The Design and Impact of Virtual Reality Training on Cabin Crew Emergency Procedure Performance

Abstract

Verbatim from Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons. Not paraphrased, not summarized.

Aircraft cabin crews are an integral part of flight operations, ensuring the safety of passengers and serving as the first response to emergencies. In order to be qualified to perform these critical duties, the crew is required to learn critical details about the door and emergency exit operations of the fleet of aircraft that they support and the operation of each piece of equipment onboard. When crew members are required to learn this information on a variety of aircraft, there are limited touch opportunities on physical doors to instill the procedural knowledge and muscle memory required to make these reactions second nature. This reduced training capability leads to students making errors both in final evaluations and during flight operations, which are very costly to an airline. This paper discusses the training needs, stakeholders, and design of the Cabin Crew Virtual Readiness Trainer, a VR training suite designed to target errors in the most critical cabin crew operations. A case study evaluation of over 800 cabin crew students conducted at a major US airline is discussed. The study was conducted during the new hire integration of a virtual reality training platform designed to train cabin crew members on how to operate all doors and emergency exits on four aircraft and the location of all emergency equipment onboard. The results of this evaluation demonstrate the capability of VR training to reduce live evaluation errors from 25% to 2% after only 20 minutes of VR training. The lessons learned from this study and critical design decisions to optimize training are presented.

Author

• Jones, David L. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Keywords

• virtual reality
• training
• cabin crew
• maintenance
• Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
• Educational Technology
• Performance Management
• Training and Development