What is AICC (AICC (HACP))?
AICC refers to the guidelines of the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee, which defined how computer-based training is packaged and tracked. Its HTTP-based protocol, HACP, lets content hosted anywhere exchange status, score and time data with a learning management system. The committee closed in 2014, but legacy AICC courses remain in use.
How Personal Academy handles it
Personal Academy imports AICC packages and plays them as content, without resume or detailed tracking of the learner’s progress inside the package.
A worked example
Suppose a 300-person aviation maintenance contractor still has a library of older courses exported in AICC format. They import each package so the material is available to new staff alongside newer courses. Because the packages play as content without resume, the team marks long modules as short sessions and plans to re-export the most used courses to SCORM 2004 from the original authoring files.
The Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee was formed in 1988 so that airlines and aircraft makers could share training across different computer systems. Its guidelines were among the first interoperability rules for eLearning, and much of SCORM borrowed ideas from them.
An AICC course is described by a set of text files: a course description, an assignable unit file listing the launchable lessons with their URLs, a descriptor file, and a course structure file. The LMS reads these files to build the course outline.
Tracking works through the HTTP AICC Communication Protocol (HACP). When the LMS launches a lesson, it passes a session identifier and the URL of its tracking endpoint. The content then posts plain-text messages to that endpoint, using commands such as GetParam to read the learner data and PutParam to write lesson status, score, time and a core lesson field used for bookmarks. Because the content talks to the LMS over HTTP rather than through a JavaScript object in the browser, AICC content could be hosted on a different server from the LMS, which was an advantage in its time.
The committee dissolved in 2014 and passed its work to ADL, and new content is rarely published in AICC format. Organisations still meet it in older libraries, especially in aviation, manufacturing and regulated industries. The usual approach is to keep such courses available while planning a move to SCORM 2004 or another current format. When evaluating a platform, check whether AICC packages are only displayed as content or also tracked with resume.