AIR TRANSPORT Pilot training

A new era of training at Gatwick

On 1 October, CAE officially inaugurated its new flight simulation centre at Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, UK – with easyJet as its anchor tenant. TIM ROBINSON reports.

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A new CAE flight simulation centre for Gatwick will see easyJet pilots start training using more representative and realistic scenarios, derived from actual line operations, in one of the biggest advances in flight training in decades.

The new facility, aimed at type rating and recurrent training, once up and fully running will train 13,000 pilots a year and joins CAE Manchester and CAE Milan as part of a European expansion of the Canadian training and simulator specialist’s footprint. CAE already run 300 simulators in 59 locations worldwide and last year notched up the milestone of one million hours of civil flight training. Globally the company trains some 135,000 pilots a year.

As the anchor tenant at Gatwick, easyJet signed a ten-year exclusive agreement with CAE in November 2018 for the use of five Airbus A320ceo/ neo simulators at the centre (and four others in Manchester and Milan) with pilots starting immediately training on these devices the very same day as the inauguration. The other two FFS devices, an A330 and A350, have already been in use by Virgin Atlantic for two months prior to the facility’s officially opening.

Another brand-new FFS device – a Boeing 787 – is set to be delivered direct from CAE, with the company also set to move other simulators (two A320s, 757/767, 737NG and an Embraer E190) from its existing Gatwick training centre to the new facility in 2020. These will support other customers, such as Air Europa, Norwegian, BA Cityflyer, LOT, West Atlantic, DHL, TUI and Titan Airways.

Pilots at CAE’s Gatwick centre will also be the first to use its newest fixed-base 600XR flight training device which allows airlines to offload some pilot training onto a cheaper simulator. Another 600XR is set to be deployed to the Milan centre. Finally, as well as classrooms, briefing/debriefing rooms and pilot lounge, the new facility will also include a 737NG cabin crew trainer.

Examining the evidence ​

At the time of AEROSPACE’s visit in September, the first evidence-based training (EBT) course was set to begin for Easyjet pilots – introducing a new era in flight training. This updates flight training for the 21st century, replacing 1950s-style prescriptive tickbox check tests with scenarios taken from today’s operational line flights. These simulator tests, though valuable in training aircrew to react and carry out emergency procedures, have increasingly become divorced from real operations, as aircraft have reached levels of system reliability that would have seemed impossible in the early years of air transport.

As David Morgan, Interim CCO of easyJet notes, in the budget carrier’s 24-year history, with millions of flight hours racked up, it has never once encountered an engine failure on take-off (a standard check-ride test) – such is the reliability of modern powerplants. EBT swaps out these statistically ultra-rare incidents for more common training scenarios drawn from line operations – (although CAE instructors note that, initially these will be delivered through mixed-EBT implementation).

These EBT scenarios may not even be technical failures on the aircraft but challenges, such as dealing with disruptive or drunk passengers, that potentially might be a case for the aircraft needing to divert alter flight plans and pilots being required to exercise command and CRM skills.

Indeed, Morgan notes that introducing EBT would have been impossible prior to this new centre, where these latest identically-configured A320 FFS devices allow for the same training experience without the subtle minor differences between previous simulators.

In another sign of how the centre incorporates the latest in-flight training technology, the CAE 7000XR A320 family simulators also feature an extended envelope data package from Airbus to support new upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT), now mandated by EASA after loss of control incidents (LOC-I), such as Air France AF477 and Colgan Air 3407. In the full flight simulator device, this focuses more on prevention and recognising unusual altitudes rather than actual spins and recovery – with that phase undertaken in real aerobatic aircraft during a pilot’s IR (instrument rating) phase. This development, a long time coming, represents a step-change in enhancing the manual flying skills of pilots on modern, highly automated aircraft.

The 7000XR simulators (which can be re-roled into either A320ceo or neo variants) feature the latest technology, such as the CAE Tropos 6000XR visual system and all-electric, instead of hydraulic motion legs – which is significantly quieter and draws less power.

Inside, the instructor’s station is state-of-the-art, with the instructors praising it for its comfort during four-hour sim sessions and large touchscreen displays – with a 3D path of the aircraft and event markers. As well as the ability to change time of day, weather etc, the instructor can also inject artificial intelligence (AI) aircraft into the synthetic environment, which then show up on TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system) and visually as well. The simulator also reflects the greater use of nonverbal datalink communications for today’s airline pilots, with instructors able to send ACARS (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system) or CPDLC (controller–pilot data link communications) text messages from the control station to the FMS.

The next step for immersion and training, say CAE instructors, is an AI traffic air traffic control (ATC) ‘chatter’ module which will provide automatically-generated voice communications between AI aircraft and ATM – adding to the realism of line-training scenarios.

Aiming for diversity

As well as training that incorporates ‘mixed-EBT’ and the new standards of upset recovery prevention, easyJet are pioneering changing the gender balance on its flightdeck, with a self-imposed target to increase its intake of female airline pilots to 20% by 2020 – a goal that it now is on track to achieve, according to CAE’s CEO, Marc Parent, opening the facility. In 2018, its intake of new pilots was 15% female – up from the average of 5% of women pilots on the flightdeck in world’s airlines.

Through career programmes, such as the Amy Johnson Initiative cadet scholarships which it launched in 2015, easyJet is making steady progress in increasing the number of women airline pilots. This is not corporate virtue signalling but a sign that the industry as a whole is now becoming increasingly desperate to fill the 47,680 airliner flightdecks that Airbus, for example, predicts will be flying in 2038. As CAE’s Parent notes, 50% of the airline pilots needed just in the next decade have yet to begin training.

‘Generation easyJet’ may be the tagline that the low-cost airline uses to describe its young, traveladdicted passengers – but it could also be used for its new generation of pilots – more diverse, and better able to handle the challenges of 21st century airline operations via the introduction of evidence-based training and loss-of-control prevention skills.