Tri-National Tornado Training Establishment
The Tri-National Tornado Training Establishment (TTTE) was a tornado training association of Great Britain , Germany and Italy that existed from 1981 to 1999 . The station was at the Royal Air Force Station Cottesmore , an airfield in the Rutland district of Central England.
history
In 1979, the three tornado developing nations Great Britain, Germany and Italy signed a trinational Memorandum of Understanding , in which the establishment of the joint training association in Cottesmore was agreed. The Tri-National Tornado Training Establishment (TTTE) received its first Tornado, the Trainer B-01, on June 1, 1980. The first course, a flight instructor course, began on January 5, 1981, shortly before the official commissioning on January 29, 1981 After the first simulator was available in the spring of 1982 , ten crews per course were trained from May 1982 onwards. In August 1982 the growth of aircraft had come to an end with 48, of which 22 were German, 19 British and 7 Italian. In the same month, the first “First Tourists” were trained in the 23rd course, i.e. flight students who were not retrained from another type of mission.
Ten years after it was set up, the TTTE celebrated 100,000 flight hours on the tornado in 1991. A special premiere took place in 1994 with the graduation of the first female Tornado pilot. In 1998 the end of the TTTE was initiated with the decision to dissolve. With the 273rd as the last course, almost 3,400 flight students had been trained or retrained by 1999 and around 162,000 flight hours were flown (D: 47.5%, GB: 40.8%, I: 11.7%).
The official decommissioning took place on March 24, 1999.
There have been three fatal aircraft accidents during TTTE's existence, two of which were collisions with other aircraft in the air and one crash in a simulated air-to-ground attack in bad weather.
Today the three nations train their Tornado crews on their own responsibility in RAF Lossiemouth (15 (R) Squadron), at Holloman Air Force Base ( Aviation Training Center of the Air Force , where a move to Tactical Air Force Wing 51 in Schleswig-Jagel has already been decided) and in Ghedi . RAF Cottesmore was then occupied until 2010 with an armed forces joint Harrier task force of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy , then the airfield was closed.
education
The courses for the Tornado crews were divided into a theory block of four weeks and a nine-week flying part. Simulator training was carried out at the same time, for which four different systems were available with the Basic Flight Simulator , the Full Mission Simulator , the Nav-Attack Systems Trainer and the Basic Avionics Procedures Trainer .
The aim of the aeronautical training was to impart basic skills in handling the aircraft, flying in formation and deploying weapons. However, this training was clearly delimited from the content of the subsequent courses that followed for the flight students following participation in the TTTE. These were carried out as national tactical courses for intensive training, among other things, of air combat and weapon operations against ground targets. Training locations were Honington, Great Britain (Weapons Conversion Unit), Upjever , Germany ( Fighter Bomber Squadron 38 for the Air Force and Navy ) and Ghedi, Italy.
organization
The TTTE was an association with around 1,600 soldiers and 130 civilian employees. While the Royal Air Force provided technical and logistics personnel , the staff and the three training squadrons were trinational. The position of Wing Commander, comparable to the Commodore , changed between the three nations.
The permanent staff and the course participants in the three training series (Tornado Operational Conversion Unit - TOCU) were each trinational. The A-Squadron was led by a German, the B-Squadron by a British and the C-Squadron by an Italian squadron captain.
The standardization squadron (S-Squadron) was responsible for further training, flight instructor training and the acceptance of inspection flights. Theoretical training and the simulator were the responsibility of the Ground School .
40:40:20 (D / GB / I) with corrections depending on the hours flown was set as the key for the cost allocation.
literature
- "The birth of Tornado," Royal Air Force Historical Society, 2002 Postcombe, ISBN 0-9530345-0-X
Web links
- Gary Parsons: "TTTEnd of an era" on Air-Scene UK
Individual evidence
- ^ "Tornado training begins" , International February 7, 1981 (PDF, 1.88 MB), English
- ↑ RAF Cottesmore 08, Station History & Organization ( Memento of November 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 460 kB, English)