Training Department Q3 2020
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Entry posted by Daniel Crookes in United Kingdom ·
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Evening all!
Please see a summary of our progress and achievements throughout the third quarter of this year!
ATC Training
The quarter began with a change to our division policy clarifying the conditions and use of Solo Validations for our students in training. This has allowed our area students to practise on underlying sectors ensuring that they can use their 90-day solo enroute validation (SEV) to tailor their network time to the positions which will most benefit them.
Back in July, we began a revamp of our OBS to S1 training process which is now coming to a close. Our S1 Aerodrome Control course has been reviewed to focus more on the practical application of the knowledge required for VATSIM, and the use of new features such as the ‘SRD Route search’ function for UKCP. Along with reworked quizzes to help students consolidate their knowledge and better prepare them for actual controlling rather than the textbook approach.
Alongside the Moodle course review we decided to introduce two new training aerodromes for OBS to S1 which we hope to begin using next week. Finally, we have developed a new training structure that students will follow during their observer training. The purpose of this new structure is to help standardise the content students are taught, whilst giving mentors a more defined plan for each session. More information on this can be found here.
After slightly heightened traffic levels and interest from mentors, East Midlands (EGNX) has been reopened as a training airport for the Approach Training Group. This, being a smaller detail in our goal to ensure that we remain diverse in where we are training students. The ease of allowing training to become focused around traffic havens such as Manchester and Gatwick has been something that we have focused heavily on avoiding, and without a doubt, we are getting there. All of our training aerodromes have a minimum of 2 and in most cases 3, training places allowing us to keep the flow of training going at all of our airports. This distribution has been achieved by our TGIs investing a significant amount of time into building a viable team of mentors for less popular airports.
Now for the M word… Moodle. After many years of promising Moodle courses for our ATC Training courses, we are indeed getting there. Our S2 Aerodrome Control Moodle course will be released by the end of the year, followed closely by our S3 Approach Radar Control course, which we are pushing to also release at the end of this year. The courses will be a learning aid for students, a library of information taken from reference material, and a place for us to hold the required theoretical knowledge for all of our courses.
Finally, on the ATC Training front, our Tower and Approach Training Group Instructors have been working hard to develop and trial a similar concept, as mentioned in our OBS to S1 revamp, of structured training during the initial stages of S2 training. This will comprise of custom lesson plans, sweatboxes and PowerPoint presentations, all tailored to standardising the initial exposure students receive to their S2 training. The development of this will continue into quarter 4 of this year, and updates and opportunities to get involved will be posted on the forum. Some of the PowerPoints are already uploaded to the forum for use by anyone who wishes to download them!
Pilot Training
In August @Darren Hill joined the Training team in his new role as VFR Flight Instructor. Over the quarter Darren has led a development team who have worked tirelessly to develop, review and publish our new P1 PPL(A) Pilot Training course. Now that the course has been published the team are continuously reviewing the content and adjusting the course where required, which leads nicely onto… the actual course!
On September the 17th we finally released our new P1 PPL(A) course after the announcement that VATSIM.net would be changing the pilot ratings back in March. This has been no small task with over 200 pages of content and questions written from scratch. I can honestly say that we would not have been able to request and obtain approval before the official launch date if it weren’t for all of the hard work and efforts of the development team. A timeline of the development can be found below for anyone interested!
- Pilot rating change announced
- Q1 Review - Pilot Training
- Launch pushed back
- Training ends for the old pilot ratings
- P1 PPL(A) goes live!
We already have over 100 people on our waiting list for the P1 course! If you currently hold a P1 rating and would like to get involved in mentoring the course, please get in touch - any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
Whilst the main focus has been on our P1 PPL(A) course, extremely good headway has been made on our P2 Single Engine Instrument Rating - SEIR(A) course, we have 95% of the content written and have completed our final review of the new lesson plans. We hope to implement the new course early next year.
General Training
Both areas of training have been incredibly busy over the past 3 months taking advantage of free time that has been accrued due to events of this year. As we come towards the end of this year we will be focusing on the projects listed above and then will begin to wind down for December (I was going to call it a Winter Wind Down but @Cathal Boyce may copyright me).
I would like to thank every member of the community for their contributions and enthusiasm towards training, and more widely, the division throughout the past quarter, it has been great to see so much positivity and willingness to help out, which has ultimately allowed all of us to find joy in a not so joyous time.
With that said, continue to stay safe, and I look forward to updating everyone as we progress through the next quarter.
Thanks,
Dan
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