Maintaining Currency
GM Corner
VFC Manager BGen (Ret’d) Gregory C.P. Matte, CD, PhD
As the COVID-19 implications continue to curtail our daily lives, routines and pastimes, the Victoria Flying Club has witnessed a sharp decline in flying activities. In addition to the suspension of all flight training, this has also impacted flying currency for numerous students, Flight Instructors and recreational pilots alike. While there are specific regulations and guidelines pertaining to the maintenance of currency, there is an underlying component that links back to airmanship and safety. Currency can be highly subjective and individualized, based on one’s depth of aviation experience as well as a realistic self-assessment. It can also relate to a variety of aviation skills beyond the obvious ones such as night flying and instrument flying, how current one might be in practicing a forced landing, incipient spin recoveries, cross-wind landings or other specific aviator skills. The bottom line is that in the aviation business, our flying skills are perishable, meaning that with less practice, our proficiency declines.
6
MAY 2020
During my time on the multi-role CF-18 Hornet, we had to maintain currency and qualifications in a number of closely tracked regimes. Quite often, it felt like running on a treadmill that never stopped; no sooner was a requalification achieved than the clock began ticking down to the next looming expiry date. Although some of the currency requirements would be common across the world of aviation, many others related to the highly specialized world in which we operated. In some cases, currency related to safety training for the ejection seat, in other cases it related to the use of weapons on a controlled range, whereas in other cases it related to the rather vital skill of in-flight air-air refuelling on a variety of tanker platforms. The list was seemingly endless... Given that we had to remain current and qualified in a variety of combat skills sets, including everything from dog fighting to aerial gunnery, to ground attack missions as well as a number of other missions involving air intercepts in VFR, IFR and night conditions, we had to rotate our
training schedule accordingly. It was for this same reason that on operational deployments abroad, such as the air patrol missions we conducted over Bosnia-Herzegovina following the Dayton Agreement of 1995, that we would rotate our pilots through the mission for only 6 weeks. The problem was that the nature of the recurring air patrol mission caused a gradual decline in their other fighter-bomber skill sets. As such, we needed to bring them back to Canada for currency training in these other areas so avoid them losing their important “combat readiness” status required for NORAD and NATO operations. As for myself, despite my many years of experience on the CF-18 as well as my Fighter Weapons “Top Gun” Instructor rating, it was with sadness yet pragmatic realism that my final period of flying on the CF-18, whilst I was the Wing Commander of 4 Wing Cold Lake, was also a period in which I had to come to terms with the impact of limited currency and my declining fighter pilot skills. While I still knew what I needed to do in the cockpit to
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