Some thoughts about Flight Procedure Design Training

There are some useful discussion platforms around that help the Flight Procedure community to exchange problems, ideas etc. The ANI operates one of these platforms. There are also others. One thing caught my attention and I decided to comment on it: There seem to be organizations, which believe that they can have Flight Procedure Designers perform their job without a formal training. They read through PANS-OPS, of course they don't get certain things, especially not the rationales behind the criteria and then think they can fill the gap posting questions on a forum.

States should be aware of the following: PANS documents are criteria and have a certain status for Contracting States. That means if a State does not comply with certain paragraphs in PANS, they do NOT have to notify ICAO (like necessary for non-compliance with Annexes) but they MUST publish it in their State AIP (Annex 15 requirement). There is a Quality Assurance chapter in PANS-OPS that says amongst other things:
Each State shall ensure that Designers achieve and maintain the required competency level though training and OJT. Training for Designers should at least include initial training and recurrent training at periodic intervals (you can check the exact text yourself). Initial training according to doc. 9906 is a basic PANS-OPS course.

So it follows that States that think they can save costs by not sending their staff to courses actually deviate from PANS-OPS. Therefore they should publish that in the State AIP. Imagine a statement in the GEN section of the AIP: "Deviations from PANS-OPS ICAO doc. 8168: Flight Procedure Designers not formally trained". I am sure, this would be much appreciated...

The bad news for such Organizations: We (ICAO IFPP) are now also establishing requirements at Annex level that will regulate how Flight Procedure Design Service and its oversight must be established. That is, if they continue to non-comply they even have to notify ICAO about it :-)

New Instructor CV added

As communicated, we have a new two-day course in Statistics and Data analysis. For this course I have hired Heinz Wipf as a lecturer. His CV is now available in the Training team section of the ANI website. Heinz is also one of the Project Managers for the PBN implementation in Switzerland. He is one of the guys who keeps the pace going, by pushing and playing the Rottweiler whenever needed :-)

ARINC 424 course date published

The next ARINC 424 course takes place April 15-19, 2013 in Switzerland. Instructor is Christian Freiesleben. This can also be used for Flight Validation Pilots to meet the Swiss Regulator's criteria for FVP certification.
Check www.ani.aero for other course dates.

Course update/Calendar update

The PANS-OPS basic course date for Winter/Spring 2013 has now been published.
For the advanced course(s) APV/RNP AR/Helicopter PinS we had to adopt the training program because the amount of criteria keeps increasing, so we need more time to cover the theory and also to consolidate with exercises. The changes are as follows:

1. Additional PBN Navigation Specifications according to doc. 9613.
2. Completely revised Baro-VNAV criteria (State Letter expected early 2013, applicability 2014).
3. Additional SBAS LP criteria (no vertical guidance).
4. Course length changed to 10 working days.
4. Helicopter PinS is a separate course now, however it will always be scheduled after the APV course in order to be able to attend a full advanced course in one go if necessary.
5. Additional criteria in the Helicopter course: PinS Approach with Manoeuvering VS, PinS Departure with Direct and Manoeuvering VS, PinS LPV.
6. Course length for the PinS course set to 5 working days.

In the future we will also need to cover LP/VNAV criteria when available.

I am waiting to schedule the following courses in the next couple of days:

ARINC 424
Geodesy
Statistics and Data analysis

Will keep you posted.

The course calendar can be found on the ANI website.

New: Statistics and Data analysis course

As mentioned in an earlier post, we have put a course for Statistics and Data analysis together. The outline and the content are now established, the course is published on the IFP and ATM master class page. There is a direct link from the www.ani.aero index page.
For this two-day course we offer an all-included package with food and one hotel night.

Dates are not published yet, we are in the process of setting them up. I will communicate it here when they are up in the calendar.