Army schoolhouse tries to fill 'insatiable demand' for aviators.

The lonely, neon lights of the aviation schoolhouse penetrate the dark before dawn at Fort Rucker, Ala. Inside, crammed in a small classroom, about a dozen pilots are huddled over books and papers, murmuring engine-power calculations and emergency, procedures. They have been there since at least 5 a.m. The one who runs late has to bring doughnuts.

Just as the sun's rays make it through the morning clouds, the pilots head out to nearby Hanchey Heliport to tackle their training flights in the Apache Longbow helicopters. This group's training session represents just a small fraction of the 520 flights that take place in one day at the Army's aviation school.

"The first instructor pilot shows up to the flight line at about 4:45 a.m.," said Col. Steven Semmens, commander of the training brigade at Fort Rucker. "The last instructor pilots on the night shift turn off the lights at about 2:30 in the morning and then two and a half hours later it starts 'all over again."

Fort Rucker starts a class of 50 students every two weeks, he said. "The Army is insatiable in its demands for new aviators," he said in an interview. "This has been the requirement for the last four years and it is likely to stay like that in the near future."

To tackle its mission, Fort Rucker has turned its old way of training "on its head," as Semmens puts it, and is aggressively pursuing its new, $1.1 billion training concept, called Flight School XXI, which the Army began implementing in 2002.

At its core, the concept stresses much more training in Army combat aircraft--the AH-64A/D, the UH-60 Black Hawk, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior and the CH-47 Chinook--and their corresponding simulators. Previously, the Army trained its pilots in two helicopters that no longer are in the active fleet, the UH-1 Huey and the OH58A/C. Pilots had to take additional courses to qualify in their go-to-war helicopters. Simulators were obsolete, said Semmens.

Before they even get to set foot in a helicopter, pilot students, under Flight School XXI, go through water-survival, and resistance, escape and evasion training. After that, for 14 weeks, pilots acquire basic instrumentation and flying skills in the Bell TH-67A helicopter. Fort Rucker also will receive a new TH-67 simulator, scheduled to arrive next spring.

Before they transition to combat aircraft, pilots spend four weeks practicing basic navigation and night vision goggle familiarization in the TH-67A+. "That takes an officer from an administrative mode and starts to ease him into a tactical application mode in a platform that is not expensive too operate," Semmens explained. The TH-67A+ is "a more robust TH-67 system," he added.

Under Flight School XXI, student pilots will spend from 13.4 weeks in the UH-60 to 22.8 weeks in the Apache Longbow. A student would spend 166 live and 117 virtual hours in the attack helicopter, for example.

Flight School XXI "requires a different resource mix of aircraft ... a different skill set from our instructor pilots force and a different logistics base to support that different aircraft mix," said Semmens.

Major changes also are required in the simulators for the combat aircraft, as well as collective trainers. After a three-month contract dispute, the program executive office for simulation, training and instrumentation (PEO STRI) in January chose Computer Sciences Corporation as the lead integrator for the school's 57 new simulators. CSC's team includes L-3 Communications, Flight Safety, NLX, ISERA and ATC.

"We have adapted a privately funded initiative," said Suzic McDonald, the aviation center program manager for Flight School XXI simulations.

The contractor provides the initial investment. CSC will build, operate, maintain and own all the simulators, said McDonald. "The government pays a steady state fee, because we can't come up with a lump sum for 57 simulators."

The award options are based on annual evaluations of contractor performance, said McDonald. "We are now in the first of 19 one-year options," she explained. "We hope that this contract is going to last 19 and a half years, but there is a basic time period of 11.5 years." After that, based on performance evaluations, the contractor can win the rest of the eight years, If performance is poor, CSC can lose five years from the basic l 1.5 years, McDonald explained.

Meanwhile, the Army has added $3 million a year into the contract to assure concurrency between the simulator and the aircraft. "We have a lot of big aircraft concurrency upgrades coming up for the CH-47F and the UH-60M and the Longbow, which is being upgraded constantly," she said.

Flight School XXI will have two levels of simulations: individual crew and collective training. For the individual crew level, Fort Rucker will receive 20 TH-67, 11 UH-60, three CH-47, four OH-58D Kiowa Warrior and one AH-64D trainers. Pilots will continue using the current five Longbow simulators, said McDonald. Fort Rucker is scheduled to receive

all the 20 TH-67 simulators, as well as five UH-60 and one CH-47 next year. Six more UH-60 trainers will come on line in 2006, and the rest of the simulators--two CH-47, the four OH-58D and the Longbow--will be ready in 2008.

All of these individual crew simulators, apart from the Longbow, will be housed in a new facility directly outside Fort Rucker, in Daleville, Ala. Called Warrior Hall, the building will be 140,000 square feet and is slated to be finished by April 2005. Simulators will start coming in around the same time, said McDonald.

CSC will own the building. The company will be responsible for providing the students' transportation to Warrior Hall as well as their security.

The 18 new collective trainers--called re-configurable collective training devices (RCTD)--can be set to represent each of the Arm)?s five combat aircraft. L3 Communications, the producer of the RCTD, used its other collective trainer, the Aviation Combined Arms Tactical Trainer (AVCATT-A) as a baseline, said McDonald (see related story). The RCTDs will be fixed sites, unlike AVCATT-A, which comes in transportable trailers.

"We have a little bit of a different requirement for Flight School XXI," she said. "We have a few changes in our collective training task list. But it is very close."

For the RCTD, the Army has additional requirements in terms of geo-specific terrain databases. "We must have several of them on start date, because we support Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the National Training Center and Germany," she said. "We need all those. This is also a separate contract under Flight School XXI." The only terrain database that the AVCATT-A system has is that of the National Training Center.

"We hope to solve the geo-specific limitations for both AVCATT-A and RCTD at the same time, because they have the same image generators," McDonald said.

The first five RCTDs are scheduled to arrive at Fort Rucker in March 2005. The next six will come in January 2006, and the final seven will be available in October 2008.

The Army's plan is that, by 2006, Flight School XXI will be the only training model at Fort Rucker. The aviation-training brigade currently is mixing the old-school method with a transition process.

"Because I am obligated to meet Army requirements to start 50 students every two weeks, I do not have the luxury of what General Motors would do in between model years--shut down for six weeks in late summer to retool and restart the assembly line," Semmens said. "If I did, I could make that change in relatively short order."

Instead the Army had to come up with roughly a four-year transition period to keep training at full speed. "Officers who start their training today; as we make the shift, will start doing the legacy model, some will do the intermediate model. Some will go future model," be said. "The ratio switching from 100 percent legacy to 100 percent future model will shift over the course of three years."

Interim flight school started in 2002. In 2003 and 2004, one third of the student pilots trained under the Flight School XXI interim concept, by increasing their hours in combat aircraft and the existing simulators. For example, the interim Flight School XXI gives an attack helicopter student 20 weeks to learn the AH-64D with 89 hours in the real aircraft and 37 hours in the simulator. This eliminates advanced aircraft qualification at the end of initial rotary-wing training, as was the case with the legacy model.

Not all student pilots, however, like the pace of Flight School XXI. "Some of my colleagues say Flight School XXI is too intense," said Warrant Officer 1 Steve Morris. "I prefer the old way. It's a slower, more relaxed pace--if you can call this relaxed."

Next year, will be a "swing year" when about two thirds of the trainees will be Flight School XXI pilots, with some of the new simulators at their disposal, and one third legacy flight school, he explained.

One other significant change is that aviators have enough time to learn how to employ their helicopters in a tactical environment, said Semmens. "It drove commanders in the field crazy, because under the legacy model there was no provision and no time to do an external sling-load operation, and there was no time to develop competency in formation flight, which is basically what lift aviators do."

There also was no time to do tactical scenarios for air assault or air movement operations, he added. "We now are to a point that as a graduation exercise we have a six-ship night-vision goggle external load operation supported by attack helicopters out doing this stuff for real, supporting Rangers," in their training, he said.

While captains coming out of the flight school may not be completely proficient in air assault operations, they are familiar with sling loads, night vision goggles and formation flights with attack helicopters, he said. These are all things commanders had to teach their novice pilots from scratch once they joined a unit, Semmens said.

"Commanders in the field are still responsible for tactical and unit training, but they are able to start at a much higher level," he said. "The ability to introduce collective and tactical tasks in Flight School XXI is absolutely a key element."

Fort Rucker, during the past two years, has requested feedback from units with combat experience in either Afghanistan or Iraq. "One of their needs is air-ground integration," said Semmens. "We seek opportunities to actually support ground units as opposed to just having scenarios where there aren't any troops on the ground. We regularly support Ranger training at Fort Benning, Ga., and in Florida, where Rangers go through the qualification course, and they happen to have an air assault as one of the tasks."

The schoolhouse has spent significant time refining its techniques and tactics for close combat in support of urban operations, said Semmens. "We have significantly reconfigured our gunnery training here to support close combat attack scenarios," he said. "We have introduced maneuvering flight as an element of Flight School XXI, particularly focusing on aspects of maneuvering the aircraft to avoid ground fire and to position the aircraft to reengage quickly," he said. The aviation-training brigade also incorporated night-vision goggle qualification for the Longbow instruction.

Pilots are learning how to exploit the Apache's capabilities. "Our limitations in the aircraft are going to change," said Chief Warrant Officer 4 James Chandler, an instructor at Fort Rucker. "Right now, they are a 30 degree pitch and a 60 degree roll. But we will put them in a much steeper roll, a 90 degree roll to show them that the aircraft is capable to do more." If, for example, an Apache is taking fire, the pilot can pitch the aircraft up, roll it over, try to find the target, "hopefully get on it and shoot it," Chandler said.

While Fort Rucker is trying to incorporate change, "the challenge is, of course, that commanders in the field want everything all the time," he said. "If it is up to them, flight school would be four years long and they would get a 2,000-hour pilot in command."

As instructors pay more attention to collective skills, they may run the risk of sacrificing the baseline skills, said Semmens. He cautioned that Flight School XXI's missions are aircraft qualification and basic operation of a helicopter as a crew. Fort Rucker has room to make some changes on the margins, but will not accommodate "whatever the fad is."