The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of parts of the entire world. You all might have experienced changes in your daily lives as well. For me, the biggest one was the online lectures offered by my bachelor’s university. All the courses I took were online for two years, which is half of my 4-year bachelor’s program. However, the more people participate in remote learning, the more limitations with contemporary forms of education have been found. For example, suppose there was a connection issue during an online lecture. In that case, I couldn’t hear what a professor said for several seconds or minutes, and sometimes the lecture had to be paused to resolve the issue. And since the professor couldn’t see all the students with one monitor, some students struggled to express that they had questions during the lecture. Due to many difficulties, solutions based on VR have been developed and disseminated. VR devices show users comparable or identical environments to the real world, sometimes without the Internet connection. Since education or training sessions using VR are modules by programmed software, people can practice a specific task repeatedly and learn new ones by simply updating the software. Moreover, various visual, auditory, and even tactile stimuli can potentially increase the effectiveness and attractiveness of a user’s cognitive process (Paszkiewicz et al., 2021).
In this post, I will introduce three VR products for employee training in the aviation industry. First, VRflow is a pilot training VR program used by Royal Danish Air Force. Pilots need training whenever a company owns a new aircraft model. Usually, the activity takes place in a big simulator, which is extremely expensive (around $10 million). However, with VRflow, pilots can join training sessions without leaving the ground. They can train collaboratively with up to three people using multi-crew functionality, and they can practice for both everyday situations and emergencies. Furthermore, by using the “Exam” mode, they can check how well and fast they can perform. VRflow provides programs for many different types of aircraft, including A320 and B737 NG (VRpilot, 2022).
Next, RAMPVR is for the ground crew. Using it, they can practice many modules (e.g., aircraft marshaling, aircraft pushback operations, and passenger boarding bridge operations) without interrupting active processes on the ramp. Furthermore, they can choose whether it is day or night and the weather conditions. Fraport (Frankfurt Airport) is one of the companies that have implemented RAMPVR for their ground crew (IATA, 2022).
Finally, AVIETRA offers a VR training product for cabin crew. It includes a variety of training modules, from aircraft/cabin/galley familiarization to medical emergencies (AVIETRA, 2022). What is especially good about training cabin crew using VR is that they can also prepare for difficult real-life situations, such as hijackings and imminent crashes (Vaughn College, 2022).
In my opinion, applying VR to employee training in the aviation industry is a brilliant move because it is much safer than training in an actual situation. And it is also more cost-effective since companies do not need to build costly simulators and regularly pay for trainers. Instead, all they need to do is to purchase VR devices once.
Do you know any other industries that have VR employee training?
What about education? What do you think about learning with VR?
Please feel free to share your thoughts!
References
AVIETRA (2022) AVIETRA – Virtual Reality and Mobile Training Systems. Available at: https://www.avietra.com/cabincrew.html (Accessed: 24 September 2022).
IATA (2022) RAMPVR Virtual Reality Training Tool. Available at: https://www.iata.org/en/training/pages/rampvr/ (Accessed: 24 September 2022).
Paszkiewicz, A. et al. (2021) ‘Methodology of Implementing Virtual Reality in Education for Industry 4.0’, Sustainability, 13(9), p. 5049. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13095049.
Vaughn College (2022) ‘VR Flight Simulator Training Shaping the Future’, Vaughn College, 15 March. Available at: https://www.vaughn.edu/blog/virtual-and-augmented-reality-shape-the-future-of-the-aviation-industry/ (Accessed: 24 September 2022).
VRpilot (2022) VRflow: The most flexible and efficient procedure trainer. In one compact device., VRpilot. Available at: https://vrpilot.aero/vrflow/ (Accessed: 24 September 2022).
