Photo: A U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon departs Cecil Airport in Jacksonville, Fla. coincidence, been with Kribs to every duty station since flight school. “Flying the P-3 for so long,” added Kribs, “you can imagine the habits we formed that we have to unlearn— and learn new techniques to get with this digital age.” For students of the P-8A, that training begins at NAS Jacksonville. It’s home to the Navy’s Integrated Training Center—a 165,000-squarefoot (15,300-square-meter) facility where, upon completing a syllabus of self-paced interactive courseware in “electronic” classrooms, students move from hands-on, lower-fidelity devices, designed to help them gain their initial touches on the hardware, on to gradually more immersive, high-fidelity trainers. “We call it the ‘crawl, walk, run’ phases of training,” said Christian Shalters, Boeing manager for aircrew training and a former naval flight officer on the P-3. He and a team including graphic artists and instructional systems designers in Jacksonville, Boeing Mission Systems in Seattle and Boeing Training Systems in St. Louis—together with input from the Navy and its test and evaluation units at Patuxent River, Md.— develop all of the training materials and help troubleshoot the equipment that NAS Jacksonville depends on to get its students up to task. In addition to the Operational Flight Trainer, where pilots train, the facility includes several of another system known as the WTT, for Weapons Tactics Trainer. Students more commonly refer to it as the APRIL 2016 | 17
Frontiers April 2016 Issue
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