David Coward

VP & GM, Training Services, L3Harris, Commercial Aviation

David Coward, VP & GM Training Services, is an experienced executive with a history of success in the pilot training & technology industry. With over 20 years of experience working with L3Harris in Project Management, business development, training services, David has a deep understanding of the challenges that the pilot training market faces when adopting new technologies. Ultimately responsible for L3Harris’ Training Services business, David oversees the delivery of strategic initiatives and the day-to-day operation of both the Airline Academy and Airline Training business units.

Under David’s leadership, L3Harris’ has recently integrated its award-winning flight data analytics capabilities across its flight training, enabling data driven decisions to increase safety in additino to utilizing key datapoints to inform training tasks for pilots and trainees.

The Evolution of Data in Pilot Training

Data-based decision making in pilot training has been a key focus for the industry for many years. It is widely accepted that data can build a more adaptive learning experience for a pilot from initial training, through to flying in an operational environment. However, as an industry, we are at the stage where we have the tools to collect the right data, and the applications to analyze this data to support instructors to improve training programs.

Within the aviation industry, areas such as passenger journey management, customer relationship management, flight operation safety, efficiency, airframe maintenance and engineering provide vast amounts of data needing analysis to deliver value. We have more data in these areas than we can imagine, for example consider an A380, it has roughly 4000 parameters which are recorded every 1-2 seconds; so a 10-hour flight would equate to well over 70 million pieces of data, just from the standard recording. The same situation exists in our training environments with complex simulators replicating real-world and worse case scenarios.