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Pohantoon-e-Hawayee Afghan School graduates new Mi-17 Flight Engineers, NCOs

  • Published
  • By MC3 Jared E. Walker
  • 438th AEW PA
KABUL, Afghanistan --  Pohantoon-e-Hawayee , the Afghan Air Force's Big Air School, graduated another two courses on Nov 4. The courses, the Mi-17 Flight Engineer and Non Commissioned Officer course, are another step in the right direction for the AAF. The growth of the AAF depends on more classes such as these and service members successfully graduating from them.

"I am so proud of what these Afghans have achieved so far," said Sgt. Kim Fournier, NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan advisor in charge of Student Scheduling / Planning. "We have been working pretty hard here at PeH to get them into the AAF and serving as NCOs."

The eight students of the NCO course graduated from orientation and now are officially in the Air Force. They will be working in the Logistics career field and the Mi-17 Flight Engineers can now officially work and fly on the Mi-17 transport helicopters.

"The NCO course is a big plus because there is a big short fall of NCOs in the AAF. The orientation is more advanced then a soldier typically receives. Now these Airmen are going into their occupation training," Master Sgt. Shawn Nordon, NATC-A Personnel Programs advisor.

Nordon said that the Mi-17 course is a fairly new course and this was its first graduation. With these new graduates out in the field, they will help the Afghans conduct and operate helicopter missions across Afghanistan.

"The good thing with the new guys is that we can train them differently than the older guys which were trained using older Russian training. We had to get with Subject Matter Expects in the field to build the course and identify the basics that a brand new Airman would need to operate in the field at the very basic level. To graduate these three engineers is a step in the right direction. It gets the ball rolling and start the training in this specialty," said Nordon.

With these two graduations, the AAF continues to build slowly but surely towards its end state of 8,000 Airmen by 2016.