A military flying training system will ultimately only be as good as the instructors delivering it. Aircraft, simulators, courseware and training infrastructure are important, but none of them compensate for weak instruction. Equally, a relatively modest training organisation with a strong, standardised instructor cadre can produce consistently good pilots without having access to the resources of a major Western air force. For smaller military aviation organisations in particular, instructor development is therefore one of the areas where relatively limited investment can produce a very significant return.
There is also an important distinction between an experienced pilot and an effective flying instructor. Operational experience is valuable and should form part of an instructor cadre, but simply occupying the other seat for several thousand hours does not teach someone how to instruct. A good instructor needs to be able to observe accurately, identify why a student is struggling, select an appropriate corrective technique and judge when to intervene and when to allow the student to work through the problem. They must do all of this while maintaining situational awareness, aircraft safety and an understanding of where the student sits within the wider training programme. These are learned instructional skills, not an automatic consequence of flying experience.
Instructor Selection Matters
The same attention given to student selection should be applied to instructors. The most experienced or senior pilot is not automatically the best candidate, nor is the pilot with the most natural flying ability. Some excellent pilots struggle to understand why another person cannot perform something they themselves find straightforward, while others have the patience and analytical ability to break a problem down and identify exactly where a student’s understanding or technique is failing.
Instructor candidates therefore need the appropriate flying competence, but they also need communication skills, judgement, credibility and a genuine ability to develop other people. They need to be comfortable having their own flying and knowledge scrutinised again because instructor training inevitably exposes weaknesses that may have become hidden during years of routine operations. Selecting instructors purely by seniority can create problems that persist throughout a training organisation for years.
This becomes particularly important where the instructor cadre will be small. A large organisation can absorb a weak instructor more easily because students will encounter many others during their training. In a small helicopter force, one instructor may influence a substantial proportion of the organisation’s pilots. The effect of that instructor, good or bad, becomes disproportionately large.
Standardisation Is the Foundation
One of the quickest ways for a flying training system to deteriorate is for every instructor to teach according to personal preference. Students then learn different techniques, terminology and standards depending on who occupies the other seat. Before long, the training organisation develops several unofficial versions of the same syllabus, and students spend unnecessary effort trying to determine what each instructor wants rather than concentrating on learning to fly.
Military flying training requires standardisation, but standardisation should not be confused with removing instructor judgement. The purpose is to establish a common instructional framework, agreed terminology, clearly defined standards and a consistent method of assessing performance. Within that framework, an experienced instructor still needs considerable freedom to adapt the way a lesson is delivered to the individual student.
This is particularly important when training students with varied educational or aviation backgrounds. One student may understand a concept immediately from a theoretical explanation, while another may need to see it demonstrated in the aircraft before the theory makes sense. A competent instructor can change the method without changing the required standard. The student may take a different route to the objective, but the objective remains the same.
Standardisation also protects the customer. If progression decisions, additional training and failures are based on defined standards rather than individual instructor opinion, the training organisation can account for why students progress or do not. That becomes important when every training hour has a cost and the customer needs confidence that additional training is being awarded because it is required rather than because one instructor happens to have a different preference from another.
Instructor Training Has to Go Beyond the Flying Exercise
A military instructor course should obviously teach instructional technique in the aircraft, but that is only part of the requirement. Instructors need to understand how people learn, how to structure a lesson, how to brief and debrief effectively, how to recognise capacity limitations and how to distinguish between a temporary performance error and a more fundamental weakness. They also need to understand the purpose of the wider training system so that each exercise is taught as part of a progression rather than as an isolated event.
The debrief is particularly important. Telling a student what went wrong is relatively easy; helping them understand why it happened and how to prevent it happening again is considerably more useful. A good debrief should identify the important points rather than provide a chronological account of every minor error made during the sortie. Students can only absorb so much information, and an instructor who produces twenty debrief points may achieve less than one who identifies the three that actually matter.
The same principle applies to demonstration. Instructor flying should be accurate and repeatable, but the objective is not to impress the student. A demonstration exists to show the student what is required and provide a clear model they can reproduce. Particularly experienced operational pilots sometimes need to consciously simplify their flying when they begin instructing because techniques that have become instinctive after thousands of hours may be difficult for a student to observe or understand.
Build a Training System That Can Sustain Itself
For an international training provider, one of the most important objectives should be developing the customer’s own instructors. There will be occasions when external instructors are required for specialist capabilities or to provide additional capacity, but a training programme that depends indefinitely on foreign instructors has not created a sustainable national capability.
This needs to be considered from the beginning rather than added at the end of a contract. Suitable local pilots can be identified early, developed through formal instructor training and then progressively given greater instructional responsibility under supervision. Initially they may deliver ground instruction and straightforward airborne exercises before moving into more demanding instruction, student assessment and eventually instructor training themselves. Throughout that process, experienced instructors can provide mentoring and standardisation rather than simply occupying every instructional seat.
The objective should be to create instructors who can subsequently develop other instructors. Once that point is reached, the customer has gained considerably more than a group of trained pilots. It has acquired the ability to generate and maintain its own flying training capability, which is particularly important where foreign training support may become expensive, politically difficult or simply unavailable in the future.
Instructor Development Has to Reflect Reality
The ideal instructor-development system is not always practical for a smaller air force. A pilot selected for instructor training may simultaneously be an aircraft captain, operational pilot, standards officer and one of only a handful of experienced people available to the unit. Removing that individual from operations for a lengthy residential course may create more problems than it solves, particularly where aircraft and crew numbers are already limited.
Instructor development therefore needs to be structured around the organisation that actually exists. Formal courses remain important, but they can be supported by supervised instruction, standardisation sorties, ground training, synthetic instruction and structured mentoring. Modern synthetic systems are particularly useful because instructor candidates can practise teaching and handling student errors without consuming aircraft hours or creating unnecessary risk. The eventual standard should remain clearly defined, but there is no requirement for every customer to reach it through exactly the same training model.
The same applies to continuation training. Awarding an instructor qualification is only the beginning. Instructors need to remain current as pilots, maintain instructional competence and periodically demonstrate that they continue to apply the organisation’s agreed standards. Where an instructor cadre is geographically dispersed or operates several aircraft types, maintaining that standardisation requires deliberate management rather than assuming it will happen naturally.
Avoid Creating Dependency
There is an understandable commercial temptation for training providers to make themselves indispensable. From the customer’s perspective, that is rarely a desirable outcome. A military flying training programme should increase national capability rather than create a permanent requirement for external personnel to perform routine training functions.
External support can remain valuable after the customer’s instructor cadre has matured. Experienced specialist instructors can provide periodic standardisation, advanced tactical training, instructor development and independent assurance without taking ownership of the customer’s entire training system. This is a much healthier relationship because external expertise is being used where it genuinely adds value rather than filling positions that the customer should eventually be capable of filling itself.
There is also a practical benefit for the contractor. A small team of experienced instructor trainers can support considerably more capability than a large permanent deployment of line instructors. For customers with limited budgets, this allows money to be concentrated on specialist expertise while routine flying training increasingly moves into national hands.
The Instructor Cadre Is the Long-Term Capability
Military aviation programmes often concentrate heavily on aircraft procurement. Understandably so: helicopters are expensive, visible and operationally important. Training systems receive less attention, and instructor development can become a relatively small line within the overall programme. In the longer term, however, the quality of the instructor cadre has a direct effect on almost every pilot who subsequently enters the organisation.
A strong instructor cadre establishes standards, identifies weaknesses before they become operational problems and creates consistency between generations of pilots. It also gives commanders a means of changing the organisation. New procedures, lessons from operations, changes in aircraft capability and revised tactics can all be propagated through a functioning instructional and standardisation system rather than relying on information gradually filtering through individual crews.
For smaller air forces, this is particularly valuable because the number of experienced personnel is limited and losing even a few instructors can have a significant effect on training capacity. Instructor succession therefore needs to be planned in the same way as pilot throughput. There should always be another generation being identified and developed before the existing cadre disappears into command, staff appointments, civilian aviation or retirement.
Military helicopter instructor training is therefore not simply another course to be completed after reaching a particular experience level. It is the mechanism through which a flying organisation maintains and improves its standards. Training pilots solves today’s requirement; developing instructors gives the customer the ability to solve tomorrow’s as well.
HDP