Lanyards, Revolutions, Internationals and Ugly Stepchildren: Four Takeaways from WATS 2025

I’ve lost track of how many WATS conferences I’ve attended over the past 27 years... most of them certainly. 

But what I look forward to is the new players – the first-time speakers, the first-time exhibitors. It’s all fresh to them, and they bring a different energy than the veteran attendees.

One such newcomer this year to the podium in the Pilot Training Conference which I led was Dino Garner, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author who has recently published with Liz Fetter the first book in a 1,100-page trilogy called ‘Aeromasters: Celebrating a Century of the American Fighter Pilot.’

Garner’s theme, a bit unusual for the World Aviation Training Summit, was ‘Storytelling in Aviation Training,’ and many who were there may agree it was the most captivating 20 minutes of the week. He essentially drove home one key point: before a pilot in distress reaches for the checklist, they will recall and react based on the stories they heard from their instructors.

“When everything is silent at 3,000 feet. When the lights go out. When the rain is cold and hard. It won’t be a checklist or manual your students remember. It’ll be you. The story you told. The mistake you survived. It’ll be the strong emotions you injected into your stories that cemented in their mind your stories, your mistakes and errors, your successes,” he emphasized.

Garner explained that “the human brain is designed to be a transponder of story. It receives, stores and replays stories across multiple cognitive systems. When we hear a story, neurons in different brain regions are activated.”

“What do we remember? Stories from our instructors… stories guide meaning and give calm to an otherwise tense or dangerous situation.” The best training uses both story recall and checklist – “because when the moment comes, pilots need structured action and deeply embedded memory to make the right call.”

Pacing around the stage, Garner described an incident in which a photographer was flying in the backseat of an F16 when the pilot put the aircraft in a near-vertical dive, then a violent 9G turn. “The photo dude in back is suddenly bent over and sucked downward.” He had a lanyard wrapped around his neck, taking a measurement with his Minolta light meter. In s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n, he sees the light meter inching down over the yellow ejection seat handle between his legs… and the lanyard wraps securely around the bottom of the handle.

As the driver unloads the Gs the photog hears a loud metallic CLICK!

“He recalls the technician in Life Support telling him a long, drawn-out story about the three detents of the ejection seat handle. First is the SAFE position with the handle secured at the bottom. The second is the “Oh, Shit!” detent, a warning that something really bad is about to happen. And the third detent means you’re going out the door, kicked outta the house, and taking a perfectly good canopy and million-dollar chair with you.”

After the F16 trauma, Garner (the photographer in the true story) was asked, “So what are you gonna do now?”

“Get on with life.”

NEXT REVOLUTION?

One of the most anticipated presentations of the week was by Fabi Reisen, CEO of Loft Dynamics in Switzerland. Loft (formerly VRM Switzerland) revolutionized helicopter pilot training four years ago when they secured EASA regulatory approval for a Virtual Reality-based flight training device using a Varjo (Finland) headset. They subsequently also received FAA approval, the only device to earn both designations to date.

On the eve of WATS, Loft announced with Alaska Airlines a collaboration to develop the first commercial airline VR flight simulator – Alaska Airlines Invests in VR Pilot Training | Halldale Group – touted as “the first hyper-realistic, full-motion Boeing 737 VR simulator, using extended reality (XR) technology and techniques, with the goal of enhancing Alaska's pilot training program and informing future training solutions across the industry.”

Loft has not only created an innovative device, the group of young engineers has developed an entire ecosystem: a worldwide networked fleet of rotary-wing simulators, a data-driven pilot cloud, and a home training suite.

Loft’s newest employee, Itash Samani, EVP Public Affairs (former CAE regulatory leader), walked the audience through a brief history of flight simulation. “In the ‘70s, full-flight simulators revolutionized training: high-fidelity, zero-flight-time devices that made it possible to train pilots entirely off-aircraft.”

“It was a leap – but like early AI, it was built on fixed scenarios, logic trees, and assumptions.”

Then came Competency-Based Training and Assessment – CBTA, AQP, MPL… “But it’s hard to implement CBTA properly. It needs skilled instructors, real-time feedback, personalized progression. Legacy tools weren’t built for that.”

Samani called today ‘The Convergence Moment’ – XR + AI = Training Transformation. “Tools and vision are finally aligned. XR gives us fully immersive, mobile, scalable environments. Training can now happen anywhere, not just in a simulator bay. AI brings real-time adaptation – systems that respond to how a trainee is performing and adjust content accordingly.

“CBTA was always the vision. Now we finally have the means to deliver it. For the first time, we can enable individualized learning at scale – continuous development instead of episodic check-ins. This doesn’t replace FFSs – it augments them. It’s about filling the training gaps that have always existed between formal events.”

“It’s about creating resilient pilots, not just compliant ones,” Samani stated. “The future of aircrew training isn’t something to wait for – it’s something to lead.”

SAFETY AT STAKE

Keynoter Captain Philip Adrian declared, “We are not as good as we think we are. Even though everybody pats himself on the back about what we have achieved, little to nothing has changed.”

Adrian is the former chief of regulatory for Boeing, has been instrumental in many industry task forces, and is CEO of Netherlands-based simulator manufacturer MPS.

He outlined some of the airline industry challenges: “Different areas of the world are recovering differently, and we need to be aware that we're still a fragile industry. Today, it seems we are under more pressure than any time before. Supply chain OEM inabilities to deliver. Engine issues that impact operations and deliveries. Unfortunately, this year already, multiple accidents. We have safety lapses. We have global geopolitics, airport restrictions, slot restrictions, noise restrictions, green restrictions, whatever restrictions. This list seems to be endless.”

“For unknowing CEOs and CFOs,” Adrian alleged, “training is one of the first things they look at to save cost. And let me be clear, safety is training, and training is safety. These two cannot go separately.”

“As an industry, we do not seem to have learned from the past. We do not have a sustainable business model in which training is seen as an investment in not only safety but also in our workforce.”

“In my opinion,” Adrian stated, “if we continue this way that we have been going for the past couple of years, or even maybe decades, safety is at stake. And as training experts, we cannot let that happen. We must come up with solutions which at the same time don't break the bank and improve safety levels as well. That is not an impossible task. However, we in the industry are our own worst enemy. We have a reluctance to challenge the regulators we despise so much. On one side we say, aha! They tell us what to do and we don't like it. On the other side we say, please, please, please let me do what you tell me to do.”

“We need to stand on our own two feet as an industry.”

“First, we need to be represented at the decision-maker level. Unfortunately, the training industry is hardly represented at the regulatory level. There is no global representation. The OEMs are represented through their organizations. Airlines are represented through IATA. You have pilot and cabin crew unions. The representation of training is not there. We are the ugly stepchild.”

“There is a lot of benefit for an independent organization that deals with global regulatory agencies, from ICAO to the FAA, and who have to identify and put on the map the training issues.”

“We need to make sure that the regulatory changes are future proof, are not prescriptive, and that they allow the performance-based outcomes of the training to be measured and to be justified. We need outcome-based regulation driven by data.”

“Impactful and important decisions will need to be met with safety as a driving factor. So as training experts, do the right thing and put safety ahead of everything else, and devise a future where training is seen as an existential need rather than the cost of doing business.”