On a warm, clear afternoon in May, speakers from Marshall University in Charleston, West Virginia, honored the aviation campus as it launched a new program.
Outside the hangar, a new Airbus H125 helicopter in Marshall University green was the star of the show. It had just flown in and was being handed over to its new owners. Meanwhile, inside the university’s pilot training building, a newly installed high-tech flight simulator stood ready for its first student. As visitors stopped to watch, a sim technician sat at a table with three monitors — two of them showing vivid representations of the flight in progress, and the third showing all the parameters the technician could control to create a vivid flight experience.
The simulator replicates the H125 and all of its flight characteristics, the motion base creating a nearly real flight experience, and the virtual reality goggles a complete simulated world of flight for the pilot. Marshall University helicopter program managers plan to use the sim to teach a curriculum of training tasks in coordination with major air medical helicopter companies, and build a skill base for pilot candidates as they complete the course in a helicopter.
“We see the Marshall program as a manifestation of a program we’ve been working on for some time,” said Jason Quisling, senior vice president of flight operations for Air Methods, the largest single-certificate air medical company in the U.S., with 1,200 pilots serving nearly 300 bases around the country.
“We’ve worked on a number of projects to feed new pilots into our ranks,” Quisling said. “We have an advantage over airlines and jet charter companies in that our pilot recruits are not required to have airline transport ratings, along with the 1,500 total flight hour minimum. However, we currently have hiring minimums at 2,000 hours due to the challenges of the job, and we are unable to bring lower time pilots onboard. We want to build a roadmap that allows a prospective student to have a clear path that will allow them to receive training, flight experience and mentoring. [This] will deliver them to a job interview as a highly qualified air medical pilot already skilled in landings in remote terrain, use of night vision goggles [NVGs], and managing marginal weather while avoiding inadvertent [entry into] instrument meteorological conditions.”
Quisling believes such a task-based program could facilitate recruiting pilots with less than 1,500 hours and empowering them to fly safely within the challenging environment air medical pilots face every day.
Treg Manning, vice president of sales and marketing for Airbus Helicopters North America, also believes task-based training can provide a higher quality training experience, possibly supporting pilots with less flight time required in the future than today, all with the skills to successfully fly not only air medical but other for hire operations and public service missions.
“We see the Marshall University helicopter program as the first of many that could help reduce the pilot shortage crisis these companies are facing. And we intend to support Marshall University in designing such programs,” he said.
A key component in task-based training is a high-fidelity flight simulator. Pilot students can accomplish initial orientation and skills development in a simulator much more efficiently than in an actual aircraft.
“We chose the Loft Dynamics H125 flight simulator training device [FSTD] as the perfect partner machine to Marshall University’s reliable, powerful and cost-effective H125,” Manning said.
Confined area landings, night flying, and avoiding flight into clouds are all basic skills every pilot learns. But air medical flying demands a higher level of awareness of the variables than that taught in basic commercial flight curriculums.
“The flight school version of confined area landings, as an example, doesn’t equip a pilot to confront a landing zone in mountainous territory in the middle of the night,” Quisling said.
He explained that every night, their pilots, on arriving at a remote trauma scene, must assess the terrain, obstacles and winds, and quickly construct a strategy to make a safe landing and then later, a safe departure. These situations leave very little room for error.
Learning these challenges and how to manage them, while creating all the hazards a pilot will face, is best accomplished in the safe environment of a flight simulator. Then, when the pilot student demonstrates competency in the sim, they move on, flying the same challenging landing zone in the helicopter and creating habit patterns that will keep them safe regardless of night or day, high winds and clouds, or rough, rocky obstacles.
This same methodology is applied to night flying with NVGs, avoiding weather in remote areas where there may be no information on the conditions, and landings and takeoffs on rocky, uneven terrain.
Marshall University’s curriculum for this training starts with introductory sessions in the Loft Dynamics simulator. The students will first be given an in-depth presentation on each maneuver that will include typical scenarios in which a pilot might need to employ them, the basics on quickly preparing for it, and then skills practice under varying conditions.
As an example, for confined area landings, the preparatory material will include a re-statement of the basics learned early in the student’s training, then the development of tools to assess the landing situation, and finally, the application of confined area principles to safely conduct the landing and the departure.
“Our intent is to build advanced mental and physical skills for each of the tasks we teach, building on the principles the student learned during their early pilot training,” said Bruce Ray, program manager and lead instructor for the helicopter training program. “The power of the simulator for us is we can teach basics and build skills on each of the tasks so that actual helicopter time to build proficiency is minimized, saving the student thousands of dollars.
For those young pilots aspiring to fly air medical missions, the helicopter program will focus their learning on that objective. The aim is that one day, when air medical companies recognize the Marshall program as an alternative to 1,500 hours of flight time, the students will be able to step into new careers as medevac pilots much sooner. Air medical companies will have a new pipeline for hiring pilots with recruits who are proficient in all the challenging situations they must master to safely complete the mission.
“The hurdle an aspiring helicopter pilot faces is that they will become a commercially certificated pilot with only 200 to 300 hours of flight time. There are very few options to find jobs that will build experience for the 800 to 1,700 hours they need for some of these careers,” Quisling said. “Our partnership with Marshall University will create a model that provides support and a clear pathway to a professional career as a helicopter pilot. We look forward to talking to a stream of new hires from the Marshall helicopter program who will be trained and ready for their jobs from day one.”
