Editor’s Note: John Persinos interviewed Rick Adams, a leading aerospace expert specializing in the areas of training, simulation, artificial intelligence, and safety. A Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Adams authored The Robot in the Simulator (2024), widely regarded as the first book focused on AI best practices in aviation training. He also served as Lead Editor on the President’s AAM Safety Brief, placing him at the center of the industry’s evolving conversation around advanced air mobility and operational safety. Adams has held senior communications and editorial roles with major aerospace and technology organizations including CAE, Raytheon, and Singer-Link Flight Simulation. For several years, he was chair of the Pilot Training conference at the World Aviation Training Summit. The following is a transcript of his discussion with John Persinos, edited for concision. Questions are in bold. AI has become one of aviation’s biggest buzzwords. Where do you see the technology delivering measurable value today in pilot training and simulator operations, versus where the industry may be overhyping its near-term capabilities? Artificial Intelligence, unfortunately, is a marketing term which has indeed been overhyped and created outsized expectations of magic. Instead, we are confronted weekly with stories of “hallucinations,” which is a deflection euphemism for errors. We’re seeing the frenzied building of water-sucking data centers and the emerging fear that AI agents will go rogue and defy their creators. Instead of bragging about “AI Inside,” I now advise clients to limit references to artificial intelligence, which is neither artificial nor intelligent. AI is more aptly supercomputing on steroids. It can provide the capability to crunch amazing amounts of data in a very short time. But the data must be relevant to the solution being sought. In the aviation pilot training realm, that translates into information about the eight or nine defined “competencies” of Competency-Based…
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The Transponder of Story
Republished by permission from The Crucibel – The Transponder of Story – CRUCIBEL by Annabelle Peeretti A man walked onto a stage in Orlando and told a room full of pilots something they already knew. They had just forgotten where they kept it. Then he told them the other half—the half that keeps seventy veterans a day from getting on with life. Rick Adams has been covering the World Aviation Training Summit for twenty-seven years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He has seen every keynote, every panel, every vendor pitch, every lanyard-wearing delegate shuffling between sessions with a cold coffee and a conference bag. When a man like that writes that a twenty-minute presentation was “the most captivating of the week,” the sentence carries weight that no press release can manufacture. The presenter at WATS 2025 was Dino Garner. The topic was storytelling in aviation training. The thesis was simple and devastating: before a pilot in distress reaches for the checklist, the pilot reaches for a story. Not a procedure. Not a memory item. A story. Told by an instructor, months or years earlier, in a briefing room or a crew lounge or standing next to a jet on a cold ramp. A story about a mistake that almost killed someone. A story about the three detents of an ejection seat handle. The Lanyard Here is the story Garner told at WATS 2025. A photographer is in the backseat of an F-16. The pilot pushes the aircraft into a near-vertical dive, then pulls a violent nine-G turn. The photographer—bent over, crushed downward by the physics of the maneuver—has a lanyard around his neck. The lanyard is attached to a Minolta light meter. In slow motion, he watches the light meter slide down over the yellow ejection…