Capt. Randall Brooks
Empowering Virtual Reality Through Upset Prevention and Recovery Training
Virtual Reality (VR) offers the promise of providing knowledge and practicing skills in a medium that can replace certain live flying tasks. This presents the possibility of accelerating learning and reducing overall flight hours required while lowering capital costs of existing simulators. While gains in efficiency and cost reduction are attractive, what are the associated costs in experiential learning, and how can they be mitigated? What instructional tools do we possess that can help mitigate human factors elements which are not present in the virtual cockpit?
ICAO, IATA, FAA, EASA, and others have, for years, recommended the inclusion of Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT) not only to provide knowledge and skills to assist in prevention of Loss of Control In-flight (LOC-I), but to provide human factors elements of training that cannot be fully replicated through flight simulation. As we attempt to offload flight time to the virtual environment, the importance of training for critical missing elements, which can only be seen in flight, increases.
Maximizing pilot learning requires using strengths of various instructional platforms to compensate for deficiencies of individual training mediums. UPRT provides the most efficient means available to complement missing psychological and human factors elements of VR and provide the intensity of training required to develop resiliency.
Current use of VR for training in the upset domain will be discussed, highlighting lessons learned from the integration of VR and UPRT.
