Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Az. -- A new course has been added to this year’s Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course (WTI), held at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona.
Advanced Aircraft Maintenance Officers Course (AAMOC) is a second-level graduate school for professional aircraft maintenance officers in the Marine Corps.
After the initial school for aircraft maintainers at Naval Air Station Whiting Field, Florida, there are limited follow-on training opportunities. AAMOC is the first of its kind and the expectation is to increase standardization, improve aircraft readiness and to minimize aircraft mishaps.
“Our primary school we go to is a Navy school, and that program is extremely successful for the Navy and its officers, but when Marines graduate, we train slightly different once we leave the school,” said 1st Lt. Jared Hasson, an assistant aircraft maintenance officer with Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron (MAWTS) One and AAMOC instructor from Winter Haven, Florida.
In an ever-evolving job field, the course’s main purpose is to create a higher understanding and standardized learning platform for professional maintenance officers.
“There are training gaps with what is taught in the school house and what is actually being done in the fleet,” said Capt. Scott Campbell, an a chief instructor and AAMOC developer from Amarillo, Texas. “This class is an attempt to formalize, consolidate and structure information that goes into the fleet that isn’t getting taught to the Marines.”
The curriculum consists of an initial and final exam, roughly 62 hours of academic course work and additional training outside the classroom. There will be daily evaluations of the students by the instructors on class work, practical application and projects. The students will receive grades on every subject and must maintain an 80% grade average to graduate. The course will run a total of seven weeks.
“If every person in the class room is able to walk away with something they didn’t know beforehand, then I would deem this a success,” said Campbell. “This isn’t going to immediately stem the flow or in no way is designed to be the sole thing that fixes aircraft readiness. But teaching our maintenance officers how to better utilize their aircraft, where the demand of the aircraft comes from and how to manage that, absolutely contributes to better readiness numbers.”
Graduation is scheduled for April 30, which is the end of WTI. Graduates from AAMOC will be granted signing authority for 2000 level codes in the newly minted T&R manual, and will have the title of Maintenance and Training Instructors (MTI).
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