Flight Validation Courses are online

As the release of the ICAO guidance material for Flight Validation and Flight Validation Pilot training is imminent, ANI offers a training program aimed at future flight validation pilots. The details are now published on .
The goal is not to cover any of the Pilot's license aspects but those fields of expertise which are required in the flight procedure design domain. A first ARINC 424 module will take place April 6-9 in Interlaken, which can be attended by flight procedure designers as well as flight validation pilot candidates. Corse dates for the other FV pilot modules will be communicated as soon as they are available.

Ridiculous journalism

I once decided that I wouldn't use this platform for political issues, but I came across an article in Newsweek that made me change my mind for a minute. The article has been written by Dennis MacShane, a frustrated and failed Labour delegate who made some headlines with the expenses scandal. MacShane, during the expenses scandal of 2009, was accused in The Daily Mail of having been less than open/honest with his expense claims. The Daily Mail featured a story stating that MacShane had claimed £125,000 over a period of 7 years for his garage, which he used as a constituency office. One fellow Labour MP privately told the journalist that he was ‘very surprised’ at the scale of Mr MacShane’s claims given that he does not have to pay to rent an office. ‘I pay £6,000 a year in rent so if he doesn’t have to pay that, it sounds like a lot of money,’ said the MP.

I am very fed up with the seemingly en vogue Switzerland bashing at the moment, especially when articles are full of wrong statements.

One example: MacPain, aaah, MacShane states that Swiss Germans stopped learning French. Quite strange, as learning French is mandatory at schools in the Swiss German part. He also states that Swiss French STOPPED bothering learning German. Fact is: They NEVER bothered. Furthermore he says trains are running late, although Switzerland has the second best punctuality after Japan statistically. I fully agree that a lot in the country could, should and must be better, but that certainly has nothing to do with banks or taxes.
So there you go Denis, why don't you make sure YOUR life is not a joke before writing factually wrong articles in a well reputed magazine?

Discussion Forum re-launch

Dear All,

Due to an issue with the database structure in the ANI discussion forum and thanks to the really unhelpful database host I had to reinstall the forum and even worse - the database.
That means that all forum members and the existing discussions were lost, but all technical problems are sorted. For those who have been a forum user, please register again, as I could not migrate the user data to the new database and I am not allowed to register for you.
You can access the forum via or .

I apologize for the inconvenience but I hope that the discussions will be more active than ever!

New AIS/MAP course

I am delighted to announce a new member of the ANI Instructor team: Aleksandar Pavlovic who can look back at a long career at ICAO and is very known in the AIS/MAP domain. I will add a summary of his CV to the ANI website soon. The two week course that we start to offer this summer will cover the basic AIS and aeronautical data knowledge according ICAO Annex 15 as well as the aeronautical charting requirements according Annex 4.
We have established the training objective and they will soon be downloadable from the ANI website (soon, because I am currently teaching a course).
As soon as we have the detailed outline of the course that will also be available for download.

I am currently scheduling the course and we are looking at dates in July or August 2010 depending on room availability here in Interlaken.
More to come :-)