CAE has improved its maintenance technician and pilot training programmes and added access to comprehensive eLearning resources for its customers. David Bienvenu, Global Leader Maintenance Training, and Timothy Schoenauer, Senior Director Global Business Aviation Training Solutions, detail the changes
Responding to the significant maintenance technician shortage and looking to improve the customer experience, CAE highlighted new options in its aircraft maintenance technician training programme during the NBAA-BACE show. David Bienvenu, Global Leader Maintenance Training at CAE, said: “The starting point for this shortage is demographics. There is a large population of technicians that are ten years from retirement and a smaller base coming in to the industry. At CAE we publish an annual Aviation Talent Forecast and our data suggests that for every ten ‘techs’ retiring, only seven are filling in. On the shop floor that can mean where you used to have nine experienced techs and one new one, now you have three experienced people and seven new ones.
“At the same time, business aviation has grown massively over the past five years. There is more demand and there are more aircraft, but there are fewer technicians and fewer among them are experienced. Training methods have also changed. In the past, techniques were taught one-on-one, through apprenticeships on the shop floor, but that changed and now there is a real need for structured training platforms. This is where I think CAE can help its partners with their type-rating training.”
Complex in execution but obvious in its immediate improvement to customer experience and making training more easily available, CAE offers the flexibility of taking training courses globally, at one of its training centres, the customer location, or via live remote training using hybrid training rooms. The latter enable several technicians to train simultaneously, which is especially attractive to companies with large technician cohorts, since it adds flexibility and reduces travel costs.
The hybrid training room concept goes way beyond training delivered during a video call. Bienvenu again: “The hybrid training room is a standard classroom with infrastructure that allows students at a distance to participate. They have their own camera and they are projected onto screens in the classroom. The instructor can interact with students in the class and on screen.”
Further adding to its technician training offer, CAE aims to expand its modular training concept to MROs worldwide after achieving considerable success with it at Bombardier. Modular training consolidates courses for an entire aircraft family since they share many components and features. Overall training time is reduced as modular courses are delivered over a week, including hands-on experience.
Professional development
Beyond its aircraft maintenance-focussed programmes, CAE’s professional development courses satisfy the need for experienced technicians to learn new skills as they move through a company hierarchy. As part of its initiative to improve its products and customer service, CAE’s professional development courses are now delivered under three tiers: those enabling technicians to develop soft skills including customer service, basic finances and human factors; training for technicians moving into people management roles; and courses to help people managers take on executive roles.
The latter tier was developed in response to the needs of customers facing no option but to place older, experienced technicians into leadership roles for which they were never trained. “These people are being thrust into leadership positions, and it is not always the case that a great technician makes a great leader. Our three tiers of professional development courses are set up for technicians identified as having high potential, those moving up to become a mentor and coach, and last but not least, those destined to become aviation executives,” said Bienvenu.
Rapid technological advance poses a further challenge to technician training. Presented with a scenario where an experienced guy happy with a wrench but less so a laptop is designated to mentor a young woman new to the industry and comfortable with the laptop but less so the wrench, Bienvenu explained: “Getting experienced people comfortable with technology has been a big jump in some places – we’ve even had people tell us privately that they are worried about their future if the owner gets a new plane. But a structured training programme helps them gain that expertise and learn what’s required to fix the aircraft, whether it’s using an iPad, a laptop, a wrench or, in future, AI. We embrace technology along the journey, because we have experienced techs who are learning to use it and new techs who learn differently.”
Bienvenu offered the example of the VR experience included early in the Gulfstream G500 technician course it delivers in Savannah, but also stated that CAE’s instructors are its most valuable assets. “We ensure they are cognisant of those technological challenges and can help all our technicians along the way.”
Finally, and proving that it has not forgotten the simpler things that make a busy MRO’s life easier, CAE is introducing a new online course booking platform while retaining the options for customers to book in person or by phone.
eLearning
Meanwhile, eLearning offers flexibility for study wherever and whenever a student has the space and time. As such it adds considerable flexibility, and just as it is easing the challenges of technician training with remote learning, so CAE, in partnership with Advanced Aircrew Academy, now offers a massive new range of end-to-end eLearning training solutions for business aviation customers.
Timothy Schoenauer, Senior Director Global Business Aviation Training Solutions at CAE, said general operations training, delivering the skills needed to run an operation, have traditionally fallen outside CAE’s core mission, but with the new initiative that has changed. “We’ve had a library of airline courses, but never a comprehensive library of business aviation courses. Instead of going out and building one, we’ve partnered with Advanced Aircrew Academy to create bundles specific to regions and operator requirements. It provides customers with the convenience of finding the courses they need, bundled together so they don’t miss anything, ordered and billed through CAE, but fulfilled by the trusted experts at Advanced Aircrew Academy.”
CAE CORe
In the simulator, CAE is also improving its business pilot training offer with what it calls Continuously Optimized Recurrent (CORe) training. Pilots train regularly for emergency situations that, fortunately, most will never encounter for real. However, defined by regulatory requirements, a standard task-based training session typically fails to address emerging threats, leaving some pilots less well equipped to deal with new risks that their peers elsewhere in the piloting community may already have met.
CAE is addressing this gap with CORe training, which delivers modules created from data gathered by CAE Rise – Real-time Insights and Standardized Evaluations. Unlike the airlines, which might gather data from their hundreds or even thousands of pilots, approximately 95% of business jet operators manage fleets of five aircraft or fewer, with more than 80% operating a single aircraft. The limited numbers of aircraft and pilots mean these operators generally lack the volume of data required to generate sufficient feedback for driving meaningful improvements in advanced pilot training. As a result, business aviation pilots, much like those in small airlines, typically continue to follow traditional training regulations.
Rise gathers anonymised performance data from thousands of business aviation pilots during CAE training sessions, from OEMs, operators and other trusted sources, including EASA’s DATA4SAFETY database, and aggregates it. The results are then analysed to create modules specifically tailored to prepare business aviation pilots for situations that fall outside the scope of traditional training compliance. Through Rise, an operator flying a single jet and retaining just two or three regular pilots, will benefit from thousands of data points, potentially making its operation safer, providing professional development opportunities for its pilots and, frankly, challenging them to think beyond the task-based scenarios they see year after year in recurrent training. Instead, they are challenged with new, real-world scenarios that require a more nuanced skill set and revised decision making.
Because CORe is based on data gathered from active training and other scenarios, it constantly evolves. As emerging issues are identified, relevant findings are incorporated into new simulator scenarios. This means that pilots might be exposed to new risks every time they visit CAE for recurrent training, keeping even the CORe content fresh. As a bonus, constantly evolving content also helps keep instructors sharp, as they guide pilots through the complexity of both emerging and unseen systemic risks with true-to-life scenarios aimed at honing the critical skills necessary to make life-saving decisions under pressure.
Instructor feedback also continually shapes CORe, effectively tweaking scenarios so that even the same piece of training might be different next time. “After each session we ask them what three things went well and what three things could the pilots could have improved on,” said Schoenauer. “The data is gathered anonymously and we’re looking for observable behaviours that we can use to improve pilot performance. As a result of this and all the other data we gather, the CORe training topics are revised every six months.”
Perhaps surprisingly, CORe is not delivered in a specific simulator session. Instead, once regulatory or other training has been completed, CORe tasks are designed to be dropped into the final 15 minutes of a session that might otherwise be filled with repetition. Schoenauer detailed the philosophy: “As a professional training organisation, once pilots have got through their check we should be able to offer relevant topics for them to train out, that the industry ought to be training out, to provide resilience and enhance safety.”
Another way of looking at CORe is that it provides polish to required training. CAE is expert at delivering that training and has done so for decades. Now it is saying it can do better, make pilots safer, deliver training that pilots love rather than simply need. Schoenauer agrees that for CAE to tell the market, ‘we believe we’re the best, but we can do better’ is a gutsy move. “With the advent of the eLearning programme, our upgraded maintenance technician training options and CORe, we’re willing to say, ‘OK, what came before is no longer good enough.’ We need to add more value for our customers, from a differentiation standpoint and because it’s what’s best for the industry. As for pilots, they want the challenge of learning something new and the industry is missing such an opportunity if all it does is check on the same tasks. It’s just the right thing to do.”