Home of the Biggest Pilot School in the Air Force

The Post

Where the Air Force Builds Its Pilots

Laughlin is a one-mission base, and that mission is enormous: the 47th Flying Training Wing, under Air Education and Training Command, runs joint specialized undergraduate pilot training for the Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and allied nations. Four flying training squadrons under the 47th Operations Group split the syllabus — the 85th and 434th fly the T-6A Texan II, the 86th flies the T-1A Jayhawk, and the 87th flies the T-38C Talon — with the Reserve's 96th Flying Training Squadron training side-by-side on base. Roughly 400 students a year earn their wings here after a 52-week course, logging over 80,000 flying hours and 51,000 sorties annually. Team XL — the base's own nickname for itself — runs about 1,400 military and 1,360 civilian personnel across a community of more than 4,300.

The base traces back to 1943 as an Army Air Field training B-26 Marauder crews, named for 2nd Lt. Jack Thomas Laughlin, a Del Rio native and Del Rio's first WWII casualty. It closed after the war, reopened in 1952, and spent the late 1950s and early 1960s flying U-2 reconnaissance under Strategic Air Command — Laughlin-based U-2 pilots flew missions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., the crisis's only combat casualty, flew from here. Undergraduate pilot training became the permanent mission in 1962 and has been ever since.

Be honest with yourself about the location before you PCS: Del Rio is a border town of about 35,000 people, sitting across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, roughly 150 miles — about 2.5 to 3 hours — from San Antonio, the nearest real metro. Off-base dining and shopping are limited compared to a bigger duty station, and most families lean on the base itself, plus Lake Amistad, for day-to-day life. It's a genuinely small, tight-knit assignment — not everyone's first choice, but plenty of families end up liking it more than they expected to.