Primary Flight Training

Upon completion of Aeromed, the next stop for flight students is Primary, the first actual flying of IERW. After months of basic officer and preparatory courses, the flight training truly begins. The first few weeks of Primary are some of the busiest and most overwhelming of flight school. Instructors often talk about drinking out of a fire hose; they say that for a reason. The schedule involves either morning class followed by afternoon flightline or morning flightline followed by afternoon academics. Academics begin with  systems classes which start a few days before the first day at the flightline. This allows students to gain a basic knowledge of the TH-67 before they begin to fly. Once both academics and flightline are in full swing, things start coming hot and heavy. With morning flightline the day will begin with a bus ride to the airfield at 0500 and academics will end somewhere between 1400 and 1600. Afternoon flightline starts with academics at 0730 in the morning and ends around 1730. Evenings will be filled with lots of studying. A word of wisdom to the wise, get a 5&9 study guide as early as you can and start memorizing. Students must know all limitations from chapter 5 and all underlined steps from chapter 9 verbatim. The rest of the information in chapters 5, 8, and 9 does not need to be verbatim but the basic concepts need to be nearly memorized as well. Students who wait till they being flying to try to learn all of this will be swamped. By having it all memorized ahead of time, Primary will be much less hectic and a lot more fun. There are two checkrides during Primary, P1 and P2. The P1 is just to make sure students are progressing as they should. Some weak students get set back a class for more time, a very few get eliminated if they just can not fly. The P2 checkride is much more intense and is likely to be the hardest checkride of IERW. Upon completion of the P2, students move on to Instruments.

Initial Entry Rotary Wing (IERW)

Flight school is broke down into two basic stages, Initial Entry Rotary Wing (IERW) and Advanced Aircraft Track (AAT). This is all proceeded by the two weeks of Aeromed and systems mentioned in a previous post. The IERW portion is further subdivided into three stages: Primary, Instruments, and Basic Warfighting Skills (BWS). These courses are constantly being updated and changed so this information is dated; however, the current schedule for each of these courses is as follows. Primary consists of eight weeks of training and around 50 hours of flight time. All of the training is conducted in real aircraft. Instruments is another eight weeks of training. It too consists of around 50 hours, though only about half of that time is flown in the aircraft; the other half is done in simulators. The final course in IERW is BWS. It is only four weeks in length and will accrue a little over 20 hours of flight time. It is currently conducted in OH-58s but has used TH-67s in the past. Upon the completion of these courses, the common core of flight school is completed and students select for and begin to train in their advanced airframes.