Virtually holding its Own

Georgina Hunter-Jones

High Wycombe's Heliservices demonstrates how the new software based simulator has now been authority approved and used for training.

This is the future of training," said Leon Smith, of Heliservices, flying delicately around the hold at Southampton, coping with a breezy wind and rain on the 'cockpit' window, "the simulator is just about to come into its own."

Heliservices have just bought a helicopter simulator from Piet de Backer's Aero Simulators in Belgium at the cost of 120,000 Euros. At the time we visited their facility at Wycombe Air Park they were just a few weeks away from CAA approval (another £20,000) the first simulator of this type in Britain to get it. This approval will allow PPL students to do 5 hours in the simulator (all they need for the instrument part of their PPL) and 40 hours towards the Instrument Rating or Instrument Examiner rating, something that will make instrument flying a whole lot cheaper and easier to achieve. There are also a variety of further training that can be done in the simulator which will not necessarily go towards an 'hours' requirement.

The Heliservices simulator is set up in JetRanger mode, but there are a variety of machines as which it can be configured, including an EC135, an Agusta 109 and many others. They chose the...