NATC-A and AAF streamline maintenance training

Published Nov. 25, 2013
By Capt. Anastasia Wasem
NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan Public Affairs

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In order to streamline maintenance training for the Afghan Air force, advisors with NATO Air Training Command Afghanistan, along with their AAF counterparts, held an education and maintenance training summit Nov. 9 to 13 at Kabul International Airport, Afghanistan.

The summit focused on evaluating the current method of training the AAF maintenance force and identifying ways to restructure the training in order to more efficiently educate maintainers.

"Between all of us there, we listed all the courses that were already being taught or in development and simply threw them up on a huge board," stated Lt. Col. Aaron Rigdon, NATC-A director of maintenance. "We were able to take a step back and say, 'wow, that's a lot of courses; why don't we have any trained maintainers?'"

Despite a large number of maintenance training classes being taught to the AAF, about 30, there were no certified aircraft maintainers. It was discovered that multiple agencies were teaching classes that the other agencies did not know existed.

"Since there was no defined cohesive process, multiple agencies were teaching duplicate classes," said Rigdon. "This was when we simply asked the AAF to define what skills were necessary to certify level 1, level 2 and level 3 maintainers."

The summit attendees spent several days truly defining what skills were necessary for each level, with level 3 being the beginning level apprentice and level 1 being a seasoned craftsman. This allowed for the alignment of the existing courses to tie to the exact skills required for each level.

One of the most significant changes to training was the English landguage requirement. Previously, the English landguage requirement dictated that 100 percent of maintainers needed to learn English since the aircraft manuals were typically in English. Now, due to the summit, that requirement has been reduced to 30 percent must know English, with all of them being level 1 maintainers. In addition, the aircraft manuals are currently being translated into Dari. With the requirement change, there were 203 "legacy" maintainers that almost instantly qualified as certified maintainers.

"The key to correcting the training issue was simply sitting down with the AAF and asking them what they wanted, what would work best for them and what we, as advisors, could do to support that," said Rigdon.

Another significant change included the amount of classes being taught. The Kabul Air Wing Maintenance Group training commander requested that all level 3 classes be combined with the specific skill identifier class into one continuous class that would reduce the breaks in training, thus increasing the velocity while retaining the proficiency. Level 2 training would then be all on-the-job training and level 1 would be mostly on-the-job training with a few advanced courses tied to direct skills the AAF wants the most experienced maintainers to have.

The overall goal of the implementation of this maintenance training plan is to eventually have Afghans training Afghans. In the near future, AAF maintainers will continue to be taught mainly by NATC-A advisors and contractor support. Eventually however, with the growth of the maintenance force, level 1 and level 2 maintainers will be able to teach newer maintainers.

"Before this, we didn't have a defined vision or process that met specific AAF requirements, now we do. Now we have a process that will lead the AAF to train their own certified maintainers, enabling a smooth transition to a fully self sustainable AAF maintenance career field," said Rigdon.