Page 35 - Australian Defence Mag Jul-Aug 2020

JULY/AUGUST 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
SIMULATION TRAINING 35
You don’t have to be a Type-A personality or the captain of the school football team to make a good defence force pilot, but you do have to have a set of skills and capabilities that will get you through training and into an operational squadron.
STEVE HITCHEN | RAAF BASE EAST SALE
THE ADF knows exactly what they’re looking for, but accurately plucking the right people from the crowd has come with its own set of problems over the years.
Now they have a new weapon in this fight for talent: the Aviation Screening Program (ASP).
The ADF used to select air crew using a work sampling process. Suitable candidates were shipped up to Tamworth for two weeks, and in a program known as Flight Screen- ing, where they were put in CT-4Bs and run through a se- ries of exercises to determine if they had the goods to be ADF pilots, in either fixed or rotary wing fleets across all three services. It gave the ADF the opportunity to observe air crew hopefuls in the very situations they would encoun- ter were they green-lighted to start training.
When the RAAF began its transition from the PC-9 to the PC-21 and retired the CT-4Bs under Air 5428, flight screen- ing in an aircraft was no longer possible. The complexity of the PC-21–including ejection seats in a tandem configura- tion did not allow the ADF to screen candidates safely in an airborne environment. Therefore a new selection system was required: enter the ASP. ASP takes only four days and uses no aircraft and no flying instructors, and can process nearly four times as many people as Flight Screening ever could. In addition to assessing candidates suitability for Of- ficer Aviation (OA) jobs, it also exposes candidates to the military lifestyle and reveals potential alternate career paths should the ADF not offer them flight training. Overall, ASP offers better outcomes for both the ADF and candidates.
NEW PARADIGMS
Wing Commander Mark Broadbridge is currently admin- istering the program. As the Officer-in-Charge of the new Aviation Candidate Management Centre (ACMC) at RAAF Base East Sale, “Broady” is responsible for the process that assesses the suitability of young men and women hoping to be selected for OA roles for the RAAF, RAN and Australian Army. As such, the file of every fixed-wing or rotary pilot, mission controller and mission aircrew will at some stage have passed over his desk.
The ADF charged WGCDR Broadbridge with setting up the new centre and its programs. As an experienced flying instructor at all levels within the ADF, as well as with the USAF and RCAF, and a former Roulette leader,
LEFT: The final flyover of the PC9 aircraft for RAAF Base East Sale. A new training age has begun.
DEFENCE