An Indispensable Tool

Written by Kenya McCullum

Aviation maintenance trainers are an indispensable tool for teaching soldiers the complexities of repairing military aircraft. By bridging the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge, these trainers prepare students in a hands-on environment that helps them develop the motor skills and muscle memory necessary to perform real-life tasks. In addition, they are a cost-effective and safe way to train aviation maintenance skills, as teaching students with actual aircraft is often cost-prohibitive and dangerous.

“We provide a safe and comfortable environment for students to become familiar with the procedures used to maintain aircraft. Rather than doing this on the plane in blowing snow, freezing rain or a 120-degree sun, you’ve got a student in an air-conditioned and controlled environment where he can really focus on learning how to interface with the aircraft and focus on that learning process, undistracted by the environment,” said Paul Mueller, vice president of training systems, Charleston Operations at AAI Corp. “We do that in a constructive and controlled environment that allows us to insert failures and malfunctions and let a student get comfortable with how they would identify those malfunctions.”

Generally, maintenance trainers used by the military are classified into two groups: hard and soft trainers. Hard trainers, which are physical replications of the actual equipment that trainees will work on, are generally reserved for tasks that require a literal handson approach in order to learn them—such as fixing a part of the plane that is located in a difficult place to reach or one that is heavy and challenging to move. Although hard trainers can be expensive, they are built for frequent use and allow soldiers to practice the tasks as many times as they need to before performing it on an actual aircraft. This is particularly beneficial when training on the most difficult tasks, because they give soldiers a true feeling of what aviation maintenance work entails.

“If we put the soldier in a pristine environment where we have everything opened up so he can just reach right in and do a task without anything obstructing his reach, it wouldn’t be very realistic for him and he would come away with the idea that maintenance is pretty easy,” said James “Hal” Ridley, training branch chief, Armed Scout Helicopter (ASH) Logistics Division. “Then when he got into the actual aircraft, he’d find out how difficult it really is.”

Hard trainers are also needed to teach skills that can be easily lost because soldiers may not perform certain tasks on a regular basis. By using aviation maintenance trainers, these skills become much less perishable.

Soft trainers, on the other hand, include 3-D gaming software with training scenarios that students perform in virtual environments. These aviation maintenance trainers are less costly than their hard trainer counterparts, and are realistic enough to instruct soldiers on the tasks that they don’t need to learn on a replicated aircraft.

“The nice thing about soft trainers is that we can put them in the students’ hands 24 hours a day, which allows them to have continual drills and practice on the task prior to performing it,” said Gina Johnson, 82nd Training Wing’s training technology manager. “We believe they build up proficiency that way, and we’ve seen test scores improve on blocks of skills that once had a high failure rate.”

The 3-D technology that drives these soft trainers creates a realistic, immersive experience for students. Some of the features that you can find in virtual aviation maintenance trainers include high-fidelity cockpits and briefing/ debriefing stations—where a training event can be recorded and played back for students, allowing them to see their areas of weakness.

“It’s more than just being able to have pretty pictures on the screen. You’re able to work with the trainers and interact with them just like they’re the real aircraft,” said Scott Ariotti, director, sales and marketing at DiSTI. “Trainers provide a surrogate piece of equipment that allows the maintainer to access the training material regardless of where he is or what the conditions are. Soldiers can learn new things or stay proficient on things that they’ve already done. They don’t have to worry about an aircraft being available for them to practice their skills.”

Between the use of hard and soft trainers, as well as a combination of the two, just about any task that the aircraft maintenance crew needs to perform can be taught. However, not every task needs to be trained.

“Some tasks are very simple, basic knowledge—like removing a screw—and you don’t need to train them,” Ridley said. “Removing the transmission from a helicopter, however, is more complex, so [you] have to train that task.”

In order to determine which skills should be taught and which should not, the military conducts a thorough analysis of the knowledge and skill sets that are required to perform each task involved in maintaining an aircraft. Once this is done, subject matter experts make recommendations about what tasks are cost-effective to train students and which ones are simple enough to bypass.

THE FUTURE OF AVIATION MAINTENANCE TRAINERS

The military is striving to keep abreast with the aviation training technology as industry partners make it available. Companies are continuously improving their products in terms of fidelity, graphics and capabilities. This is particularly important because of the nature of today’s soldiers, who are more familiar with virtual environments because they have been using the technology their whole lives.

“As the Nintendo generation grows up, they’re more adept to that type of training— whereas I trained out of a book. Back then they gave you a manual, you read it, you learned the procedures when they were taught in the classroom, and you went out and practiced it,” said Ridley. “Now with the electronic media that we have today, such as what the gaming that the commercial world has brought to us, we can use the technology to train the soldiers of today because they’ve grown up in the Nintendo era, with things like Mario Brothers. I think in the future, we will continue with the advancements that keep the technology relevant to the soldier’s learning.”

One of the challenges in keeping up with the new technology options is the funding available for them because many budgets are shrinking as the cost of training devices steadily increases. In addition, the rapid changes in technology will necessitate training for the trainers themselves, who may not have grown up in the Nintendo era and are less familiar with how gaming works.

INDUSTRY PLANS

In response to the military’s needs, industry partners foresee future products with increased 3-D gaming capabilities that will engage students, track their progress and inform them of the skills they need to improve so that they can further practice them.

“Gaming enables us to provide more immersive, competitive and interesting environments for the students, and that in turn allows the missions to be performed more effectively,” said Damian Szigeti, engineering manager at American Systems. “The difference between our maintenance trainers of today and the ones of five to 10 years ago is that they use physics-based modeling, 3-D animation, gaming technology and they provide immediate feedback to the student to make them a lot more effective at training maintenance than the older trainers.”

In addition, Szigeti said that the improvements in virtual maintenance trainers will also make it easier for technicians to receive certification.

“What we’re really looking forward to in the next generation of trainers is similar to what the industry has achieved with flight trainers, where we can promote certification of maintenance technicians so that when they get out of the classroom on the virtual trainers, they are certified to run real maintenance missions on aircraft,” he said. “They’ll still have to work on an aircraft for a bit, but the amount of hours will be significantly reduced—reducing the life cycle training costs for the military significantly.”

Another factor that can help keep the cost of aviation maintenance trainers down is SCORM, or the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, which mandates a set of standardization criteria for companies that make trainers for military use. As a result, the military can combine multiple technologies in their training exercises—eliminating the need to purchase new systems that aren’t compatible with each other. Companies are also looking at ways to build networks of trainer devices, which will allow the military to create more scenarios through increased information sharing.

“As you can tie these training devices together, you can achieve much more in the virtual environments,” said Mark McGraw, vice president, Boeing Training Systems and Services. ♦

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