KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Afghan National Army Air Corps is planning to take ownership of a fleet of 18 to 20 Italian-made C-27 (known by the Italians as the G.222) medium-sized cargo planes beginning in November of this year, and the pilots have been undergoing flight training both in Afghanistan and in the United States for months.
Speaking at Camp KAIA—a NATO installation attached to the Kabul Airport—on Thursday, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Hersant of the 438th Air Expeditionary Advisor Group told me that the Afghan pilots have mostly been flying a handful of Ukrainian-made Antonov-26 and the Antonov-32 airplanes, and that the more advanced C-27 is something that’s going to “require quite a bit of training” for the pilots to master. “They can fly” Hersant says, and “they have real good stick and rudder skills,” but since the Afghan government has mandated that English be the language of aviation, trying to teach the Afghans how to communicate in English is one of the hardest parts of the training schedule.
Another big hurdle is that the Afghans haven’t had a lot of training in instrument flight rules, since they have been flying by Visual Flight Rules, “so if you’re told to fly a heading and maintain an altitude, we’re trying to teach them why that’s important.” Along with the C-27s—the first three of which will be delivered by the end of the year and will be used for training purposes—a team of ten American C-27 pilots and six loadmasters will be heading to Afghanistan to train the pilots to fly by instruments, as well.
Overall, Hersant says that they have identified and trained 30 Afghan pilots, all of which are studying English at the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio, Tx., after which they’ll take a two month class in the United States to obtain an International Civil Aviation Organization IFR certification.
“We’ve got the first two pilots ready to go,” Hersant adds. “We sent one pilot to our war college for a year in Maxwell AFB, and now he’s back, and they’re sending three to four more to San Antonio for instrument flight training.” Hersant expects to have a handful of Afghan pilots trained by the end of this year, and the 438th is currently trying to send two loadmasers to Italy for training. He expects to have “operational capability” of the planes by March of next year, and is currently awaiting a simulator to give the Afghans more training in Kabul. There’s a simulator currently on order, but he wouldn’t speculate when it will arrive, only that it probably won’t arrive “any time in the next year.”
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 09/14/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Posted by: David M | September 14, 2009 at 11:01 AM