Wednesday, February 22, 2017

IFP Conference June 6-8 moved to bigger venue

As the IFP Conference in Lisbon June 6-8 already sold out the 40 seat auditorium, thanks to the flexibility of NavPortugal we can announce that we moved the event accross the road to Nav's main building to an 80-seat auditorium.
This is great news because we still have a number of interested people who would like to participate.
An update on confirmed speakers:
Nils Lundström of GeomaticSolutions, Rapporteur of the IFPP CRM Working Group will speak about the Collision Risk Model work that is going on and will explain a few important things regarding obstacle modelling and number of obstacles used in a CRM run. Then we have Martin Zillig, Lufthansa Systems and ANI ARINC 424 instructor, who will inform us about the choice of ARINC 424 leg types in a combined PBN/ILS environment. To follow this up, Patrice Rouquette, Avionics Engineer at Airbus will explain the aircraft systems behaviour in the same environment. Procedure Design related we have a couple of real-world examples shown from Romano Germann, ANI Services Chief Designer regarding a Flight Procedure in ectremely complex terrain, as well as an example of a PinS Helicopter project. Romon Solé, IFP Designer at Pildo Labs will present another PinS example in complex terrain. Finally Frank Lumnitzer, Captain at Condor Airlines will present operational issues from the cockpit perspective in a PBN environment.

We still have a couple of slots to be allocated. We certainly want to have a speach about practical PBN implementation, as that is one of the burning topics today. Personally I just wanted to moderate the event but depending on what will be going on at the IFPP meeting in two weeks, I might be doing a briefing as well. All in all I want this to be an exchange of ideas for people in the procedure design domain and everybody should leave Lisbon satisfied and with the wish to have such an event on a regular basis.
Updated info file here.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

New: Flight Validation Practical Module

As far as I am concerned this is a milestone achievement. We always thought that the Flight Validation Pilot Course could do with some kind of practical module. ANI Services Chief Designer Romano Germann delivered the first such practical in the helicopter simulator in December in Zürich. The feedback was excellent.
Now we are able to offer the same for fixed wing pilots. The ANI established a cooperation with Lufthansa and appointed the four instructors Josef Anschau, Pascal Wegmann, Emre Gümüs and Pieter-Bas Oortman. They teach the new 4-day Flight Validation Practical Module that will be held September 4-8 (Monday afternoon to Friday midday) in the Lufthansa Simulator Center at Frankfurt Airport. It is an optional module but highly recommended. The rundown of the course will be that participants will get a flight procedure report to start with, which they have to work through and do the analysis of the impact on Flight OPS (the so called pre-flight validation). Then they will establish a plan how to perform the flight validation, specific issues to check etc. on the third day of the course the participants will fly the procedure in a simulator. We cannot guarantee which one, it could be anyone in the Airbus 3xx family including the Airbus 380. At the end, a validation report is produced. There will also be information on recording and post-treatment of recorded data.
I strongly believe that this was the missing jigsaw in an already good training program and will help that future Flight Validation Pilots come out of the course more confident and up to speed with what will be required from them.
Expensive you think? Maybe that is the best part: we are able to offer that module for CHF 3000 per participant. Again, we are talking a full shebang airline simulator we will be using for this.

There will be another course held at the same location aimed to help Flight Procedure Designers to understand Flight OPS. It will also include simulator time, but let me announce that separately when we agreed on the dates for that one.