Naval Aviation Comms Training with ASTi's CommCheck™
Customer
U.S. Navy Commander, Training Air Wing Six (CTW-6), NAS Pensacola, Florida
Application
CTW-6 is responsible for all CNATRA Naval Flight Officer (NFO) training and production, graduating approximately 300 U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Foreign Military Service (FMS) students annually. CTW-6 uses ASTi’s CommCheck™ for naval aviation communications training.
Challenges
&
Solutions
The challenge requirements are listed in blue; ASTi's applicable components are
Choose All Three
On the surface, military flight training appears to exist in an unstable balance of program requirements:
- Skill and safety: Training must include increasingly complex crew operations in an increasingly crowded airspace.
- Throughput: Training must be efficient to fill constant turnover in operational vacancies.
- Cost: Training budget must not be perceived as competing with service modernization or operational spending.
"Good, fast, cheap... choose two" doesn't work here. Military flight training requires all three.
Empower Students to "Self-Train"
Learning aviation communications is a critical skill in flight training programs. Unfortunately, it requires time and money for instructors or other role-players to practice radio calls with trainees, often more than these programs can accommodate. Using CommCheck, however, CTW-6 students can now practice radio communications with ATC on their own and receive immediate feedback from the app.
Reduce Cost and Risk
Before CommCheck, pilot trainees learned communications in classrooms, simulators, and during both training and operational flights. Each of these steps is progressively more expensive and dangerous than individual training in a controlled environment.
Working through content designed by CTW-6 curriculum developers, trainees practice program-appropriate communications skills at their own pace and skill level. While CTW-6 students use it in a computer lab, CommCheck is a cloud-based application that can be used on a personal device like a laptop, tablet or phone, allowing students to become proficient at aviation comms cheaper, faster and safer than before.
Lighten Instructor Load
Teaching aviation communications, often through role-playing, isn't usually where qualified instructors shine. There are much more sophisticated aspects of flight training where their expertise is needed. Offloading radio training to CommCheck frees the instructors to concentrate on teaching more complex concepts. This also eliminates the need for scheduling simulator time and better prepares students for more advanced steps in the training program.
Use Time Wisely
Giving students the ability to conveniently conduct comms training on their own means that the training program can reduce or eliminate classroom scheduling requirements. That leaves more time for higher-order instruction or allows the training program to take less time overall. Either way, CommCheck can reduce the time and cost of the CTW-6 pilot training program.
Support Custom Curriculum and Training Requirements
CommCheck is not a one-size-fits-all application that is ready for use right out of the box. It's a training toolkit that instructors and curriculum developers populate with the content, scenarios, and training progression that makes sense for their program. ASTi engineers can assist with curriculum creation, but CommCheck is designed to allow customers to easily develop courses on their own.
While CTW-6 already had a communications training curriculum, CommCheck allows them to automate portions of it at their discretion without changing their training plan. They even use CommCheck for NFO checklists and pilot/NFO cockpit procedures training.
Provide Training Metrics
If students are free to practice aviation communications on their own, how can instructors measure their proficiency? CommCheck captures training data for each student and makes that available to instructors (or even learning management systems) for assessment. CTW-6 instructors can use this critical feedback to focus instruction on areas where students are deficient. Or, if everything looks good, program admins can move students to more advanced instruction quickly, which improves efficiency and program throughput.