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An airman training in one of the Air Force’s toughest intelligence jobs recently set a course record for, well, intelligence.
Airman First Class Ty Bishop, 21, a signals intelligence, or SIGINT, analyst in the Arkansas Air National Guard, finished the grueling training school for the job in July with a 100% academic average. School officials at the Apprentice Electronic Signals Intelligence Analyst Course confirmed to Task & Purpose that Bishop’s 100 percent average across the school’s 16 tests and progress checks was unprecedented since the course was overhauled in 2019.
“Getting a 100 percent on the curriculum is highly commendable, requiring a mastery of the subject matter through dedicated focus and an exceptionally keen attention to detail,” said Capt. Dennis Tyukayev, the flight commander at the 316th Training Squadron at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, where the course is taught. SIGINT teams collect and analyze radio, radar and other emitted signals, and the course is heavy on electromagnetic spectrum and radar theory.
The SIGINT course is one of the Air Force’s most difficult training programs. Just to enter the SIGINT training course, according to the service’s recruiting website, a recruit must score a 72 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the second-highest mandatory score of any job in the Air Force and seven points higher than other intelligence roles (intelligence linguists, who train to speak a foreign language, also need a 72).
Just under 300 students from the Air Force, Marines and Space Force completed the course in 2025, with 339 scheduled to graduate this year.
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In an email to Task & Purpose, Bishop said that he’d been interested in military intelligence before joining. After basic training, he said, he took advantage of eight months at home at Ebbing Air National Guard Base before reporting to Goodfellow, joining drill weekends at the 123rd Intelligence Squadron for a firsthand look at the secretive work of the job. The 123rd supports the Arkansas wing’s squadron of MQ-9 Reaper drones.
“Alongside that, I have an interest in current affairs and defense affairs, so I already had an interest in how military and intelligence systems worked before joining,” Bishop said in an email. “I did lots of open-source research on radar concepts, the [National Security Agency], and SIGINT/Intel.”
Bishop graduated from high school in Batesville, Arkansas, in 2023 (where he won two straight state quiz bowl championships), and finished a pre-engineering associate degree the same summer. It was unclear, officials said, if his 100 percent was truly a “perfect” score, with no wrong answers across the three months of training, since the course rounds final scores to the nearest half-point. To put Bishop’s perfect score in context, squadron officials reviewed the last 12 months of classes and found that two students had finished with a 99 percent, and six with a 98.
Officials also noted that a week after Bishop graduated, a second student finished the course with a score of 100.
The post New airman records perfect score at a top Air Force intelligence school appeared first on Task & Purpose.
