looking to take a firm, fair, and consistent approach. And he was explicit about why the standard matters as much as it does: the expectations placed on a winged aviator escalate sharply and quickly the moment they reach the Fleet, and the training pipeline’s job is to condition students for that jump before it happens, not after.
He offered a detail that captures how far this commitment goes in practice. When asked how CNATRA is producing at 105 percent of requirement without enough airplanes or instructors, his answer is that the instructor cadre is flying seven days a week. He called being a CNATRA instructor one of the hardest jobs in naval aviation: training the least experienced aviators in the Navy, transmitting culture as much as stick-and-rudder skills, with no finish line and no offseason.
McCoy described his own method, one he said he has applied at every command he has held, as reverse engineering: starting from what a first-tour junior officer in a given type-model-series actually needs to be capable of doing in the Fleet, and working backward through the FRS, then advanced, then primary, so that each stage builds the specific habits and skill sets the next stage requires, rather than each stage optimizing in isolation.
Live Virtual Constructive as Constant Learning, Not a Substitute for Flight Hours
We spent time on Live Virtual Constructive training. McCoy described LVC as complementary to flight time rather than a replacement for it: using ground-based systems to build habits and get students to a “right training, right cost” starting point, so that when they climb into an aircraft they achieve first-pass yield rather than needing to re-fly events they were not ready for. He was careful to distinguish this from an add-on. His view is that LVC only delivers its real value when it is woven into the curriculum, not treated as a separate module bolted onto an otherwise unchanged syllabus.
That distinction matters because of what McCoy called the age of urgency: a security environment with no clean line between crisis and peacetime, where a training system built on the assumption that there will be time to catch up later is no longer viable. What the Fleet needs, in his words, is a dynamic training system, not a custodial one. He was explicit that fixing CNATRA’s current production shortfall is a necessary precondition, not a substitute, for that shift; you cannot build a dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture on top of a pipeline that is still struggling to produce enough aviators to fill Fleet seats.
A Culture the Navy Will Not Outsource
McCoy was equally direct about where he draws a line. He does not want to outsource large parts of the training enterprise more than necessary. Naval aviation, in his framing, is not a normal air force: flying from ships, operating inside a carrier strike group, and supporting amphibious groups all impose requirements that a generic training model does not capture, and he sees it as his job to protect that distinctiveness even as he pulls in outside capacity to solve near-term shortfalls.
The Contract Operated Primary Training-Rotary program is his clearest example of how he squares that circle. Students who go through COPT-R are supervised by an active-duty O-5 who verifies compliance, and CNATRA sends personnel through at elevated frequency to ensure that students see people in Navy and Marine Corps flight suits who can reinforce the cultural content the syllabus alone will not carry. He was clear this is a deliberate, bounded use of outside capacity to relieve pressure on active-duty instructor manning and T-6B readiness, not a step toward wholesale outsourcing.
McCoy flagged something he sees coming that has not yet shown up in the public accounts of Street to Fleet: aviators returning from recent deployments as genuine combat veterans, who will move into CNATRA’s instructor cadre in the near term. McCoy was unambiguous about the value of that shift. There is no substitute, he told me, for a student naval aviator sitting across a briefing table from someone who has employed weapons in combat. That is the mechanism, in his account, by which a training command that is currently focused on fixing its own production math starts to become the kind of open, operationally-current learning system that keeps pace with a threat environment that will not wait for a five-year modernization plan to catch up.
Mr. Fixit
What came through across the conversation was less a modernization narrative than a description of triage performed with an eye already on what comes after it. McCoy was candid that a system in crisis makes innovation challenging because so much of the available time and energy goes into simply making the machine run. However, CNATRA continues to innovate in parallel on initiatives to deliver production efficiencies, uphold standardization, and improve training quality. His stated ambition is to hand his successor a pipeline with the right number of airplanes, the right number of instructors, and time-to-train at entitlement, so that the next Chief of Naval Air Training can accelerate training modernization with a fully operational production line.
CNATRA is not yet the dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture that the kill web environment McCoy’s own aviators will eventually operate in demands. What McCoy described to me is the harder and less visible work of building the foundation that architecture will eventually stand on, without compromising the standard that determines whether the aviators coming off that foundation are ready for the Fleet waiting for them.
Note: This is complete version of the interview.
A condensed version was published earlier on Breaking Defense on September 4, 2026.