Candidates for Defence

You don’t have to be a Type-A personality or the captain of the school football team to make a good defence force pilot, but you do have to have a set of skills and capabilities that will get you through training and onto an operational squadron. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) knows exactly what they’re looking for, but accurately plucking the right people from the crowd has come with its own set of problems over the years.

Now they have a new weapon: the Aviation Screening Program (ASP).

Australia’s defence forces used to select air crew using the process of work sampling. Suitable candidates were shipped up to Tamworth for two weeks, and in a program known as Flight Screening, were put in CT-4Bs and run through a series of exercises to determine if they had the goods to be air force, army or navy pilots. It gave the ADF the opportunity to observe air crew hopefuls in the very situations they would encounter were they green-lighted to start training.

When the RAAF began its transition from the PC-9 to the PC-21 and retired the CT-4, flight screening in an aircraft was no longer possible. The complexity of the PC-21–including ejection seats in a tandem configuration–did not allow the ADF to screen candidates safely in the airborne environment. Therefore a new selection system was required: the Aviation Screening Program (ASP). ASP takes only four days and uses no aircraft and no flying instructors, and