Premium On Safety - Issue 13, 2014 - 4

fLIGHT VIS

"Flight Vis" shares opinions on safety issues from
professionals operating on aviation's front lines.

maximizing your Pilot Recurrent
Training Vendor Partnership
By GREG WooDS

Training is the most impactful portion of
a typical corporate flight department's
budget. Recurrent pilot training is an
investment that catches the eye of those
involved with the annual budgetary process. The financial impact is significant
but so too is the payoff. As stewards of the
company's assets, aviation departments
must work hard to ensure we maximize our
training investment.

Each department is unique with its
own particular needs. This is why it is so
important for aviation department leadership to take charge of the training partner
relationship. Special missions, the wide
variety of challenging airports we operate
in and out of, pilots with different levels
of experience, even corporate and departmental culture come together differently
in each flight department.
Meanwhile, training vendors have their
own particular set of circumstances to
address. Vendors are tasked with ensuring 100 percent compliance with the FAA
mandated syllabus, maintaining technologically up-to-date and high fidelity
simulators, and attracting and retaining
high quality professional instructors, while
keeping an eye to competitive pricing.
Balancing these sometimes competing
imperatives is not an easy task, which is

why these vendors offer rather regimented programs designed to appeal to the
"average" customer. Who wants to be an
average customer?
Despite the differences in individual
business aviation departments most of
us are concerned with the quality of our
instructors, fitting tailored training into a
tight schedule already laden with numerous FAA requirements, scheduling simulator time at a reasonable time
period, and the perceived reticence to fail a paying customer
(especially when that customer
has the option of training
somewhere else). At Peabody
Energy, we address each of
these areas through active
partnering with our vendor, and
we have seen real improvement in the quality of our pilot
training as a result.
Pay, work-life balance, even
reputation can influence an
instructor's decision to stay
with a particular employer. We
cannot directly control instructor pay or work-life balance-
however, by providing ongoing feedback
to our vendor, we actually do influence
management decisions, which have a
trickle-down effect on the quality of their
instructor team. When paying customers
provide constructive feedback vendors
listen. We have developed an internal
feedback process which goes well beyond
the basic forms each pilot receives after
training. Our training captains track these
results, identify weaknesses, and bring any
to the attention of vendor management.
Our training captains also meet with vendor program managers each year to ensure
our syllabus is correct and complies with
FAR 61.58 requirements and IS-BAO.
Given the limited number of days in a
recurrent training session and that our
crews are not the only paying customers in
a training class, the demands of checking
all required FAA blocks while also incor-

porating specific training tailored to our
needs requires extra effort on our part.
We have found that allocating resources
toward full service contracts and adding an extra day of training in the form of
line-oriented flight training (LOFT) is well
worth the outlay. Our chief pilot and training pilots meet each year to develop LOFT
scenarios designed to address the specific
areas we want to focus on. Currently we
have LOFTs structured around an Atlantic
crossing with an emergency and diversion, an international trip with a number
of emergencies leading to a diversion
decision, and a trip to Mongolia with a
diversion to Russia which requires QFE
ops. These scenarios were chosen after listening to pilot feedback gathered from our
real-world operational experiences.
In the spirit of continuous improvement,
we are budgeting for Corporate Flight
Operational Quality Assurance (C-FOQA)
to dove-tail with our Corporate Aviation
Safety Action Program (C-ASAP). Together
C-FOQA and C-ASAP generate enhanced
data for consideration when designing
LOFT scenarios and developing SOP, and
contribute to a sound Safety Management
System. For Peabody, a corollary benefit
of adding an extra day of training is the
chance to have our dual-qualified pilots
jump in the off-cycle aircraft simulator to
proactively address any occasional currency issues before a currency gap occurs.
The issue of simulator sessions scheduled at times not optimal to learning, performance, or retention is something operators of certain aircraft types are all too
familiar with. When pilots and instructors
are operating on the opposite side of the
clock training yield is diminished. We deal
with this reality in the same way we deal
with the other vendor partnership opportunities-through active communication and
planning. By scheduling pilot training as
far in advance as possible, and by pushing
back at the leadership level when necessary, we have had success in obtaining
reasonable training periods for our pilots.
(continued on page 5)

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