Army helicopter pilots to receive more training hours
In response to aircraft related accidents, the Army is going to have its helicopter pilots conduct additional hours of training. Six hours of training will be added that focuses on spatial awareness and maintenance issues. Active-duty pilots will complete this training by May 10.
From Military.com:
Now, the service is adding four to six hours worth of training for pilots that focuses on spatial awareness and maintenance issues, though the service was unclear on what that training means in practice.
The move comes after Army aircraft have been grounded twice in the past year — including once after a crash last April involving two Black Hawks out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that killed nine soldiers in one of the deadliest training incidents in the service’s history.
The Army National Guard also grounded its aircraft in late February after two of its pilots died in an AH-60 Apache crash in Mississippi. In a prior incident Feb. 12, a National Guard Apache crashed near Salt Lake City, Utah, and both pilots survived.
Service planners did not announce any significant tweaks to training or maintenance after those groundings.
In March, two soldiers were injured when their Apache crashed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state during what base officials described as routine training. Then, 48 hours later, two more soldiers were hospitalized when their Apache went down at Fort Carson, Colorado. Two New York Guardsmen died in a UH-72 Lakota in southern Texas while supporting federal border security. A border patrol agent also died.
“We get into aspects of flight where the crew must reinforce how to revert back to knowing where you are and where your aircraft is with respect to the ground. And so it always bears reinforcing any spatial disorientation training,” Rugen said.
Military.com provides additional details.
Category: Army, Army News, Big Army, Military issues
Not enough details to understand how 4-6 more hours of training a pilot that has had thousands (?) of hours worth of training already is gonna fix this problem. Maybe there should be more training upfront on how to fly the whirly birds instead of which pronoun to use?
Yeah.
I would have thought DEI training would be more important.
Isn’t DEI training sort of like shoveling bird shit INTO your coo coo clock?
Yes, but you really don’t want to miss pronoun the ground… it will straight up slap you silly!
It’s pronouns are: It/Thar/That
You can’t keep a helicopter in the air without recognizing that the White Cisgender Patriarchy is existential threat to aerodynamics.
Hmm, knowing where the ground is when you’re flying, and what your relationship to it is DOES seem kinda important…
The PsubK of colliding with a CumuloGranite Cloud is pretty damn high.
Daniel Bernath didn’t think so.
I’ve seen plenty of them flying training sorties out of Fort Carson. They’ve often flown over my place of work. Pretty cool.
Can ‘enhanced’ “spatial disorientation training” involve booze? As a taxpayer, I think it should.
…….
Also, youtube is killing comments of a video that pokes fun at the,… um, less than stellar reputation of recruiters and the MIC right now.
Censorship of critique directed at The Emprie?
Not very cash money, yt.
IMPORTANT THINGS FIRST, is everyone’s SHARP, CRT, DEI and Trans-whatever training all up to date? Just checking, mmmmmkay?
If you let your MEDPROS go red the Taliban will overtake Trashcanistan.
Don’t buck your fuddy.
It is the duty of the command/staff, and the wrenchbenders of the aviation maintenance battalions to keep the machines flying.
But, since the days of Orville and Wilbur Wright,
it has been the duty of the pilot to keep his machine from
flying into the ground.
My two cents as a career Marine Corps Aviator:
Having those Army pilots sitting on their asses in the ready room enduring yet another six hours of lectures on spatial awareness and “maintenance issues” (whatever that means) is probably not going to have much of an impact on improving Army aviation safety.
What those Army pilots need are more actual flight hours in their respective type/model/series aircraft. Not classroom lectures, and not simulator training. More flight hours. In all of the flight regimes/mission profiles that they are expected to maintain proficiency in for the aircraft that they fly. The more that a pilot flies, the better he is, and the safer he is. It really is that simple.
To do this, Big Army is going to have to accept that it’s going to cost a lot of increased time, money, and resources (e.g., maintenance hours, aviation supply, aviation ordnance, fuel, etc.) to provide those additional flight hours and associated “live” training to their aviators that will go a long way towards improving the Army aviation safety record.
In my view, if Big Army can’t/won’t provide the additional resources that are required in order to get their pilots more actual flight time each month, then they’re not serious about addressing their aviation safety issues. Adding a mere six additional hours of classroom training is just “sticking a Band-Aid” on a much deeper problem, in the hope that that problem will somehow just go away on its own.
Is it something like; Ground hard and bad. Air soft and good, stay in air…