Great information. BTW, who decided upon the requirement for full autos and who did they ask?
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- Thread starter Randy Daytona
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Great information. BTW, who decided upon the requirement for full autos and who did they ask?
so no sim instructors? and getting rid of reservists? am I reading this right? If that's true then there's gonna be a huge institutional change in the way things are done at south field. There's a lot of institutional inertia from the decades that training has pretty much stayed the same. Now change the aircraft, sims, syllabus, instructors… I hope it gets done right and I'd be interested to see how such a drastic change would take place. Would it be piecemeal like the T-34/T-6 transition or would they shut down the pipeline for a few months and do a total reset and restart?
Whatever they do, there would have to be a transition period. You cannot shut down the firehose coming from VTs or the output to the Fleet.
I read the line you quoted as "keep our current manning the same, we're not going to use contractor pilots like the Army," but that might be wrong.
Also, keep in mind that this is just an industry day for an RFP. The RFP may have issues in how it's written and should not be read as guiding/changing policy. Part of responding to an RFP is communicating to clarify the requirements if they're not clearly written.
Either way this is done there will be a phase in period across several years as new assets become available and older assets are phased out. The deliveries wouldn't happen en masse so the HTs wouldn't shut down all at once. At the end of the day, it's just another program for someone to manage.
Not sure that I follow you on this one - why can't a single engine helo handle the hard parts of Form/NVD/Boat?
Concur @Pags I believe thats the intent as well. Same goes for full autos in FAM's - "we teach them now, we consider the maneuver a critical building block to any future syllabus"
@hscs I think a medium twin would approximate what we're train to do far better than a Single VFR. Any actual helicopter would do better than a sim for those. Night form, low light, in the mountains, to a DVE zone is probably one of the hardest things we do. A tough night behind the boat is probably close behind. Even the "pretty good" R/S sims, with linked mode, do a terrible job with those. I'm not suggesting we throw HT studs into that challenging environment, but they deserve the highest level of flight training we can give them.
The TH-57A was initially bought (1968) when there were far less options in the commercial space and single engine helos existed in the fleet. Less so in the late 80s for the B/C models, but the issues were still there. That's no longer the case. Every fleet airframe in the inventory is a heavy+ twin engine helicopter with a glass cockpit (save the -53s, one more engine, one less glass cockpit, soon to be replaced).
With respect to full practice autos, I don't get it. The bottom of a full practice auto in the -57 is a modified running landing. Any theoretical effort or money for that needs to be put into finding a viable way to get DLQs for HT students. Punting TCQ to the Tailhook FRSes would be inconceivable, but they did the equivalent to HT students and replaced it with a sim.
The TH-57A was initially bought (1968) when there were far less options in the commercial space and single engine helos existed in the fleet. Less so in the late 80s for the B/C models, but the issues were still there. That's no longer the case. Every fleet airframe in the inventory is a heavy+ twin engine helicopter with a glass cockpit (save the -53s, one more engine, one less glass cockpit, soon to be replaced).
With respect to full practice autos, I don't get it. The bottom of a full practice auto in the -57 is a modified running landing. Any theoretical effort or money for that needs to be put into finding a viable way to get DLQs for HT students. Punting TCQ to the Tailhook FRSes would be inconceivable, but they did the equivalent to HT students and replaced it with a sim.
I don't see the Navy spending money for 2 different new helicopter trainers, nor spending the training time on learning 2 different aircraft systems and time to train. I could see the Navy keeping the TH-57B's for full down auto training for just 2 or 3 flights so the SNA's don't need to learn systems - flown by a select group of IP's.
A better option would be full autos trained in a Level D simulator, saving money and time to be spent on a light twin, full glass, IFR trainer - hope they go with something that has a 4 axis autopilot. Yes, you can do NVG's and boat landings in the sim. If you have not seen a modern simulator, they are extremely good.
Expect business as usual for instructors. Active duty IP's supplemented by reservists and contractors handling simulators and maintenance. That system works - no need to change it.
If that's the case why not split the syllabus into Intermediate and Advanced stages. The Tilt students could do their T-6 top off at their primary squadron and skip intermediate because they don't need to know how to autorotate or deal with tailrotor issues. Intermediate for the helo guys could cover FAMS, Full Auto fun, helicopter specific tactics and whatever else they want. In advanced you would have to redo FAMS for a new platform, multi-engine considerations, and to get the tilt-rotor students up to speed on the magic of helicopters then continue with Goggles, Instruments, Low Levels, Forms, and then a comprehensive Tactics to finish off. This would also give you the added benefit of using the twin-engine instrument trainer sooner rather than later while you still utilize the -57B for an intermediate role. Cannibalize parts off the -57C now to prolong the -57B life just long enough to get the VFR trainer up and running. The problem now isn't the -57B, it's the -57C and it's spotty electronics, FAA waived instrument suite, low fuel capacity, and lack of the security blanket of having and extra engine.
So you haven't convinced me why we need two engines to do the basic tactical stuff in HTs. Glass cockpit, avionics - got it, but if FRS / fleet JOs were having issues on working on multi-engine a/c or there was a massive engine reliability issue in the trainer, I could buy the argument. If multi-engine doesn't satisfy any training objectives, then it just takes money out of the system that is needed elsewhere.
A lot of this is driven by the fact that many of the light twins are single pilot IFR certified with 3 or 4 axis autopilots already (EC-135, EC-145, Bell 429) but none of the singles are (Bell 407, EC-130, AW-119). Not that this could not be rectified quickly but it is the situation as of now.
I think there's value in getting to something that does OEI procedures earlier in the training track.
How much value? Great question. Is it fundamental to flying a fleet helicopter? Yes. Essential to learn early? Maybe.