Can Loft Dynamics’ VR Flight Simulator solve America’s pilot shortage?

It’s a transparent day in Zermatt, a distant Swiss city anchored in a pointy valley underneath the gaze of the Matterhorn. We’ve taken off from Air Zermatt, dwelling to among the greatest high-altitude rescue pilots on this planet. I’d flown in helicopters earlier than however by no means piloted one. And this location was hardly a newbie course.

“Are you able to take the reins?” the controller asks.

“Um, I feel . . .?” I stated nervously.

“In three, two, one . . .” And with that, the complete energy of the craft shifts to my command. The controls are exquisitely delicate, excess of I imagined. Each motion I make on the joystick, irrespective of how minute, leans the helicopter too far. First to the left. I attempt to compensate however pull too onerous to the precise and the car begins furiously rocking forwards and backwards. My coronary heart is racing.

All of a sudden, I discover the bottom developing at me. “Oh, f—okay!” I yell. Then every thing goes black.

After a beat, I ask, “Did I crash?”

“You had been about to.”

In actuality, I’ve by no means left the bottom—or Los Angeles. As a substitute, I’m strapped right into a mock cockpit, a digital actuality headset throughout my eyes, on a platform that replicates the six axes of motion mimicking the forces and sensation of an actual helicopter. The headset permits immersive 360-degree 3D views of customizable terrain and climate, and I can see my fingers and really feel the digital flight controls. This system is so lifelike that after I try a gentler digital flight across the surrounding space, I can really feel a slight updraft whereas maneuvering the helicopter over a small mesa. Like a scene out of The Matrix, I preserve telling myself this isn’t actual, although my coronary heart is racing. Afterward, I’m provided one of many moistened towelettes available for extra anxious responses.

My “flight” is courtesy of Loft Dynamics, the Zurich-based designer of the only real VR flight simulator licensed by a serious regulator for pilot coaching. In 2022, the European Union Aviation Security Company (EASA)—Europe’s model of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—accepted this expertise for helicopter pilot certification for the Robinson R22 and Airbus H125 fashions. The FAA could quickly observe. Final yr, it put in two Loft simulators in its New Jersey testing facility to guage the expertise for U.S. pilot certification and decide whether or not it’s correct sufficient to rely towards flight hours and proficiency checks.

Loft has been using this momentum to some 4 dozen present and deliberate simulators in North and South America, Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Australia, with curiosity from one other 200 purchasers. This month, it opened its North American headquarters in an ethereal workplace overlooking the Santa Monica Airport runway and is showing on the Helicopter Affiliation Worldwide Heli-Expo in close by Anaheim. In the meantime, the Los Angeles Police Division is within the strategy of buying one for its Air Assist Division.

“I’ve by no means seen something like this in all my years of flying,” says LAPD chief pilot Kevin Gallagher, who championed his division’s push for the simulator. “It has the potential to revolutionize pilot coaching, notably within the space of emergency procedures and surviving an inadvertent flight into instrument meteorological circumstances.”

Such responses are nonetheless considerably surreal for Loft founder and CEO Fabi Riesen, given its roots simply 11 years earlier as a mere ardour challenge sprawled throughout his lounge. “It’s like being a child and having a birthday, Easter, and Christmas all collectively directly,” he laughs.

Scaled all the way down to scale up

Riesen considers the tech—a fraction in measurement and value of conventional FAA-approved full-motion simulators utilized by airways—an reasonably priced approach to scale the following era of pilots and bolster flight expertise. It arrives amidst a worldwide pilot scarcity, trade calls to modernize U.S. aviation coaching to enhance airline security, and a potential improve within the variety of simulation hours allowed to rely towards flight certifications.

High-end simulators are $10 million to $20 million two-story machines with mock cockpits that transfer on hydraulic actuators and require a separate information heart and workers to function and keep. Their expense and demand restrict company and municipal utilization and make them largely unavailable to the common pilot and flight college. By comparability, the Loft simulator is a tenth the scale and prices $800,000 to $2 million, relying on service and software program packages. That mixture makes it engaging to extra budget-conscious flight colleges, personal fleets, police, and fireplace and rescue models wanting extra constant simulator coaching and efficiency information monitoring.

“Conventional simulators are the gold commonplace of pilot coaching as a result of you possibly can run all of the emergency procedures as near actuality as potential,” says Sky Dayton, a Loft board member and lead investor. “However they’re so costly and so big that they’re simply not scalable. Loft represents the power to decrease the fee in order that extra pilots have entry to those applied sciences to do coaching.”

It’s this situation that attracted the LAPD’s Gallagher. LAPD pilots bear an preliminary 44 weeks of specialised flight college and quarterly proficiency coaching however can solely afford a couple of days of annual coaching in conventional simulators as a result of $10,000-per-pilot prices and day trip of rotation. That’s not sufficient to grasp sure emergency procedures, together with the 15-20 % so harmful that pilots can solely follow in simulation. These embody engine fires or inadvertent flights into fog, a number one reason behind helicopter fatalities, and the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020.

“There are at all times dangers in flying, however add a police mission and the dangers amplify,” says Gallagher. Refined maneuvers from surveillance hovering to automotive chases happen as little as 500 ft and gradual as 60 mph over city environments. “Greater and sooner is less complicated to deal with; gradual and low is a mix that makes it way more difficult for a pilot to deal with an inflight emergency, as a result of response time is proscribed.”

In the event you construct it, they’ll come

Again in 2013, Riesen had already encountered this difficulty firsthand. {An electrical} engineer with a non-public pilot license, Riesen had grown annoyed by the dearth of reasonably priced high quality simulators to enhance his flying. “You both had the $20 million ones, which you might solely fly if you happen to had been employed by the airways, otherwise you had these small ones that actually weren’t doing the job,” he says. His first VR headset sparked the concept to adapt it to flight simulation and advance it from 2D monitor shows. And he determined to sort out a helicopter simulator first just because it was more durable. So, he hijacked the lounge for a construct website and enlisted his children. “I’ve essentially the most tolerant spouse on the entire Earth,” he says.

By 2016, he’d wrangled some engineering mates for assist. They started sharing prototypes with fellow pilots and concerned college students via college work-study packages. Regardless of incorporating, initially as VRM Switzerland, “there was no marketing strategy behind it; it was simply ardour.” A lot in order that when EASA known as two years later, Reisen laughed it off as a prank. “I imply, come on, how is a European authority from Germany calling a Swiss farm boy?” However when a really official request popped up in his inbox a half-hour later, “I used to be like, `Whoa!’ How fortunate I used to be that I requested for an e-mail and didn’t simply cling up!’”

For the following 4 years, Riesen’s workforce raised $10 million in seed cash and labored on making the simulator EASA-compliant. They weathered the pandemic by partially quarantining in a workspace with a climbing wall and workplace rock band. “It was like a hippy group—we had been residing there, cooking for one another,” Riesen says. “Because of that, we had been tremendous centered, as a result of we couldn’t do anything.”

They devised a cloud-based AI-driven system that allows pilots to expertise real-time hand and physique actions in VR with out sensor gloves or physique fits, and a digital cockpit that delivers haptic suggestions whereas working controls. A collection of sensors and cameras line the cockpit and funnel 70 photos per second into proprietary software program to each monitor and troubleshoot downside physique actions. For instance, the machine tossed Riesen round each time he tried an elevated platform touchdown. However the replay information confirmed his head shifting ahead barely on method, which pulled his shoulders off the seat again, compelled management into his elbows, and threw off the helicopter steadiness.

A fair more durable job got here with crafting methodologies that EASA wanted to independently confirm the simulator measurements in a VR atmosphere. “These take a look at instruments are way more difficult than constructing the simulator,” says Riesen.

Their work paid off in Could 2022, when EASA lastly granted Loft certification for use towards required flight hours. However it will take Dayton, an entrepreneur greatest recognized for founding Earthlink and Boingo, to scale their enterprise after he joined forces and helped increase one other $20 million. Initially, nonetheless, he’d approached Loft as a possible consumer. An early investor within the eVTOL startup Joby Aviation, Dayton was a cheap however secure approach to prepare its pilots.

“Working towards emergency procedures in an precise helicopter is extremely harmful,” he says. “One-third of each helicopter accident in Europe occurs in coaching. Meaning you went to do a factor to study to be secure, and you bought killed.”

By sheer coincidence, Dayton got here throughout Loft on YouTube simply two days after its EASA certification and flew to Switzerland. A jet-rated pilot with some helicopter expertise, he was hooked after his first simulated journey.

“My thoughts was fully blown,” he says. “The visible was higher than the standard simulator as a result of whenever you flip, you finally see the sting of the display.” Additionally, the Loft headset’s stereoscopic imaginative and prescient provided higher depth of subject than commonplace 2D projections, which distort as you method the bottom. “This seems to be actually essential whenever you’re coaching in helicopters as a result of essentially the most troublesome maneuvers are those near the bottom the place you’re hovering.”

Fixing the pilot disaster

For now, Loft is advertising and marketing its product as a supplemental coaching software. But when the FAA approves its expertise and Congress will increase the variety of simulation hours that may qualify as flight hours, the corporate can be ready to considerably streamline the trail to pilot certification by decreasing coaching prices whereas bettering high quality. To that finish, it’s at present growing an airplane simulator and has plans for multi-passenger and eVTOL variations.

The aviation trade is already going through a dearth of pilots, with almost half slated to retire within the subsequent 15 years, and with a 9 %, or 14,000-pilot shortfall anticipated by 2030, excluding the rise of eVTOLs including to that want. In the meantime, a rise in near-miss collisions has many trade leaders pushing to advance coaching expertise as Congress debates the particulars of a proposed five-year FAA funding invoice.

High quality over amount coaching

Jetliner certification requires a minimal of 1,500 flight hours, which might take three to 4 years and exceed $100,000. Pilots typically accrue them through flight instruction, gliders, crop dusters, sightseeing excursions, and even hot-air balloons. However most of those flights happen in clear skies with out an teacher.

“The actual query is how do you employ these hours to most successfully prepare pilots? In the event you’re flying banners on the seaside, are you actually studying something?” says Michael Huerta, a former FAA administrator who now serves as an aerospace guide, and Delta Airways and Joby Aviation board member. 

Huerta is amongst a number of trade veterans urging more extensive use of FAA-approved simulators in pilot certification and regards Loft’s potential ubiquity as “a recreation changer” in higher aviation security. “You need to elevate coaching in order that pilots perceive the way to deal with danger and get better from catastrophic conditions you can’t replicate in real-life coaching,” he says.

Airways already closely depend on such simulators to coach jetliner pilots on their assigned fashions after they’re employed. However value and demand would possibly enable as little as 20 simulation hours earlier than copiloting an precise jet.

“On the airline degree, pilots get rated for every jetliner they fly in simulation. They by no means see the [real] airplane till they exit on the primary flight, and it’s fully FAA-acceptable,” says Randy Babbitt, a former industrial airline pilot, FAA administrator, and Air Line Pilots Affiliation president who now runs his personal consultancy. “After I was a brand-new DC-9 captain, the primary time I noticed a stretch DC-9, it had 149 individuals in it. I’d by no means flown the airplane; solely the simulator. However they’re an identical. So, we’re simply not taking as a lot benefit of that as I feel we might and will.

Like Huerta, Babbitt is one other proponent for extra simulation coaching counting towards flight hours. “Proper now, it’s transferring too slowly,” he says. “If we examine ourselves to Europe, we’re considerably behind in appreciating the expertise that we now have in simulation and never giving pilots extra credit score for it.”

In the meantime, as Riesen patiently waits for the FAA testing and political discourse to run their respective programs, he’s busy planning the corporate’s subsequent steps and, frankly, having an excessive amount of enjoyable. “We now have a transparent massive image–extra and safer pilots and getting the world prepared for the eVTOLS,” he says. “To construct one thing cool with a incredible workforce sharing the identical ardour to deal with an issue—you speak concerning the American Dream; that is the Engineering Dream.”