During my ATC years and also after, I did a fair amount of training that ranged from ICAO Annex 14 (Airports), radio telephony procedures and ATC automation to HMI design and airspace user requirements in the future ATM system. The students represented a similarly broad spectrum from ab-initio controller trainees to ATC supervisors, engineers and pilots with a dizzying variety of nationalities and classroom customs. I had to learn early that ignoring their sensitivities was not a good idea.
I was reminded of this when our friends in The Netherlands bought a very nice house in the South of France and although they like to stay there as much as possible, during the school year they still tend to stick to rainy “kikkerland”. I am not sure but I suspect that part of the problem is their primary-school son whom they may be reluctant to entrust to the school system in France. He is a bright little guy and there is nothing wrong with the school system in France. But it is different and a kid used to the more free-wheeling Dutch system would need to adapt.
Several years ago a few times a year I was delivering a presentation entitled “Airspace user requirements for the future ATM system”. The course was meant for ATC supervisors who came to the EUROCONTROL Institute of Air Navigation Services in Luxemburg to attend. I held a very similar presentation once a year at ENAC in Toulouse for ATM engineering students whose study language was English and they had to incorporate the presentation material into their final exam papers.
Both occasions were extremely stimulating and I was always looking for the days with those presentations on the agenda. There was only one thing that always puzzled me. In all my teaching I tried to run very interactive sessions where the students were drawn into the presentation and they had to wade their way through the material at all times thinking and figuring so that by the end, they had the feeling that they had come to the correct conclusion and it was not me at all who had “taught” them what the right conclusion was. This worked beautifully in Luxemburg but was usually less of a success in Toulouse. Although there were a few brave young engineers who would venture forth with ideas when I prompted them to get engaged, most of them would just sit there visibly at a loss as to what was expected of them.
I raised the question with the course supervisor who laughed and explained that in France the “professeur” is considered to be the absolute authority and
students are supposed to listen to him or her and not challenge or query what he or she is saying… So my attempts at interactivity collided neatly with customs they were probably trained for since kindergarten. Mind you, in the breaks we had great discussions but once back in the auditorium, the old ways took hold once again.
At a certain point in time I was on the development team of a new ATC system in Europe and I was in charge of a small group who had to figure out what kind of user interface should be given to the flight data positions. The flight data position is a small, but important part of the total system with a lot of information to be displayed as well as to be exchanged with the human operators. The old system used a command-line type interface concept and three-letter abbreviations to trigger functions. My idea was to replace this with a nice windowing environment, driven by a mouse/touch-screen combination besides the traditional keyboard. It was during that time that I came to learn and hate the expression “screen-soiling”. Translated from the local tongue, it referred to anything shown on a display that was not directly related to the task a hand. So the buttons in the top area of a window, the frame, even drop-down menus were considered “screen-soiling”… The guys assigned to help in designing the interface had many years of experience working with the old system but their vision of the potential inherent in a new kind of interface was, to put it mildly, limited. Screen-soiling was the excuse given each time something more adventurous than the old approach was refused. After a lot of arguments and long hours of explanations we produced something that was probably a not too lucky combination of both worlds… By the way, similar arguments were going back and forth also in the groups designing the controller working position HMI with the end result similarly mixed. Of course the mistake there was the missing first step, namely educating the controllers and assistants on the design team so that they could make decisions in the full knowledge of the pros and cons of modern interface design.
Going back to the Luxemburg course, there really was one case where things got out of hand. I had a few examples of proven cases where ATC for various reasons drew fire from their airline customers and I used these to illustrate various points in my projections for the future. The examples were anonymous but detailed enough so that those involved could easily recognize their unit… And in one course they did! The person concerned was really upset and said that it was not acceptable that we airline people talked only about the problems when in fact the Unit concerned has done so much to eliminate them. I did acknowledge his point but that was not enough. A few weeks later an official complaint arrived and it took some fancy footwork to pacify the people concerned but only on condition that I should be “punished” by being obliged to fly to the ATC facility concerned to see for myself! It was a very pleasant trip, the controllers were really nice and the improvements they showed really credible. Of course the example remained because the same problems were evident also at other places but I did include in my presentation a note about how at least one facility got their difficulties resolved.
Another interesting training issue arose in connection with the introduction of 8.33 kHz channel spacing. While in most European states ATC was told of
what was coming and that was the end of the story, in France controllers perceived a serious safety issue with the new channel spacing and were resisting its introduction. This was particularly awkward because it was exactly France where the frequency shortage was the most acute and they needed 8.33 like nobody else on the planet. As a last resort, the European 8.33 transition project manager and yours truly were dispatched to Paris and Bordeaux to ATC technical meetings to explain why 8.33 was essential (I guess they knew it already) and why it was not a safety hazard… I will probably never know whether it was something we said or just a coincidence, but soon after those meetings, resistance to 8.33 in France evaporated like fog behind a jet engine and things could finally progress as planned.
Training in all its facets is fun but one must watch every step to make sure what the students hear is what you intended to say. You and the students must speak the same language… and this means more than just English!