Two Down, One to Go...

My sim partner and I had our Maneuvers Validations (MV) on Friday. It went really smoothly, we actually flew better than we did in our first five sim lessons. The MV is the AQP equivalent of a proficiency check, so in a traditional program we'd be done right now. Instead we have a couple of line oriented flight training (LOFT) modules, two in the IPT and one in the sim, before our Line Oriented Evaluation (LOE). That's scheduled for next Sunday since we have a few days off between now and then for Thanksgiving.

The end is in sight!

Are the Regional Airlines Safe?

As a pilot, I often get the question "are the airlines safe?" I don't know whether the people asking it think I'm privy to some horribly damning information that's been hidden from the public, but I think the airlines' record this decade speaks for itself: terrorism aside, airline travel has become very safe. That's the answer I usually give, and the people I'm talking to are satisfied. It's a good unequivocal answer.

When people ask whether the regional airlines are safe, as a commenter in one of my training posts did, my answer tends to be more nuanced. Nobody likes a nuanced answer to that question. Well, it depends on what you think the question is really asking. If the question is, are the regional airlines safe compared to, say, driving or skiing or lawn darts- why, yes they are. If the question is, are the regionals safe compared to the major airlines - that's where my answer gets a little wavy. The accident record for the last ten years is not worse for the regionals than it is for the majors. However, I do believe that certain trends at the regionals right now do lead to a decrease in safety margins, and we could be sowing the seeds of future accidents.

My primary concern is the plummeting experience levels in regional airliner cockpits. After 9/11, the regional airlines exploded as major airlines sought to slash costs by outsourcing more small jet flying to the lowest bidder. The regional airlines have been very aggressive in controlling costs so they can competitively bid, resulting in poor pay and working conditions at many regionals. This, along with fewer opportunities at major airlines and the erosion of wages and benefits at that level, has contributed to a sharp decrease in the number of pilots training for an airline career. The end result: a severe pilot shortage in the lower echelons of U.S. aviation, where several airlines have dropped the pretense of minimum experience levels altogether and are hiring at the lowest legal qualification (commercial multi-engine land certificate, 190-250 hours) and still can't get enough pilots to properly staff their airlines for all the contracts they've been awarded.

This isn't the first time that airlines have hired low-time candidates. In the boom days of the late 1990's, massive hiring at the major airlines meant that some regional airlines were hiring pilots with less than 1000 hours to fly 19 seat turboprops. These days pilots with even less experience are flying 50-90 seat jets. Fortunately, these new planes are relatively idiot-proof; this and the training I've been describing is, I think, largely responsible for preventing a rash of experience-related accidents.

The good news is that inexperience has a way of taking care of itself; pilots hired with 250 hours don't stay at 250 hours for long. However, some of the most abusive regionals have massive attrition in their FO ranks as low-time pilots leave as soon as they have enough experience to get hired at a better airline. At Pinnacle, for example, 30% of the entire pilot group has been with the company for less than a year and meager new-hire classes can't even keep up with the attrition. There is a lot of attrition in the Captains' ranks as well as the major airlines ramp up their hiring, and several airlines (including Pinnacle) have started to hire "street captains" because none of their FOs have enough flight time to qualify for the upgrade (typically around 2000-2500 hours)! This is the real challenge, in my opinion. With a seasoned Captain, an inexperienced FO is more of an annoyance than a hinderance to safety. When you put a Captain with little time in type together with an FO with little time in any type, though, I think you will see a real degradation to safety margins whenever abnormal situations arise. And thanks to the seniority system, that's exactly what will happen: the street Captains, perpetually junior, will always get paired with new, junior FOs. Incidentally, I just described my own near future.

Maintenance is another major concern at some regionals. Horizon had a very good maintenance department. They hired qualified mechanics, paid them decently, had a lot of oversight, and did the vast majority of maintenance work with our own mechanics. Whatever maintenance was outsourced (mostly line maintenance at smaller outstations) was done so with rather strict oversight. This is becoming the exception to the rule at many regional airlines (and even a number of major airlines). The new M.O. is to outsource at least all heavy maintenance and often line maintenance as well to contractors. NewCo does not employ a single mechanic, only supervisors and maintenance controllers. This is more than a passing concern: shoddy, under-supervised outsourced work has caused two crashes already, Valujet 592 and Air Midwest 5481. In the latter case, Air Midwest (part of Mesa Air Group) had contracted their maintenance out to the lowest bidder, where an unlicensed mechanic improperly rigged the elevator using an unapproved procedure. The licensed mechanic he was working under signed off the work without inspecting it. All five of the mechanics working on the aircraft that night had almost zero experience on the B1900. Mesa's penny-pinching killed 21 people. After the accident Mesa decided to stop outsourcing maintenance work. "After an accident like that, you reassess," said Jonathan Ornstein, Mesa's CEO. "Bringing the maintenance back in-house is a cost-effective way to facilitate more direct control of the work."

Few in the industry have listened to him, because the trend is definitely toward more outsourcing, not less. The Air Midwest crash impacted Mesa Air Group's bottom line only, and other airlines will not change until an accident cuts into their profits. The regionals are obsessed with keeping their costs low because their survival depends on it. The major airlines share a major part of the blame because of how they play regionals off each other to secure the lowest cost feed possible. Nobody wants to change because doing so puts them at a competitive disadvantage. The obvious solution would be for the FAA to change the regulations, keeping an even playing field for everyone while increasing safety, but the FAA has proven time and time again that they will not do anything to cut into the airlines' bottom line until public outrage forces them to.

One very good example of this is the area of pilot fatigue. There is ample evidence to suggest that the current regulations are inadequate. NASA has stacks of ASRS forms where pilots reported fatigue as being a major factor in deviations and other incidents. The NTSB has excoriated the FAA on numerous occasions for not changing the regulations to conform to modern knowledge about fatigue's effect on human performance. It's actually been on their "Most Wanted" list of safety improvements since 1990. In two recent fatal airline accidents (American 1420 and Corporate 5966), the NTSB found fatigue to be a significant contributing factor. This issue affects the majors almost as much as the regionals, especially since their contracts were gutted in bankruptcy. In an effort to keep costs low, airlines are flying their pilots as much as they legally can. For a major airline that may mean 8 hours of flying in three legs and 12 hours on duty; for a regional that may mean 8 hours of flying in six legs and 14 hours on duty.

The basic thead that connects all of this is airline management being cheap. They won't pay the pilots, they won't pay for quality maintenance, they wring every bit of productivity they can out of their employees, and they'll continue doing so until inexperience, shoddy maintenance, and tired pilots cut into their bottom line. Profits in aviation being underwritten by others' blood has a long and pedigreed history. Google "American 191" and consider that the man who approved the forklift procedure against McDonnell-Douglas' recommendations is now in the top echelons of AirTran management. Read the NTSB report on Alaska 261 and think about what it means that, after everything they said about Alaska's maintenance program, the FAA found Alaska MD80s with unlubed jackscrews coming out of (outsourced) heavy maintenance last year. Consider that as cheap as the majors have become, they outsource a portion of their flying to regionals because the regionals are cheaper!

I suppose this post would have a rather frightening effect on non-pilots. You should understand that despite my concerns, accident rates at the regionals are at the same amazingly low rates of the major airlines. I just think that if airline management continues along the path they're on, that won't continue to be the case forever.

A380 Sighting

I didn't have any training on Monday and it was a nice day so I took the Metro downtown and spent some time walking around Old Montreal snapping photos (which I will post soon). While I was there I heard a jet coming overhead somewhat low so I looked up and took a quick shot.



At first I thought it was a 747, but that didn't look quite right. Then it banked and I realized it was a the A380! Mon dieu!

Training Days, Part II: Transition, Differences, Upgrade, and Recurrent

It usually takes two to three months to get through the entire initial training syllabus that I described in my last "Training Days" post. Thankfully, this is the longest training cycle you'll typically go through; that said, you can still end up in training for a pretty significant portion of your career, especially if you fly for a carrier that operates multiple types of aircraft.

Every time you switch between types of aircraft - from DC9 to A320, for example - you have to go through transition training. This is basically the same as initial training except that you don't have to do the Basic Indoctrination portion of ground school, just aircraft systems. Other than that the syllabus is pretty close, although a transition is really a little easier because you're already so familiar with the airline's general operating practices and fleet managers try to harmonize procedures between types. Depending on the number of aircraft types in an airline's fleet and special contract provisions like seat locks, it is sometimes possible to go through several cycles of transition training in a single year. A guy I know got hired onto the MD88 at Delta and only flew it for a month or two before going back to the schoolhouse for transition training on the B757/767.

Closely related to transition training is differences training. The FAA requires differences training when they ascertain that two or more models of the same type are different enough that a pilot already holding the type rating needs to get additional training on that specific model before operating it under FAR 121. The best example of this is the B757 and B767. They actually share a type certificate and their pilots hold a "B756/B767" type rating, but in reality there are some differences (195,000 lb difference in takeoff weight between the 757-200 and 767-400ER, for starters) that require additional training for pilots who fly both. A less obvious example is the B737-200 and the newer B737NG's, because the cockpit is so different. Differences training is typically much less intensive than initial or transition training.

There actually is one instance where a pilot already with an airline is required to go through initial training again: when they have not served on the same "group" of aircraft (turboprop, turbojet). Therefore, at Horizon, Dash-8 pilots going to the CRJ had to go through initial training again, and vice versa. It's basically transition training with a general subjects refresher course thrown in.

When a First Officer is promoted to Captain, they go through Upgrade training. I won't have to do this because I'm already being trained as a Captain; the company didn't want to send me through two training cycles within a few months of each other. Most airlines, however, train their First Officers as FOs only; there's no real advantage to having them all type rated and captain qualified (and most new FOs at the regionals today aren't even close to ATP minimum qualifications).

Upgrade training is, by itself, pretty straightforward: a "refresher" ground school, some CPT sessions to learn the left-seat flows, and then simulator training to learn how to fly from the left seat. The only thing that's really new for most people is learning how to taxi! Because of the way the seniority system works at most airlines, it's pretty common to upgrade into an airplane other than the one you flew as an FO. In this case, upgrade training can be combined with initial, transition, or differences training, as appropriate. For example: a CRJ FO upgrading in the DHC8 would go through initial + upgrade, a 747 FO upgrading in an A320 would go through transition + upgrade, and a Q400 FO upgrading into the Q200 would go through differences + upgrade (which would've been my case had I stayed at Horizon).

Now even if you're hired as a Captain at a one-type airline, you don't escape from training for years on end. There's always recurrent training to do. All flight crewmembers must go through recurrent ground school once a year. This tends to be dreadfully boring, as the FAA has a long laundry list of things that must be covered, which leaves little time for extra training on pertinent and timely issues that'd actually be useful on the line. On the plus side, you often find yourself in class with coworkers you haven't hung out with in a while, and that can be a good time.

And then there's recurrent simulator training/checking. The regs say that captains must take a proficiency check every six months and FOs once every twelve months, but that recurrent flight training may be substituted for every other pro check ("training-in-lieu"). I've discussed this before, but the pro check is actually easier than most training in lieu sessions, because a pro check is a fairly structured event in which everyone knows what to expect, while the instructor can (and will) throw pretty tough, complex situations at you in a TIL session. I actually think it's easier on Captains because they fly the sim every six months and therefore have a pretty good memory of what it flies like...not always quite like the airplane! Maybe I'll think differently once I have to visit the torture box every six months, though.

AQP programs are considerably different where recurrent training is concerned. The time intervals are different and are unique to each airline's program, although I understand that nine months is a common interval. The recurrent sim training is usually done right after recurrent ground school, which isn't always true of traditional programs. Also, AQP doesn't have training one time and checking the next; rather, pilots are trained and checked within the same training cycle. Usually there are at least two sim sessions, including one maneuvers validation and one LOFT (Line Oriented Flight Training) scenario. These are rough equivalents of the pro check and TIL, and doing both in the same cycle is why AQP programs get away with longer intervals between training cycles.

Finally, each pilot is required to be line checked once a year. This involves a line check airman sitting on your jumpseat during one or two legs of normal revenue flying and silently taking notes of what you're doing wrong. You have to do something pretty blatantly unsafe to actually bust a company line check, but at many airlines even small screwups count towards a running point total. If you reach a certain number of points over a given time period, you get hauled in for retraining or even a review board.

I just calculated how much time I've spent in training in less than four years at two airlines. My initial at Horizon took about ten weeks including IOE, I sat through three recurrent ground schools, and I had one recurrent pro-checks and two TILs. Initial here at NewCo will be about six weeks (not including the self study period) plus about a week of IOE. So that'll bring me up to about 20 weeks of training in under 4 years. That's actually not bad, I'd bet there are people who have done that in a single year. Like I said, it's a major part of an airline pilot's life - and that's a major reason the airlines are so safe.

Back in Business

Well, we took the plunge and bought a MacBook. I like it so far...a lot. I'm still getting used to the Mac OS X Leopard operating system, it's considerably different than windows (although vista copied some of its features). I'm continually finding new quirks and features that make you go "Hmm...why didn't Microsoft do that!?" 

Thank you everyone for your suggestions and tips in the comments of my last post. There seem to be a fair amount of Mac users that read this blog, so I'd like to ask you all to post your best Mac OS X tips and tricks in this post's comments. Thanks!

Here's a picture of the new machine:

Oops

You guys are going to love my latest stroke of genius. It truly merits a "brainiac of the year" nomination.

I've had the same Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop computer for the last four years. It goes with me on almost every trip, and sees a fair amount of use at home as well. It was a budget laptop when I got it (Celeron 2GHz, 256mb ram) and has long since been left behind by technological progress, but it's still pretty adequate for web surfing, blogging, chatting, and word processing usage. For more processor-intensive computing I use our home desktop machine.

Four years of heavy usage have taken a toll on my laptop. The case has a chip out of a corner, the screen has a crack on its edge, and there are scratches aplenty. It never had internal wifi capability, so when the PCMIA slot stopped working two years ago I had to swap out my PCMIA wifi adapter for a USB version. About the same time the power supply module went bad so that the computer would revert to battery power and refuse to accept the AC power adapter if I let the battery fully charge. I adapted by taking the battery out of the computer once it reached a 99% charge and then not using it until I really needed battery power. A year ago the power supply cord also went on the fritz, so I got a replacement.

A few days ago, that power supply cord started going bad exactly like its predecessor did: intermittent power that could be made continuous by holding the cord just so in a certain spot, apparently due to broken wires within. I ended up getting a universal power supply at Radio Shack, figuring I could still use it after the Dell passed the point of usefulness. Before hooking it up, I made sure that the input power specs matched and that output DC voltage and amperage (20V @ 4.5A) was correct. Great. I found the correct Dell adapter plug and attached it, and then plugged it into my computer.

Immediately I caught a whiff of the acrid smell of burning electrical wires. I unplugged the adapter right away and plugged in my old adapter. The computer didn't respond when I pressed the "on" button. I put in the battery: the yellow "fault" light illuminated and the computer refused to turn on. Worse yet, the burning smell came back. I double-checked the output voltage, amperage, and wattage of the new adapter. Everything matched the old one. I plugged it in again, and got the nasty smell again. I wasn't sure what was happening, but it was obvious that I'd just fried my computer.

Suddenly I realized why: the power supply output is DC, meaning it's critical that the polarity be correct, but the design of the adapters allowed them to very easily be attached backwards so that the positive wire went to negative and vise-versa. I inspected the power supply side of the plug: sure enough, there was a small imprinted word, "tip," that was apparently supposed to be matched up with the equally small imprinted "tip" on the adapter side of the plug in order to keep the polarity correct. I'd had the polarity reversed.

So here's what I've concluded from this little episode: I'm just tech-savvy enough to be dangerous. To a smarter, geekier techie, this would've been a painfully obvious mistake. The computer-illiterate would've read the manual and alligned the "tip" imprints without ever knowing why they had to do so. I'm the computer version of the 600 hour CFI who's been instructing for six months and thinks they have this flying thing figured out.

Anyways, the end result is that there is a MacBook in my near future. I've toyed with the idea of making the jump to a Mac for years, but the price difference versus PCs of similar performance plus the compatibility issues always held me back. With the newest generation of Intel-based MacBooks, though, Apple has brought the price within spitting distance of comparable PC laptops. I also considered the Dell Inspiron 1520. Built to the same specifications as the base model MacBook (2GHz Core 2 Duo w/4mb cache, 800Mhz fsb, 1Gb ram, 80Gb hdd, 802.11n wifi), the Dell is only $150 cheaper and the Mac comes with better default software. Actually, I know someone who works at an Apple store; with their employee discount it's the same price. The coup de grâce is that Apple has reportedly worked the bugs out of their BootCamp software and bundled it with the newest version of mac os x, Leopard, making it fairly painless to run Windows when you need it to run your "PC-only" software. I'm pretty sold.

By the way, my Systems & Procedures Validation ("the oral") was on Saturday and it went well. There was a pretty strong emphasis on FMS usage, apparently because some previous trainees had made it into the simulator without a good grasp on the FMS. It's a rather easy box to use once you get used to it, though. I start sim training on Thursday.

Training Days

Airline travel in the US has become amazingly safe. After American 587 crashed in November 2001, it was almost five years before there was another major fatal accident (Comair 5191 in August 2006). In the "golden age" of the 1960s there were single years with numerous major accidents. Even in a fairly recent five year period from 1986 to 1990, there were 14 major crashes involving US carriers which killed over 700 people. Since 2000, though, the fatality rate for scheduled Part 121 operations has held steady around .015 per 100,000 flight hours. To put that number in perspective: A kid born today could spend every second of their life on board US airliners in flight and still have only a one in ten chance of being killed in a plane crash by the time they reach age 75.

The same has not held true of general aviation. Although exact statistics are hard to come by because nobody knows exactly how much the GA fleet flies, the NTSB estimates a fatal accident rate of 1.32 per 100,000 flight hours. In other words, for every hour spent flying in General Aviation, you are 88 times more likely to die than on a Part 121 airliner. It's even worse if you look at fatalities per miles flown.

There are quite a few factors you could attribute the gap to: aircraft capability, reliability and redundancy, maintenance, dual pilot vs. single pilot, and greater experience levels in airliner cockpits. One undeniably huge advantage that airline pilots get is the quantity and quality of training they receive. In my opinion, the GA training industry does a poor job of preparing GA pilots for the real-world challenges they face, while the airlines do a mostly exceptional job of preparing their pilots for safe line operations.

Unlike GA pilots who typically receive little recurrent training after certification, airline pilots spend a significant portion of their professional lives being trained and checked. They have training programs to complete when first hired at the airline, when transitioning into new equipment, and when upgrading; they undergo recurrent training every year; and they are checked in both the simulator and on the line at least once a year. Part 121 is quite specific about the training and checking crews must be given, and this is one area in which the FAA exercises considerable oversight.

The traditional airline training program is set forth within FAR 121 Subpart N, but in recent years many airlines have come to use an alternative method for qualifying their crewmembers contained in Special FAR 58 known as "Advanced Qualification Program," or AQP. Whichever program an airline chooses to use, there are four main categories of training for crewmembers: initial, transition, upgrade, and recurrent. This post will focus on initial training, and Part II will cover the others.

When first hired at an airline, you go through initial training. This usually starts with several weeks of ground school. The first portion is typically spent reviewing general subjects such as meteorology, aviation weather, aerodynamics, regulations, and instrument charts and procedures. Then the material becomes more company specific: the Operations Specifications and FOM (Flight Operations Manual) are studied at length. These provide guidance on a wide variety of non-aircraft specific subjects and constitute the official company policies that all pilots are expected to know and follow. This can range from the more asinine aspects of uniform policy to CRM philosophy to stabilized approach requirements to deicing procedures. Finally, the ground school becomes aircraft specific, and the candidates will study systems, limitations, and procedures. There are usually several thick manuals to work through: a systems description manual which contains in-depth information on aircraft systems, and a flight standards manual that sets forth standard operating procedures for that aircraft at that airline. Throughout ground school, there are usually written tests, and sometimes a final exam.

Most airlines used to send candidates directly from ground school to flight training, but as simulator and/or aircraft time has become more expensive many have introduced an intermediate step: the procedures trainer, known by various acronyms such as "CPT" or "SPT" or "IPT" but commonly called the "paper tiger." This is a full-sized mock-up of the cockpit that can vary in quality from little more than a three-dimensional cockpit poster to a near-simulator lacking only motion and visuals. However it is constructed, the idea is that here the crewmember can learn their flows and procedures thoroughly before having to use them in real time in the simulator.

After ground school and usually after the CPT sessions if they are used, the candidate will undergo an oral exam with a check airman. These typically last between two and eight hours and are comprehensive: they include general knowledge, company policies and regulations, aircraft systems and limitations, and flight procedures. After the oral exam, the student is ready for flight training.

Not too many years ago, it was commonplace to do at least some of your training in the actual airplane. Now, the FAA allows all training and checking to be done in level D flight simulators, which have full motion and advanced visual capabilities; as Level D sims become common, it's pretty rare to touch the real airplane until after your checkride. Some of the bigger airlines have their own simulators; most regionals and some majors lease time in simulators owned by companies like FlightSafety, SimuFlight, PanAm Flight Training, and CAE. The flight training is most often provided by the airline's own instructors, but in some cases the training center's instructors may be used as well.

Candidates are usually paired with each other for the duration of training. Sometimes if there is an upgrade class going through at the same time as an initial class, new hires will be paired with upgrade candidates. This is an efficient way to train because each student is always being trained for their own seat, and the upgrading student's prior experience is usually helpful to the new hire, especially if the upgrading student flew the same airplane as an FO. It doesn't always work out this way, though. At Horizon I was paired with a fellow new hire; when one of us was training in the right seat, the other would "play captain" from the left seat, using flows we hadn't been taught and weren't expected to know. I'm afraid we weren't always horribly helpful to each other. Fortunately we got a fully qualified captain to sit in the left seat during our checkrides. At NewCo I'm also paired with a new hire; we're both being qualified as Captains but also have to learn First Officer duties, so our time in the right seat won't be wasted.

The first simulator session is typically spent just getting to know the airplane, usually flying a normal flight with nothing inoperative. That's about the last time you'll fly with everything working until you get to the line! Subsequent sessions are chock-full of engine failures, fires, electrical emergencies, rapid depressurizations, landing gear malfunctions, and more than a few simple glitches to serve as potential distractions. In modern aircraft there is a large emphasis placed on proper management of automation, including the autoflight and flight management systems. You can be the sharpest stick since Chuck Yeager and still fail out of flight training if you don't know exactly how to make the "black boxes" do what you want them to.

In a traditional training program, you would have five to ten simulator sessions of several hours each before your Proficiency Check. This is basically an ATP checkride; in fact, if the type rating requires an ATP certificate and the candidate has only their Commercial certificate, the Pro Check will be given by an Air Crew Pilot Designee (APD) and considered the equivalent of an ATP checkride. Although the Pro Check of course carries an inherent amount of stress with it, in reality it's more laid back than the previous training sessions, because you know exactly what maneuvers need to be completed and you'll usually have but two engine failures: one high-speed abort and one failure just after V1 followed by a single-engine approach. Once the Pro Check is complete, you are issued your brand new type rating and are ready to go fly the real airplane.

AQP programs differ from traditional initial training programs in that there is no single climactic checkride but rather a series of "validations" throughout the training. At NewCo we have our Systems & Procedures Validation (SPV, ie the oral) after the four IPT sessions; my SPV is scheduled for next Monday. After that we do five simulator sessions and then a Flight Maneuvers Validation (FMV), which is similar to a Pro Check but may be conducted by an instructor rather than a check airman or APD. Then we run several LOFT (Line Oriented Flight Training) scenarios in the IPTs and one in the sim before our final checkride, the LOE (Line Oriented Evaluation). The LOFT and LOE sessions are basically normal line flights that never have anything major go wrong, just little things that have a way of building on each other and forcing the crew to exercise their decision making and CRM skills. This is considered the type ride and is conducted by a check airman or ADP. The use of LOFT is not exclusive to AQP programs (Horizon had one LOFT session between the Pro Check and IOE) but the emphasis on making flight training more geared towards the challenges of real life line flying is an AQP hallmark.

After your Proficiency Check or LOE is complete, the last step to becoming a fully line-qualified pilot is Initial Operating Experience, or IOE. At long last, you finally get to fly the real airplane for the first time - with paying passengers on board, no less! No matter how thorough your simulator training was, IOE can be a pretty stressful experience. It's pretty funny, because you're finally flying around with both engines operating and nothing on fire, yet you'll get freaked out by something as simple as being cleared for a visual approach. Who practices visual approaches in a sim!? You're with a check airman, though, and they're good at getting you squared away on normal line operations in short order. Once the check airman is confident that you know what you're doing, they or another check airman will conduct a line check over one leg. Assuming you don't screw something up badly, that will be your final signoff from training and you're free to start getting used and abused by crew scheduling.

Next post: Training Days Part II: Transition, Upgrade, & Recurrent Training.