They fly U.S. Air Force aircraft at a U.S. Air Force base in north Texas, but the student and instructor pilots at the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training Program (ENJJPT) hail from more than a dozen countries across Europe and North America.
“It’s completely normal to fly with two different instructors on the same day and five different instructors through a five-day work week, and it’s completely normal for all of those instructors to be from different countries,” U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Mark Reyes, who finished the 55-week undergraduate pilot training program at ENJJPT on Oct. 18, told Air & Space Forces Magazine recently. “It’s something that’s very unique to ENJJPT, and it’s something that I was very attracted to when coming here.”
With 207 aircraft flying about 250 missions per day, ENJJPT makes Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, one of the busiest airfields in the Air Force. It is a pilot factory, churning out about 190 undergraduate pilot training (UPT) graduates and about 180 graduates of its Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals and Pilot Instructor Training programs every year. ENJJPT trains half of all U.S. Air Force fighter pilots and is the sole source of fighter pilot training for several NATO allies such as Belgium, Denmark, and Germany…