Thank you, Chair.
It's nice to see everyone. I'm usually not sitting on this side, but it's nice to be here.
I wanted to pick up on something that was mentioned earlier. Just before I do that, when I read that Auditor General's report, I thought it was a good report and I thought that it stated the obvious. We have a capability gap. We've had it for years. It really started to manifest itself when previous governments decided to only modernize 79 airplanes. We lose an airplane every two years. We're at 76, and that's kind of where we're at.
The report did say that the jet set that was being purchased would help manage the fleet. I accept that. I totally understand it. We'd all rather have new aircraft, but we are where we are, and that's the best way forward, given where we're at. It did identify that the limiting factor, however, was pilots and maintainers, and I understand that you have to work on all three at the same time.
With regard to pilot retention, not recruitment, I've done some reading. I appreciate your remarks at the beginning, but I have to say—and I have tabled M-177 at the House—that I'm very aware of the numbers with regard to the global pilot shortage and Canadian pilot shortage. If I look at what our allies are doing on the retention side, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy are offering up to $210,000 U.S. for up to six years of obligatory service, depending on how many years you have in and what aircraft you're flying.
The Canadian Forces in the mid-1990s offered a bonus to pilots as well, so we have a precedent for doing it, and our allies are doing it. FedEx is offering between $40,000 and $110,000 to keep their operations flying. Delta is giving everybody a 30% pay raise. I understand that is a unique challenge when you have to do something like that, but I would suggest, if that's not already being considered in the other things you haven't identified, that you seriously consider it, because this pilot shortage is not going to get any easier. It's going to get harder. We need to stop the bleeding, and that's one way to do it, in addition to some of the other things that you mentioned. We have a precedent for doing it in the past.
Some of the other things are on the generation side, and I had a longer conversation with the chief of the air staff at a function recently, and I want to bring some of these up as a recommendation that you guys could look into if you're not already looking into it.
We have CFTS and NFTC, which are two contracts that are generating pilot production in Canada. To the best of my knowledge, we have retired military pilots working there, teaching in simulators and teaching ground school. There's no reason why those gentlemen or women couldn't fly an airplane to just give us better force generation capability. I understand they do it in helicopters right now in Portage, and if we're not using them to their maximum capacity, that's going to hurt us. You could free up military people and post them to the OTU to generate and crank up your OTU at the same time to generate better capacity there.
I would also recommend that we ask our allies for help. In the mid-1990s we seconded, I believe, four F-18 fighter pilot instructors to Australia. If we haven't made a phone call to the U.S. Marine Corps or the Australian air force, I suggest that we might want to consider doing that. We've helped them. They are our pals, and they'll help us out if we ask them, I'm sure.
Finally, on the 419 squadron, when we ship to fighter pilot production, like has been mentioned, that is a sub-component of pilot production in general, which is a problem. The 419 for the most part, I understand, generates much of its adversary training in-house. We have a contract with Discovery Air right now that generates pilot adversary training. You could shift a lot more. You might have to beef up the contracted hours, but having the 419 generate its own radar training is just taking another CF aircraft and a CF pilot out there as a training aid for a student when we have resources that could do that.
Either one or more of those things or a combination of all of them, I think, would help overnight with pilot production and help get this machine cranked up in addition to recruitment.
I want to shift quickly to combat capability. I don't know if you can share this, but as we know, the F-18 hasn't had a lot of combat capability upgrades since about 2008. I think they got air-to-ground capability upgraded in Libya with a new air-to-ground weapon, but we haven't had much. I was wondering if you could comment on what you're considering for that, because that's going to be an important part of keeping our aircraft relevant moving forward.