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New flight simulators teach air safety on the ground

by Jason Lamb
Friday, October 30, 2009

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- State and national officials unveiled a new partnership to improve air safety Friday at the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum. Behind the partnership: development of high-tech flight simulators with lifelike detail to train pilots.

Given Alaska's high rate of aviation accidents over the years, officials said Friday this new partnership between federal and state agencies, the Medallion Foundation and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is just what pilots in Alaska need.

Software programmer Sean Ruddy knows about flying.

"These are our highways," said Ruddy. "This is how you get around Alaska. There are so many parts of Alaska you can't get to without an airplane."

He also knows flying in Alaska poses challenges you won't find anywhere else -- challenges that can prove deadly.

"There's many wrong turns you can make in Alaska that you can end up dead," Ruddy said. "You go in the wrong box canyon and you won't be able to turn around in it, and there's aluminum up there to prove it."

That's why he's part of a development team that helped design this program, specifically the real-life Alaska terrain and scenery that most other flight simulators lack.

"You can fly through Rainy Pass, say, if you haven't done it in a while or you've never done it," Ruddy said.

The officials who announced the program want to put more of these detailed high-tech simulators in training programs across the state.

"The difficulty in flying Alaska is demonstrated in the high number of accidents we've had in the past," Ward said.

Not all parts of Alaska are now in the simulators; for instance, the Juneau area was only recently added. But officials hope to use funds from the new task force to further upgrade the simulators, adding more regions and features to let new pilots experience flight challenges common in Alaska.

"We've developed systems for placing clouds in certain areas," Ruddy said. "We've had experienced pilots looking at it and going, ‘Oh yeah, that's the rock I use to see if I can get through over to Whittier.'"

More importantly, officials say, the new features and simulators funded by the partnership will hopefully give pilots more confidence to face the real thing -- to avoid the real consequences of when things go wrong thousands of feet in the air.

Contact Jason Lamb at jlamb@ktuu.com