David Jones & Vasin Settachan
The Design and Development of Team-Based Virtual Airline Maintenance Training
As American Airlines revitalizes their maintenance training program, a need was defined to support an expansion of training that would provide a wide array of training scenarios to distributed learners across multiple training sites. Based on a needs analysis, a series of training requirements were developed based on current gaps in the training program. These requirements were used to guide the development of a multi-student virtual maintenance training system.
This presentation outlines the iterative design and development process of American Airlines’ virtual training program from the initial needs through deployment. Two key focuses of the presentation are the early usability and user feedback reviews conducted with the software and how the changes in training needs due to travel and training restrictions over the past 2 years have driven the system design. The design review will follow the iterations from a lab-based training system to a classroom-based and deployable training suite that can combine students in immersive VR with those training on low-cost laptop systems.
This review will end in the presentation of lessons learned to follow when developing when developing a virtual training program to support a wide range of learners across multiple sites. Finally, the presentation will end with the expected future needs of the training program and the planned deployment process within American Airlines. This presentation is applicable to training system designers, curriculum developers for maintenance training programs and team members in charge of reviewing new training technology for airlines.
