An increase in ‘tagging’ cadets early leads to L3 Harris shaping up to meet a pilot surge
Dave Calderwood
26 July 2024
Professional pilot training academy, L3 Harris, is seeing an increase in airlines ‘tagging’ cadet pilots going through its courses. The ‘tagging’ is also happening earlier in the student’s progress.
Dave Coward, General Manager of L3 Harris training services talking to us during the Farnborough International Airshow, said, “We are working with a number of airlines including British Airways, Tui, Jet2 and Wizz. They are all now ‘tagging’ our students in training.
“They (the airlines) offer conditional offers of employment while they’re still training. And the trend is looking forward. So people were coming out of flight school and being tagged. Now the tagging is now happening before they finish groundschool. And we’re starting to see the programmes at the front end as well.
“That shows that the need for pilots is getting greater and greater because that time point is coming forward.”
The return of airline activity is back up to pre-pandemic levels – and higher in some regions.
“We’ve been through some challenges over the past few years,” said Mr Coward. “The growth is clearly coming back. We’re seeing records being broken for the amount of passengers flying daily.
“So, clearly, travel is coming back. Aircraft deliveries are ramping up. That means more pilots, ab initio pilots, and more training. The conversations we’re having with airlines are about starting bespoke programmes or targeted programmes – and are really taking off.
“We’ve a lot of airlines talking about how they get in front of this supply challenge for pilots, rather than relying on what has been quite a large population of graduates that built up over the pandemic.”
Mr Coward confirmed that L3 Harris is about to relaunch itself in the pilot training business. “We’re at the start of a new journey, starting to move towards our new business,” he told us.
Obvious question: What’s your new business going to be? “It’s just about to be announced. We’re just going through the final stages so we’ll have a little bit more to release in time, but it’s exciting for us. The industry is clearly growing and we’re positioning ourselves to play a bigger and bigger part of that.”
Cranfield Airport is definitely going to continue its role within L3 Harris’ UK training, he confirmed.
“For our UK students, the training pipeline starts in the UK with groundschool in Crawley, Sussex. After they’ve completed groundschool exams, we take our students out to Florida and they do all their single-engine flying in Florida. They spend about 30 weeks there and then come back to the UK to finish their five phases: multi-engine IR at Cranfield and to our simulators – in Crawley – to do the APS MCC course.”
L3 Harris recently launched its PilotApp, which can be used on smartphones or tablets. Using data collected from ‘hundreds of thousands of data points a day’, PilotApp allows users to compare flights to others within, say, an airline or, useful to student pilots, within their cohort.
“You can see how you are performing against the rest of a fleet of airline pilots or, the application that we’ve used in the academy is against a cohort of students,” said Mr Coward. “If we’re working with an airline partner, how do those students compare to different students as part of that programme?
“One of the things that we introduced, two years ago, was to put flight data monitoring into our aircraft. When the aircraft lands and we power down the avionics, through a wireless transfer, it squirts the data back to our data servers.
“That’s all analysed. Then it comes back through our safety team, to be replayed on any PC or iPad – or anything like that.
“It’s phenomenal. I mean, it’s amazing when you see the students interacting with the instructors around this data, the richness of the conversations that they have, it’s incredible. It’s those learning points that in the heat of the cockpit, it’s just not always possible to be able to reflect on.
“Later, in a more relaxed environment you look at everything that led up to it because it will never be one thing. It will be a combination of events that may be internal or external – weather related. You can start to track back to say: ‘This, this is what happened. This is where we started going wrong. And this is how we should have reacted.'”
