Home schooling for ANA pilots

July 1st 2018

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Navigating intense training to win a commercial pilot licence is the easy part. Read More » Keeping it is a career commitment to regular health checks, intensely scrutinized simulator sessions and in-flight inspections of the skill levels of all cockpit crew from junior officers to senior captains.

To support is pilots in their efforts maintain and enhance their flying skills, All Nippon Airways (ANA) was the launch customer for the CEFA Aviation Mobile Services (AMS) app that 3,000 of the carrier’s pilots have on their tablet devices. Three thousand ANA pilots have the App on their tablets.

The CEFA AMS (Aviation Mobile Services) is the first program worldwide to enable pilots to replay their flights on their tablets immediately after landing. In Japanese it is called “Furikaeri,” or “looking back into one’s behavior”.

CEFA Aviation is a French company that enhances pilot training and flight safety by developing 3D animation software and services that recreates flights based on data from aircraft flight recorders.

AMS was officially launched at the 2017 Dubai Air Show in November, but ANA has been using the system from March last year. The company’s main product, Flight Animation System (FAS), is in use with airline flight data management (FDM) departments worldwide. It was developed the company founder and chief executive, Dominique Mineo, after he left Switzerland’s Crossair in 2000.

Results from an internal ANA survey reported 88% of pilots found the new app useful for performance review and safety enhancement. Mineo said AMS helped to address the “loss of piloting skills due to automation”, which even the most up-to-date full flight simulators don’t really help to address.

The fact that ANA was the company’s launch customer for the training goes a long way in explaining why it can be a useful tool in the region. Loss of face in Japanese culture can, more than in many other societies, prevent pilots from admitting mistakes. “The idea is to have a better, individualized briefing tool”, said Mineo.

AMS allows crews to discuss a flight after the journey is completed. “This increases acceptance of any failures” compared with an instructor telling a pilot what has gone wrong. Mineo said the U. S. space agency, NASA, pioneered this form of evidence-based training. “Every flight can become a potential training event,” because relying on memory could be inaccurate.

It took seven months to put the system in place with ANA, said Mineo. It also is set up for video. ANA pilots have “created tens of thousands of videos” that they have reviewed after flights. “All videos are de-identified and encrypted. Pilots can view them as a team if they wish. The idea is to have a mirror. They can play it back at various speeds and compare.”