JimI, T my last gig 5-6 years as training systems development manager, we had a few recent Naval "graduates" on staff as subject matter experts (Chief types with instructor backgrounds). My first Navy training gig was with (I should have asked if you were east coast or west coast Navy) FCTCPAC (Fleet Combat Training Center, Pacific). I designed and help develop and install a courseware authoring system for the Navy enlisted instructors to author L-TRAN lessons. This was DEC Vax 11-785/Pascal language. I gave them features like wysiwyg and developed an intermediate language that the authoring system used as output as well as being able to interpretively execute so they could "run" their lesson without having to schedule time in a mockup, like 0300 Sunday as mockup time was in short supply. Later when DEC Ada became available I redesigned and extended the system while redeveloping in Ada. This was the last of my heavy hands on experience actually writing software. After going back to grad school yet again in Instructional Technology I did the training systems development bit.
Fast and loose or better cheaper faster. There are lots of excuses employed by decision makers who assume themselves to be training experts because they have taken so many classes themselves. They don't seem to grasp the significant differences between being a movie buff, keenly interested in watching movies, and being an actor or director and making movies. It is hard to find anyone who even recognizes ADDIE (Analysis Design Development Implementation Evaluation) much less practices its application in a rigourous structured manner. It is the difference between engineering a training solution versus picking a solution for some reason akin to fliping a coin or wanting to incorporate some "neat" technology whether it is effective or not. I watched several (double digit) millions poured down the drain because someone thought a particular technology was neat and decided it would be used although every professional trainer not on the gravy train thought it a travesty.
You seem a definite cut above one of our typical nemises, now don't take offense, often a definite barrier to our getting in on a training development project would be a Navy chief (active or retired)who had been to IT school and was consultant to or had the ear of a key decision maker. Never is anyone, us included, so dangerous as when we don't know that we don't know.
Getting too negative???
My last involvement with flight training was a failed attempt to get a project started to design and field flt sims for unmanned aerial vehicles. Get this: There are two different kinds of people responsible for flying UAVs from Navy ships (including carriers) They are 1. The fellow who launches the bird and controls it like an RC model would be controlled until it reaches a predetermined altitude and range from own ship. then the guys, inside, command the bird to turn to xxx heading descend to yyy altitude or fly to GPS coord zzz and loook down with FLIR xx degrees to left etc. When the bird returns to within the predetermined range the guy who flew it off, recovers it. Piloting an RC model from a roling pitching scending platform is a challenge. The skill is highly volitile and if you don't get sufficient practice then you might damage or destroy one or more Tomcats or a Hornets when you mess up the landing. That would cost us taxpayers a gazillion bucks. What is it worth to have the pilot not screw up? Plenty! What could be done aboard ship to keep the guy sharp between actual flights? Aha, right you are, I thought you would know the answer to that one. Give him a laptop and a helmet mounted stereo vision/sound telepresence flight sim program. takes up little shipboard space (store it in a small suitcase/briefcase.) Can simulate sufficiently what he should see and hear and interact with. Technology is not any more complicated than Microsoft Flt Sim or a half dozen games on the market but it needs to be modifiable and extensible to accomodate different birds as thay may evolve.
check it out get the contract, become ritch and famous. If you get it, all I want as a finders fee is a root beer float.
Last flt sim annecdote, this post: A couple years ago I went to an air museum in Fayetteville (sp?) Arkansas. Taking the self guided tour, as we rounded the first bend we saw the first exhibit of "ancient obsolete technology" it was the first Link instrument trainer I had been schooled on and used to keep SAC pilots current in instrument procedures way way back in my USAF days, same exact model and variant, probably close in serial number. That was the first time anything had ever made me feel old, even for just a little while. Still it was a hoot! The docent, a retired AF colonel, said they had made enquiry about getting it running but were told that it was not possible. Seems their is a shortage of ANALOG computer people. Too bad I had finally tossed out my personal set of, marked up with colored pencil, prints on the beast or I would have been roped in to fix it. Ahh, shaped card potentiomenters, hysteresis velocity feedback for ac servo motors, gee I feel nearly mystic just thinking of such wonderfully arcane lore. Selsyns, autosyns, differential synchro transmitters..... ooooh!
My (early) retirement was brought about as a result of planning, sort of. After spending over a decades worth of vacations (thinly disguised scouting trips, looking for THE place to retire we bought a quarter section of gently rolling low agricultural value BEAUTIFUL land in South Central Oklalhoma and started to DESIRE being there instead of So Cal. San Diego county is mostly desert but where populated it is POPULATED especially along the coastal strip (a block from our house you could see ocean). San Diego county has more population than the entire state of Oklahoma, so once out of a city (either of them) or a large town, the rural folk have time to be very friendly.
Now for something serious: I have to go crawl under my L4610 and find out why it started making a fair sized puddle of hydraulic fluid under the rt rear axle housing. Less than 70 hrs, a bit premature to start spewing out its life blood, nicht var?
Patrick
