Ha All,
Long time since you heard from us. Mark has been travelling a lot lately and I have been busy with the training of some (9) of our aviation forecasters with the help of a simulator. But we don’t want our session die a silence death.
Thinking back of the session we had a few things came to my mind:
- Until now I have done most of the simulator training on my feeling and the feeling of the colleagues who helped me to realize the training. For me it was great to have to dig into literature to get some background knowledge. I still have to read some of the articles you loaded on to this Moodle and I am looking forward to that.
- It was great to hear the stories from you all of what you are doing in your training at home in regard to training with simulators. I am convinced that the preparations (and the ideas behind those preparations) for a simulator session are more important than the technique used to run a simulator session of a role play. I think we have seen some beautiful and very simple (non technical) examples of this here in this forum.
- I do think that this type of training on the edge of what you can expect in reality is very important just to be ready in case of extreme events. The only trouble was that the needed tools are not always available to train this. In this forum we have seen different solutions to cope with the technical issue which are not expensive at all. Please go and try them yourself and remember even a pile of paper weather charts and sometimes a simple clock will help.
- It seems that Australia is the only one is using a simulator as an assessment tool like they do in the aviation. It looks like we are going that way too….
- I really enjoyed reading all your stories regarding simulator training from all different parts of the world. I hope it stimulated also your creativity to go beyond the normal training road and try something new.
- I hope this place will stay a community where you will drop you stories, both positive and negative experiences, examples, results, ……. and place where you can leave your questions and hopefully will find answers. In this way I hope you realize you are not alone in this world and you will find help when needed.
To definitely end the session Mark and I want to invite you all to go back in your memories and post your reflections and summary of this simulator session in this forum. Mark, on behalf of EUMETSAT, will provide a small price for the best post.
We very much enjoyed this session and we hope that you enjoyed yourself as well. Thank you very much for all your contributions! And we hope to meet you soon in a next CALMet event or in this forum.
Hartelijke groet,
Heleen
Ps. At the start I mentioned the simulator training we were having for our aviation forecasters the past few days (with special thanks to Rob and Rini!). For all of them (9 from very experience to complete new comers in forecasting office) it was their first time they had to do such a training and I don’t want to spare you from their reactions. One forecaster said: “Such a simulator session is much more effective than sitting passive in a classroom. You think that you don’t make any mistakes, but before the simulator session is over you realize yourself that you have made some procedure errors. It was a very good learning experience!”. For another new forecaster it was the first time he had to go through a warning procedure. He told me that he had learned a lot.
We found out that half an hour adaptation time included orienting at your shift is enough and you should have no longer sessions than 3-3,5 hours. A simulator session is very exhausting and you want to save some energy for the debrief of your session. This debrief moment again showed to be the most important part of the simulator session especially for the more experienced forecasters.
See you soon!