Vanguard Magazine

26 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2019 www.vanguardcanada.com times. That will leave us with three spares. If an aircraft breaks down then we bring a spare one in and within 30 minutes we are good to go again," explained Fedak. Hav- ing such a rigorous schedule and spare air- craft keeps downtime to a minimum. At the 3 CFFTS school, students go through training from basic to advanced using desktop trainers, procedural trainers, touchscreen to Level 5 trainers, whether it's cockpit procedures trainers or devices with visuals. The newest addition to the course is the Jet Ranger Trainer for the Bell B206. In this Level 7 FTD, the cockpit moves up to six inches to provide the motion of flying while the screen remains stationary. "This is a very unique device and the most real- istic helicopter trainer I've ever been in," said Fedak. He went on to point out that even with the advancement of technology, there is no such thing as a replicator. The aircraft is the only machine that can repli- cate exactly what happens in flight, but it's the "closest thing – a real evolution to the point that Transport Canada and the FAA don't know what to call it." Fedak stressed that this is a military pro- gram that they support. "We do all the support for them with the oversight of their contract authority, and it's all under their quality assurance, whether it is stan- dardization, flight standards, or programs. It's all 100 per cent RCAF's." For its training in Moose Jaw and Cold Lake, CAE operates 22 Harvards and 17 Hawks. After about 400 hours of flying, each aircraft comes in for a 15-day major maintenance activity managed by over a hundred CAE technicians. With that maintenance schedule, both fleets have a 90 per cent availability for flight training. innovative Ways of training Pilots The two flying schools utilize six fleets of aircraft – consisting of the Grob, Harvard, King Air, Bell 206, Bell 412 and the Hawk – for training. "We conduct about 34,000 hours of flight training across the two loca- tions, and the result is typically about 100- 115 trained pilots per year," said Col Denis O'Reilly, Commander, 15 Wing Moose Jaw and Military Director of NFTC. In 2016, the schools graduated 116 pi- lots, 115 in 2017, and last year was down to 107. Col O'Reilly pointed out that the drop in 2018 is intentional because of the success in the previous years. "We did so well that we're stacking them up a little bit, we've got to let the operational training catch up," he said. "We are trying to achieve a balance and shift the resources away from our initial pilot training to wings." He explained that the increase in out- put is not due to more significant financial investment, but by being innovative. One such way is instructor training develop- ment. Previously, instructors were trained to teach the entire syllabus. The last time an instructor may have flown a Harvard was as a student. To get up to speed, they would have to be retrained to a level where they can teach the entire syllabus. "That is a bit of a wasted effort at the very beginning when they're not famil- iar with the aircraft," said Col O'Reilly. Instead, the decision was made to have the instructors teach the basic parts of the syllabus for the first six months to a year. After that, they fly with other senior instructors to learn the advanced sylla- bus so that they can be fully equipped to teach it. This resulted in savings, and the schools managed to get instructors to the line twice as fast while spending fewer re- sources later on. Another way is using block training syl- labus. The general concept of training is linear learning, but with block training, it is about taking an entire "chunk" of lessons and measuring performance to get the students to the end of the block at the right level. "The result of that has been very positive in the sense that we've reduced our extra tools and extra training in half. We're not wasting time retraining people because they cannot learn on a cer- tain rate," said Col O'Reilly. This change produced a decrease in attrition rate and, at the same time, increased student confi- dence. Block training provided a more fo- cused use of flying hours with the students given the opportunity to map their trip planning and focus on weak areas rather than going through a very prescriptive training plan. Through these types of innovative changes, the schools were able to produce more pilots, even though "the overall training system hasn't changed, regarding the number of resources and aircraft," said Col O'Reilly. Ramping Up At the end of July 2018, the RCAF was short 275 pilots. To fill this deficit, increas- ing the input of students and increasing the output of trained pilots would be the obvious answer. But to get there requires a coordinated effort with the operational community. "We will only intentionally ramp up here when they are ready to re- ceive them," said Col O'Reilly. Canada, as well as other countries in the world, is plagued by the lack of sufficient pilots to meet the growing demands of military operations. Even though the situ- ation seems grave at the moment, with a world-class training system in place, Can- ada is in position to continue producing world-class pilots to meet the needs of national and international obligations. By implementing more innovative methods of training and incorporating lessons from the NFTC and CFTS programs, Canada most assuredly has the experience, capa- bility and capacity to produce more pilots to fill the complement required to protect Canada's sovereignty and citizens. The future success of this world-class sys- tem is dependent on having enough suit- ably qualified young men and women to fill these programs. So how does the future look? According to Col O'Reilly: "In the last six or seven years that I have been in- volved, we've had no shortage of interest from people who want to be pilots." De- spite the current deficiencies, Canada is on the right track to a fully-staffed RCAF and the ability to fulfill all of its defence obliga- tions both at home and abroad. trAininG The Grob G120A aircra is used as the primary trainer by KF Aerospace for Phase I and Phase II training. Photo: KF Aerospace.

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