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members are trained at the FWAATS across both platforms. The school- house trained about half that num- ber in 2020 due to COVID-19 restric- tions and this year has started with a full schedule.
While it’s the only facility dedi- cated to fixed wing training for the Army National Guard, FWAATS also trains pilots from the active and re- serve components of the United States Army. There are generally three types of students FWAATS sees: a regional pilot with enough fixed wing time but no Army aviation experience; a rotary pilot making the switch to fixed wing flying; and a pilot who qualified in Army fixed wing flying decades ago but got out for some reason.
“Maybe they got out of the military and got back in, or they flew helicop- ters for a while,” said Latimer, who has 19 years of federal service time, starting as a Marine and switching to become an Army aviator with the Mississippi National Guard and then joining the FWAATS in 2016. “They still meet the prerequisites to come here, and we’re just knocking off the cobwebs and reconnecting them with today’s Army aviation.”
Lt. Col. Wade A. Johnson, com- mander of the FWAATS, and Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bill Douglass, the program’s senior standardization instructor pilot, oversee a team of 23 personnel conducting fixed wing initial qualification and graduate- level qualification training, such as instrument examiner, maintenance test pilot and instructor pilot courses.
Origin of the FWAATS
In addition to training C-26 and C-12 aircrews, the FWAATS was also the Army’s only aircrew train- ing facility for the Short C-23 Sherpa aircraft for several years. The Army divested the platform and the last FWAATS C-23 course was in 2013. From 2001 through 2020, the FWAATS has trained more than 2,600 pilots and non-rated aircrew members in- cluding more than 1,400 C-12 stu- dents, about 800 C-23 students and approaching 400 C-26 students.
But their efforts started a few years earlier. In the 1980s and 1990s, the
Army National Guard set up four accredited regional aviation learn- ing institutions of excellence, called Army Aviation Training Sites (AATS). The FWAATS, formed in 1996, is the only one of four that offers fixed wing training. It was created to provide the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Ex- cellence at Fort Rucker in Alabama with a professional and reliable train- ing resource and surge capacity to meet the Army’s fixed wing training
requirements here and abroad, in support of combatant commands en- gaged in decisive action operations.
The Army used King Air 90 air- craft designated U-21 as far back as 1964 and was the first branch of the military to use the King Air vari- ant C-12 Huron, starting in 1974. The Army National Guard first start- ed using C-26 in the 2000s when the U.S. Air Force ended its use of the C-26 and dispersed its inventory to
AOPA
August 2021 / TWIN & TURBINE • 15