It has become obvious to many airlines that existing systems for providing skilled employees – particularly but not exclusively pilots and engineers – are inadequate. Ryanair, for example, revealed last year at the Royal Aeronautical Society that a consistent 50% of pilot applicants with a commercial pilot licence/instrument rating (CPL/IR) fail the airline’s competency test.
Indeed, the European Aviation Safety Agency has been concerned about the issue since at least 2013, when it set up a working party called the EASA Aircrew Training Policy Group (EATPG). In UK more than five years ago, Simon Witts, then in charge of recruitment and training at Exeter, UK-based regional carrier Flybe, realised that if the airline wanted a steady flow of suitable recruits to skilled positions, it had to set up a system for pointing young people in the right educational and training directions to obtain airline-relevant skills. Regionals tend to be at the bottom of the skills supply chain, and are forced to be independent.
Such skills included not just piloting but those required for operations/crewing management, engineering, cabin crew, passenger service officers, and dispatchers – not to mention provision of infrastructure like airport management or air traffic control. Flybe set up an academy at Exeter to meet its skills needs, as well as having third party capacity, and it still operates today.
Airlines are still struggling to attract and prepare sufficient numbers of young people because the carriers believed – mistakenly according to Witts – it was not their job to engage student interest in aviation careers. But to Witts, the aviation industry – an enterprise that needs a constant supply of well-educated young recruits – was doing itself no favours by failing to flag up aviation and air transport careers to students sufficiently early at school or college, and also failing to inform pupils about what studies would support such ambitions.
Witts explains: “I have long held the view that the UK needs to re-establish its place as one of the world’s leading providers of skilled people to feed the growth in the industry.” Decades ago, when the military was large and the air transport industry small, a very high proportion of the knowledge and skills the industry required came in the form of military-trained engineers and pilots. Now the proportions are reversed this is no longer true, but it seems airlines have not realised this.
When Witts left Flybe he set about working with the industry and government education departments to review the information provided to young people about the aviation industry and how to enter it. That included advice on what education and training they could access to realise aviation industry ambitions, and which would enable them to present themselves to airline employers as suitable candidates for their chosen careers. To further this aim Witts set up the Aviation Skills Partnership (ASP) in 2013, the same year the EATPG was formed. Its stated objective is “developing talent for a growing industry by engaging individuals, businesses, trainers, educators and government to ensure people with the right skills are available for the right jobs.”
While researching the issues ASP sets out to address, Witts confirmed what he already felt he knew from his time at Flybe: there was no integrated system, just a large number of educational establishments, colleges and commercial training organisations which individually touted specialist courses. But many had insufficient contact with the industry and little or no contact with the government agencies from which they – or their students – could get assistance.
Nurturing the business environment in which a nation develops skilled workers is an important aim for any government but Witts observed the UK, despite a long aviation tradition, has a disjointed system for delivering such recruits. Very often – reflecting Ryanair’s experience – the product of existing training was inadequate, demonstrating the system today needs reviewing and updating. The aim of ASP, according to Witts, is to act as a facilitator in making the system more accessible, more transparent and more relevant to modern industry needs.
Meanwhile Ryanair’s head of pilot training, Capt Andy O’Shea, has – like many others – observed that passing a CPL/IR course and gaining the associated licence may produce a person who can fly a light twin, but does not prepare a pilot for operating a jet airliner as part of a crew. Even when the CPL recipient puts in additional time on courses like multi-crew co-operation (MCC), crew resource management (CRM), jet orientation (JOC) and line-oriented flight training (LOFT), the product has not been meeting Ryanair’s expectations. The presumption is that add-on courses, as presently constructed, are not delivering.
O’Shea is a key member of the EASA ATPG whose purpose is to bring airlines, the training industry and EASA together to determine what to do about this apparent mismatch between the product of the training system and what airlines actually need.
The emerging solution is being called the airline pilot certificate (APC), a qualification that would be awarded after a CPL/IR course that embodies all the components of MCC/CRM/JOC and LOFT, delivering “industry-ready pilots”. An acceptable alternative, according to EATPG, is the multi-crew pilot licence (MPL), which embodies all those components, but with its provisions modified to make it simple for a trainee pilot to transfer to other airlines if the employment agreement between the sponsor carrier and the trainee is curtailed. Another MPL modification, according to EATPG member and veteran training industry consultant Peter Moxham, is that the MPL is now awarded following the type rating but before the base check. The latter has already been adopted by most European national aviation authorities and others may follow. In the pipeline is the possibility that the original base-check required following an MPL – 12 real landings/touch-and-goes – may be reduced to the International Civil Aviation Organisation/Air Transport Pilot Licence standard of five landings.
It seems possible that, eventually, the CPL and MPL courses will converge and become a comprehensive solution that will deliver flightdeck-ready pilots. Moxham envisages a CPL incorporating all the MPL content and including, toward the end, more time in a simulation device for a specific airliner type – say a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 series – without having to commit to a specific airline. That would deliver a flightdeck-ready pilot for that type, with airline-specific standard operating procedures (SOP) the only additional component needed – and they could be injected into the final stages of training if an airline were to offer the trainee a job at that stage. An EASA policy on this issue, and the beginnings of an update of European flight crew licensing regulations and guidance, could be announced by mid-2016, according to sources.
Meanwhile according to the EATPG, there will definitely be a move, in terms of the style of future training delivery, towards competency-based (rather than syllabus-based) training at the ab-initio level, and evidence-based training at the recurrent level. This will be directed by EASA via the national aviation authorities, much of it in the form of training programmes approved under “acceptable means of compliance”. The philosophy is that if qualification for a licence is required to be demonstrated by defined performance standards across the board – rather than completion of a syllabus – the means by which the defined standards are delivered are not the crucial part of the equation, although best training practice will be established in time.
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It has become apparent the principal objectives of the EATPG and ASP are aligned because they both identified the same problem in the same year, one as a policymaker and the other as a solutions provider. For students, however, as ASP perceives the present situation, the new ideas are all very well, but a learning and training system that was not transparent in the first place is in a state of flux. Hence – at least temporarily while the commercial air transport industry and EASA decide what form training updates will take – the system is even more confusing to anyone contemplating an aviation career.
ASP offers guidance to all parties, from students wanting to know what to study, to would-be pilots or engineers working out where to start; and also to technical colleges or air training organisations wanting to design a course to meet the new objectives. Because ASP has become the expert go-between, liaising with prospective candidates, students, educators, government, industry and colleges it can – and often does – carry out marketing for technical colleges. That allows the colleges to get on with what they do best – teaching and training – and since they earn more money the more students they take on, ASP can monetise service provision.
Witts and the ASP have played a key part in setting up the new Professional Aviation Pilot Practice (PAPP) degree, which provides a BSc qualification as well as a pilot licence. The degree is conferred by the Middlesex University, and at present the ATOs that deliver the total course are CTC Aviation, Tayside Aviation and Helicentre Aviation.
At the beginning of a new phase in its development, ASP launched its manifesto at the Houses of Parliament on 18 January, having successfully persuaded relevant members of parliament to back its objectives for aviation skills provision. Speaking at the launch, MP for Norwich North Chloe Smith said: “I am delighted that the first Aviation Skills Manifesto is being launched under my sponsorship. As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Youth Employment, the opportunities for young people are at the top of my agenda.”
Cadet pilots attending the ASP launch event explained the PAPP degree course does not alter flying training or groundschool subjects, but at several stages during their course they are required to write “reflective” descriptions of their training process, which they described as being like a self-debrief, remarking it increases awareness of the significance of what they are learning and has the effect of consolidating understanding.
Until its re-launch, ASP had mostly followed the first two imperatives in its slogan: “inspire, connect, train, achieve”. Its task had mainly been to inspire people and connect them with the means and assistance to develop. Now however, ASP has begun construction of a new aviation training centre at Norwich airport, called the International Aviation Academy Norwich (IAAN), which will be operating by the end of the year. Professional training there will include piloting, air traffic control, airport operations, airline operations, cabin crew, and aviation engineering. Smith said: “The country’s first international aviation academy has been located in my constituency, contributing to the future economy of the whole region. It will provide excellent opportunities for local young people and for the firms who seek their talent. It is nationally and internationally notable and I am pleased to play a role in ensuring that the whole of the UK gets behind this exciting new project.”
IAAN will partner with KLM UK Engineering at Norwich airport, and also with other airport users that can benefit from the skills it provides. ASP explains: “IAAN will offer a new BSc (Hons) professional aviation engineering practice degree validated by the University of East Anglia under their partnership with City College Norwich, and delivered by KLM UK Engineering based on an Aviation Skills Partnership framework. This unique work-based degree integrates the required EASA regulatory training, classroom, workshop and on-aircraft training, all within the custom-designed training and business centre.”
The experience of being part of Flybe when it was setting up its academy appears to have inspired Witts. The ASP vision for training is national. In the ASP manifesto, it talks about aviation academies in the plural: “To establish international aviation academies that will inspire and educate through world-class training and education pathways with ‘aviation emulation zones’, facilitated by local stakeholder partnerships.” In launching the IAAN project, ASP enlisted the support of Norfolk County Council, the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, Norwich City Council and other local area bodies.
At the same time, UK-based airlines are becoming more imaginative about pilot recruitment, a number embracing graduates with the PAPP degree, and EasyJet recently announcing its “Amy Johnson initiative”. Under this, it will underwrite the training costs of female pilots to increase the proportion of women in the profession. Meanwhile at Leeds Bradford, Jet2 has been successfully running a pilot apprenticeship scheme ASP would approve of. Having selected pilots with a frozen ATPL complete with an MCC and JOC, Jet2 takes them on for a year at a modest salary, during which time they work in numerous ground jobs at the airline’s bases, including the operations department, and carry out enough simulator work to keep their skills current. By the time they carry out their type rating training they know how an airline works.
Since Ryanair’s O’Shea has been so deeply involved in the EATPG, much of which his inspiration has driven, do not be surprised if that airline starts to do more on pilot training than the recurrent training it has always done for crews. It is a really big airline with really big needs which are getting bigger fast, and it has the resources and the vision to do more.
When Witts set up the organisation that was to become the ASP he called it the Aviation Skills Network, because he believed the first task was to get all the disparate organisations, resources and talent scattered around the UK talking to each other and co-ordinating. That process, it seems, has begun, but across Europe, not only in the UK.
Source: Flight International
