The United States Air Force (USAF) Air Education and Training Command (AETC) is responsible for training and educating Airmen across the Air Force enterprise. AETC seeks to revolutionize the pilot training experience, from student selection through content delivery and course completion, by leveraging insights from recent academic studies and experiments, with an orienting objective of reducing the USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) course from 12 to six months. Known as Pilot Training Next (PTN), this initiative will serve as a testbed for evaluation of technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), physiological data collection and cognitive mapping, on commercially available hardware while simultaneously conducting pilot training for an initial class of 20 students under accelerated training timelines. PTN will also provide data-backed insights into return on investment, training effectiveness, and desired characteristics for use in recruiting future candidate pools. Based in Austin, Texas, PTN seeks to immerse itself in an entrepreneurial, innovation-centric environment that will challenge current thinking on how pilots are trained. AETC will apply PTN’s lessons learned to many other pressure points across the AETC areas of responsibility, by continuing to maintain a close connection to industry partnerships. This paper discusses the execution of the first PTN course from inception to insights, with a specific focus on exploring the use of commodity Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technology to build affordable, portable simulation systems. This paper describes in detail the technical solution in place for training and data collection, including the VR-based flight simulation, AI-enabled virtual flight instructors, biometric sensors, and learning management system. Finally, this paper provides PTN’s initial insights into training modernization and a path forward for the use of emerging technologies in training.