For our yearly team event in Munich, our colleague Anja Wilbert organised a visit to the Lufthansa Aviation Training center nearby the Munich Airport. We spent much of the day there and learnt great things about their VR-assisted training process, the flight simulators and about their specific challenges for which they experiment and often already use new technologies.
With this blog post we just want to share some quick impressions – it was an inspiring & fun day – thx Anja for organising and thx all who joined for the great discussions later on!
Using VR for Aviation Training
As you can imagine, training flight attendants for their job can be a really costly process. Traditionally, old aircrafts or replicas are used to train the flight attendants in this setting. The flight attendants do need to search the cabins for harmful objects. Among other things, each seat needs to be checked according to checklists for example.
The innovative and brilliant solution that Lufthansa Aviation Training came up with involves using VR Headsets for this training process. The virtual avatar Via, a small toy airplane, is leading the trainees throughout the training process. The “virtual” environment is of course the interior of an airplane and the trainees are guided step by step. The more confident they are, the less instructions are given until their training is completed. Using their solution and with the current VR setup, up to 9 parallel trainings can be performed. This used to be a cost- and time intensive task, one instructor explaining to many and then each trainee getting trained on a one-by-one basis. We think it is a brilliant example of how new technologies like Virtual Reality can be used to increase the efficiency, reduce cost and provide a really great and fun experience at the same time!
