Army schoolhouse tries to fill 'insatiable demand' for aviators.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Flight Training - Flight School XXI at Fort Rucker Alabama

The lonely, neon lights of the aviation schoolhouse penetrate the dark before dawn at Fort Rucker, Ala. Inside, crammed in a small classroom, about a dozen pilots are huddled over books and papers, murmuring engine-power calculations and emergency, procedures. They have been there since at least 5 a.m. The one who runs late has to bring doughnuts.

Just as the sun's rays make it through the morning clouds, the pilots head out to nearby Hanchey Heliport to tackle their training flights in the Apache Longbow helicopters. This group's training session represents just a small fraction of the 520 flights that take place in one day at the Army's aviation school.

"The first instructor pilot shows up to the flight line at about 4:45 a.m.," said Col. Steven Semmens, commander of the training brigade at Fort Rucker. "The last instructor pilots on the night shift turn off the lights at about 2:30 in the morning and then two and a half hours later it starts 'all over again."

Fort Rucker starts a class of 50 students every two weeks, he said. "The Army is insatiable in its demands for new aviators," he said in an interview. "This has been the requirement for the last four years and it is likely to stay like that in the near future."

To tackle its mission, Fort Rucker has turned its old way of training "on its head," as Semmens puts it, and is aggressively pursuing its new, $1.1 billion training concept, called Flight School XXI, which the Army began implementing in 2002.

At its core, the concept stresses much more training in Army combat aircraft--the AH-64A/D, the UH-60 Black Hawk, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior and the CH-47 Chinook--and their corresponding simulators. Previously, the Army trained its pilots in two helicopters that no longer are in the active fleet, the UH-1 Huey and the OH58A/C. Pilots had to take additional courses to qualify in their go-to-war helicopters. Simulators were obsolete, said Semmens.

Before they even get to set foot in a helicopter, pilot students, under Flight School XXI, go through water-survival, and resistance, escape and evasion training. After that, for 14 weeks, pilots acquire basic instrumentation and flying skills in the Bell TH-67A helicopter. Fort Rucker also will receive a new TH-67 simulator, scheduled to arrive next spring.

Before they transition to combat aircraft, pilots spend four weeks practicing basic navigation and night vision goggle familiarization in the TH-67A+. "That takes an officer from an administrative mode and starts to ease him into a tactical application mode in a platform that is not expensive too operate," Semmens explained. The TH-67A+ is "a more robust TH-67 system," he added.

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