Mark Huber is an aviation industry veteran who has worked in the flight training, aircraft sales, aircraft component, and airport development businesses. He has flight time in more than 50 different and diverse aircraft, including helicopters, aerobatic aircraft, vintage warbirds, jet fighters, business jets and turboprops, and transport-category aircraft. He has jumped out of several of these—on purpose—with a parachute. His defense and aviation journalism has been published in a variety of national and international periodicals.

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Mark Huber

Metro Aviation's helicopter flight training center plans to add a patient simulator to its Bell 407 Level 7 flight training device (FTD) later this year as part of a plan to offer fully integrated helicopter air ambulance medical crew training. Terry Palmer, director of the center, says she plans to start working on the project in April and hopes to start offering training in the patient simulator later this year.


The patient simulator is a box in the back of the actual cockpit in a space often shared for the instructor(s). The 407 FTD to which the patient simulator will be added is convertible to a GX model and is NVG compatible and certified. After that, Palmer is looking at putting a second patient sim in an Airbus AS350 Level 7 FTD. While not full-motion sims, the Level 7 FTDs have seat shakers, vibration and high-resolution visuals. Palmer points out that they qualify for higher training credits than Level B full-motion simulators while keeping training costs lower.


<h2>Integrated Training Option</h2>


Metro Aviation says it provides the training center at&nbsp;cost as a service to the industry. It concentrates on the air medical and law enforcement markets. The air medical sector currently accounts for 90 percent of training, with law enforcement the remainder. Simulators from FlightSafety and Frasca are dry leased to clients, who bring their own instructors. That keeps costs down and in line with training in actual aircraft. The center also runs maintenance training and a communications lab. Courses in the com lab are taught by volunteer instructors and course fees are matched to actual costs to encourage attendance. The com lab is connected to the aircraft simulators to create a more realistic experience. "The only part of the training that was missing was the medical crew training," Palmer noted. "We already offer air medical resource management training and will continue to do so, but I want to take it a step further and put a patient simulator in and then offer full crew training,"&nbsp;she added.


"Right now I am working with several different sources to get a patient simulator donated or placed here. The next step is to get the right people to write the course that will go with it. That is how we did it with the com lab. We brought in com managers from around the country who are considered the best of the best. They wrote the course, they developed the program, they maintain the program. And it is at top level that way. We don't bring in our own employees. We find experts who really work, bring them in, and help build the program," she said.


For Palmer, adding the patient simulator is the last piece of the puzzle to offer integrated helicopter air ambulance simulator training. "I have had this dream for 20 years: to build a training center that focuses on all of air medical, not just one facet of it. Metro personnel get the best training because this is here. But right now even Air Methods comes here, and so does AMGH [Air Medical Group Holdings]. All the major air medical operators you can name are coming here for their pilot training…Helicopters Inc. [ENG] also comes through here. So do the federal police of Argentina and Colombia. Eighty percent of the air medical pilots who have trained here have never had simulator training in their programs before. The resistance was to sim training, period. Air ambulance companies are all doing it now, because they've all realized there's a benefit to it," she said.&nbsp;

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