Boeing anticipates that, only in the Asian region, the aviation industry will require almost half million of pilots and qualified technicians to meet the demand for air travel in the next 20 years.

Due to the high cost of buying and maintaining an airplane, the investment in a real aircraft for only training purposes is out of the question, therefore the training centres should rely on simulations to provide the education that future pilots and technicians demand.

Flight simulators have been in the market as early as the Second World War, although such simulations were meant to provide pilots a first contact with a real cockpit, train students in common procedures and providing the means to be familiar with the positions of the controls of the aircraft.

Those devices were evolving with the introduction of computers, which made possible to develop partial simulation software and provide limited feedback when a pilot pushed a button, turn a knob or operated the controls of the airplane.

With the 21st century, new innovations as the development of real-time parallel computers, and advance in motion platforms, provide flight simulators manufacturers, the possibility of implementing software to fully simulate all components of an airplane, provide realistic graphics and last to provide movement feedback.

This development was acknowledged by governmental institutions such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which classify the simulators in several categories. The category with more realism is called FFS Level D, and such classification was adopted as well by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Flight simulators with the level D, should provide motion simulation to at least 6 degrees of freedom, a realistic aerodynamic model, graphical outside world simulation of at least 150 degrees and realistic sounds in the cockpit.

As we can see for everything described above, we are in a case of product innovation, which is defined by Horrocks & Walker (2016) as “a good or service that is new or significantly improved”. This product innovation was pushed by the need of training centres to provide an adequate education to future pilots and technicians.

Therefore, the new flight simulators are goods with an innovation similar to the step from a classical mobile phone to a smart phone, in which the capabilities of the “good” were improved up to a point in which only the name remained.

References

Horrocks, I., & Walker, S. (2016). Block 1 Technology, Innovation and Management (WEB033868). The Open University.