Mike's Saudi (16) How we taught the Saudis in the 1970s

The photograph taken by Mztourist of an RSAF Lightning aircraft at the RSAF Museum Riyadh

At work I was getting to know my trainers and trainees, if you can imagine a situation where the trainees had had little experience of science or engineering and the trainers were widely experienced men who found it difficult to connect with the these simple country lads. The Saudis had also been taught American English at an introductory course which only added to the trainers difficulties. You may get some idea of my job, to get these two factions to meet and it had to be done in the work situation. There was always the difficulty of maintaining the aircraft and training the Saudi boys. For us Brits there was the added challenge of training to an American system which at the time few Brits at any level understood.  It was only much later when I was working alongside the Americans that I really appreciated it and how appropriate it was to the Saudi situation at the time; remember this was in the 1970s.  To add to all these problems the Saudis had spent 60% of their schooling on religious studies which didn’t leave a lot of time for everything else. Another item seen by some as a problem was that the training program on the ground was overseen by the Pakistan Air Force. This really annoyed some of the section chiefs but I got on fine with my Pakistani I had only one and in the end he just trusted me to get on with it. It was very interesting time to be there, remember Saudi Arabia had only been united as a country about 40 years and was still emerging from a mainly desert community.

Perhaps it might help if I describe briefly the American training system known as ‘On the Job Training’ usually referred to as OJT. This meant that the trainee would accompany the technician in his daily work, studying what he did and gradually taking the job over, first under the guidance of the trainer/technician and later by himself at which point the trainee would be qualified in that single task. Once qualified the trainee would move on to a different job until he was qualified in all aspects of his work at which time he would receive a small technical promotion. This system was ideally suited to training a workforce intelligent but ignorant of any mechanical or electronic working. Theory was provided in formal lessons by people such as myself and in discussions with the trainer. This was a wonderful system to get a generation of young Saudis understanding the modern world quickly. The disadvantage was that they only learned what was immediately relevant to the job in hand.

The British way was to do an initial training course followed by experience in the field followed by a more advanced course, a system which was more in depth but took longer and required the trainee to have at least some idea of basic mechanics. If I may put it this way it required someone brought up Meccano not on herding sheep this is not an insult it was a fact in the 1970s. Here you can see the problem for the BAC trainers most of which had an RAF background and there was a tendency to teach beyond what was required for the job in hand. This frustrated both the trainer and trainee. However as I said earlier it was much later that I fully understood the advantages of the system particularly for the Saudi trainees and a country with a need to catch up on the modern world.