Grief chaps! A bit of history here... we did try to set up an FD course with Silverjet. As we looked at how we could do it I became aware that, although we could provide the background theory, we at BGS have no direct experience of the Operations Officer's job. The solution with Silverjet was for them to provide on the job training and to help us develop -or more likely cut down - the basic ATPL course, which exceeds the Doc 7192 requirements, to match their Operations department's needs.
The course we produced could not be 'approved' because there is no requirement to do so in JAR OPS or EU OPS. I tried to get the course 'recognised' instead as being compliant with Doc 7192. The CAA were no help, Flight Crew Licensing refused because FDs aren't flight crew (like to help you old chap but not our bailiwick, try Flight Ops) and, when I asked the Flight Ops department to recognise the course, their refusal was blunt to the point of rudeness, in fact it was rude.
Unfortunately this first version of the course didn't really get started before Silverjet's unfortunate demise but they do deserve credit for trying to set up a decent system.
I had quite a bit of e-mail encouragement at this time from some senior and experienced Flight Ops staff who thought the idea should be kept alive. I'd like to thank them for that. A year or so later SITA approached me with a similar idea, but to produce a generic course this time, not company specific. In this iteration the ATPL course is cut down from the start and modified to match the Doc 7192 requirements. SITA convinced me that they could run the classroom phase quite successfully - this depends more on the competence and drive of the instructors than anything else - and we have talked about a pricing structure which doesn't see unreasonable to me.
I'm sure that SITA will monitor what we deliver as we will watch what they do because its in both our best interests to deliver a good course.
Why don't you give us a chance to do it right? If we mess up, then attack us.
Edited to add: I haven't spoken to SITA about this but I don't think there is any monopoly in our agreement. If an airline, for instance, wanted to run their own version of the course I can't see any reason why we shouldn't provide the Doc 7192 theory course and they provide the on-the-job training to their own company specific procedures, or maybe SITA could run a cut down version of their classroom phase with the airline bolting company specific procedures on the end?
Last edited by Alex Whittingham; 8th Aug 2010 at 18:27.