Commercial Aviation Safety & Training
By Rick Adams, FRAeS
WATS 2024 was a truly transformative week, dramatically shifting the focus of the civil aviation training community from the traditional emphasis on flight simulator hardware – visual and motion systems, mostly – to the science of learning.
Editorial Comment By Rick Adams, FRAeS
When the hype about AI-generated text began to amp up recently, I was naturally curious. After all, predictions are that AI is going to replace humans in numerous jobs, including journalists.
I had to experiment to find out for myself. So I asked ChatGPT, the most-hyped platform, some questions related to flight training and virtual reality. The response was okay, if you’re looking for a high-level generic essay that reads like it was composed by a middle school student plagiarising Wikipedia. Where the chatbot completely failed was in identifying the first regulatory-approved VR-based simulator, a story I broke about two years ago (Born in Switzerland: Regulator-Qualified VR Flight Training | 2021-04-26 | Halldale Group).
A colleague had a similar experience, comparing ChatGPT’s response with what we had written about the recent FAA Aviation Safety Summit, which was both widely reported on by aviation writers and posted on YouTube. My colleague received an ‘apology’ from the chatbot, saying it couldn’t comment on ‘future events.’