Internal Licensing & WARG's Flightline Progression Program (FPP)
- Anthony Luo
Welcome to our FPP page! Here you’ll find a brief overview and pointers to next steps!
Overview
WARG’s internal Licensing program, called the WARG Flightline Progression Program or FPP for short, is designed to teach you how to fly, operate, problem solve, and communicate while on the flight line. WARG maintains a flight-line team so that all subteams have access to qualified pilots and ground-station operators. Pilots and GSO’s can are called in whenever subteams need to test or integrate new software and hardware, by putting something in the air! Pilots and ground-station operators embedded in subteams are go-to knowledge centers when getting a drone up and running both safely and responsibly.
How difficult will it be?
Although there’s a lot to learn, the flightline progression program and our associated workshops are designed to make flying safely and responsibly as easy as possible. There’s a lot of how-to guides, quick-start guides, and reference documents for you to work through and understand. Unfortunately, as with any program, there’s no free lunch. You have to study to pass your courses, and although this isn’t a University of Waterloo course, this is still something that you’ll want to study and prepare for!
Cool! How to get started?
You’ll gain critical skills in different areas, and you’ll be given written and practical examinations in order to progress! WARG’s FPP has 2 distinct qualifications, one for pilots and one for ground-station operators; these are split into 3 levels. We also have a qualification for “BVLOS” operations, split into 2 levels. Here’s a brief overview of what that all means:
Definition: Pilot
A “pilot”, commonly referred to as “Safety Pilot” or “Human Operator”, is there to ensure the final safety and condition of the drone in flight. They will help control the drone if necessary, and ensure that the drone is always moving in a safe and responsible manner. A pilot is also responsible for taking over in the event of system failures, providing visual feedback to the GSO, and also fine-precision manual flight! Our pilots are divided into Fixed-Wing and Multi-rotor categories.
Definition: Ground-station Operator
A “ground-station operator”, commonly referred to as “GSO”, “GCS Operator” or “GCS Tech”, is there to operate the “GCS” - Ground Control Station. Ensuring that all systems on-board the drone are functional during the flight! GSO’s are also responsible for ensuring the drone is within operating limits, managing flight paths, and changing parameters on the drone.
Definition: Flight Director
The flight director is the flightline team member dedicated to the flight planning, operational management, and external communication during the mission! They can be thought of as the “brain” of the flight team, and operate in a similar fashion to Directors to the team. They’ll tell you what to do next, how to do something, or help pilots and gso’s make decisions. Commonly, they will also handle external communication, although sometimes this may be buffered through a visual observer or team member.
Definition: BVLOS
“BVLOS” stands for “Beyond Visual Line of Sight”. All of WARG’s flight tests are conducted within system VLOS with the aid of “VO”s - Visual Observers. The pilot or GSO, however, may be operating beyond their own visual line of sight. Due to the complex nature of such operations, we ask that pilots & GSOs complete extra training to ensure the safe operation of the drone!
Active Operator Roster
Our active operator roster includes both pilots and ground-station operators; it can be found as a sub-page under Internal Licensing, or with this link: Pilot & GSO Roster
Subteams looking for operators? Who can fly what?
This is probably one of the most asked questions, especially when it comes to asking for an operator. In this section, I’ll briefly explain the restrictions on each level:
Level | Pilot | GSO |
|---|---|---|
Beginner |
|
|
Intermediate |
|
|
Expert |
|
|
So, if I were looking for a pilot to do an autonomy object detection flight, I might ask a beginner GSO + Pilot pair to fly me a mission profile using ardupilot waypoints, and work with them + flight director to determine a viable flight plan.
If I were, however, looking to qualify a new airframe in the Vanguard class, I might be looking for intermediate or expert operators comfortable flying in Attitude mode and having a lot of experience communicating as a flightline team.
While pairing up between pilot/gso is not mandatory, it may be useful to pair or swap pairs as necessary in order to build or develop synergy.
Understanding Levels, Progressions, and Evaluations
Levels
Levels refer, internally, to your WARG progression level, and are often prefixed by your skill tree. This is different from TC-CAN RPAS leveling, although RPAS licenses are required to progress. This is split into 4 skill-trees (qualifications), each having 2-4 levels each.
Skill-Trees:
Pilot, fixed-wing (
fw)Pilot, multi-rotor (
mr)GSO (
gs)BVLOS (
bvlos)
Possible Level Designations:
Beginner (
bgn)Intermediate (
int)Expert (
exp)Competition (
cmp)
Your level is pre-fixed by the skill-tree it is under, for example: fw-bgn, gs-cmp, bvlos-int, mr-exp.
Evaluations
Before you progress from one level to the next, you must complete an evaluation. An evaluation may consist of the following parts:
Online quiz - used to judge your basic knowledge and competencies
Practical examination - used to judge your work under pressure and real-world situations
Technical demonstration - used to judge your ability to execute specific instructions in a real-world situation
Progressions
In order to move from one level to the next, you must “progress”. This is done through the use of evaluations, combined with other supporting information such as your operating logs. There are a few progression rules to keep in mind.
Note: You may be asked to re-demonstrate your competencies in order to maintain your level progression. We all forget things sometimes, and that’s ok! BUT, we need to make sure that we’re always ready and in a good mental state to fly when we’re asked to, and otherwise able to inform relevant parties that we’re unable to conduct our duties safely and responsibly.
Progression Rules
Note that we have a few rules regarding progression and testing, in order to maintain fairness and ensure the safety of our team members (including you!) as well as our drones:
Max 2 progressions per term, per skill tree
This is done so that “cramming” can’t happen, and so that we ensure you are able to have time to apply the knowledge that you learned in a real-world setting.
Previous experience does not matter
Although we understand that you may have more years flying drones than years the team has spent developing our newest highest-tech coolest drone, that doesn’t mean you get to cut the line! We encourage you to demonstrate your abilities by progressing as quickly as possible! After all, it should be easy, right?
Minimum 30 calendar days between evaluations
This also exists so that you cannot cram, and rush levels. We want to encourage you to take the time to learn and practice!
Three strikes, you’re out!
While we encourage every member to try their best to learn from mistakes and apply that learning in real life, unless there are extraneous circumstances, three evaluation failures at one level will void you from further progression in the program! Note: Strikes are cleared once you successfully progress.
This is done to keep our drones safe, and to make sure we give everyone equal opportunities to show what they can do to the team. note: It is very very unlikely that you fail three times! Talk to one of your directors or flight test coordinators if you’re really feeling uncertain about this.
No cheating, be honest. No electronics (other than GCS)
While we understand the power of using the tools available, we don’t always have chat-gpt, google bard, or bing-trashcan with us at competition. In fact - we might not even have power or time for our electrical devices to ctrl-f! That means that all of our knowledge needs to be in our heads, ready to go, without the help of external tools.
Note: Paper notes, writing on your arm, etc, is not allowed unless done during the evaluation period.
Re-demonstrations of competencies // Re-qualifications.
In some instances, in order to keep your level progression, we may ask you to demonstrate competencies again. Some examples of why we might ask you to do this include: time since last evaluation exceeding 2 years, limited flight time, limited sorties, notes about unsafe behaviour, or any red-category incidents. We aren’t out to get you, but we are here to make sure that everyone and every drone stays safe! (they have lives too).
This is not a full evaluation, but a necessary and integral part of our program to ensure that we can continue operating our drones safely.
Our rules aren’t written to hurt you, they’re there to keep everyone as safe as possible. If you need any convincing, there’s lots of incidents involving drones on the internet that we don’t want to repeat. Not even close. Safety really is the number #1 priority (even more important than the well-being of our drones).
Next Steps
We encourage everyone to consider both GSO and pilot roles, but we want to ensure that everyone is given equal opportunity and the same resources. Here are some links to top-level pages for each program:
Pilot progression: FPP: Pilot Handbook
GSO progression: FPP: GSO Handbook
BVLOS progression: <link here>