Raven
Sim OS
A flight simulator that trains a whole class at once, an industry first
Flight simulators have always been single-student. For an aircraft manufacturer's training software, I led the UX for an instructor console that lets one instructor run multiple students through the same live scenario, a first for the field.
The client builds aircraft. When a customer buys a plane, they typically buy a flight simulator with it. Training in a sim is far cheaper than burning fuel in the air. But that sim needs an instructor console: the interface an instructor uses to monitor a session and control the simulation in real time.
They'd been running a generic third-party solution and wanted something of their own: modern, and reflecting the manufacturer's own identity. A returning client, reactivated for this project. We delivered the UX concept; they built it in QT.
The interesting challenge was domain, not pixels. This was a classified environment with a small IT team, and the people whose work I had to understand weren't the pilots; they were the instructors who train and assess them.
The console's whole purpose is controlled, repeatable testing. An instructor introduces conditions live (wind picks up, fuel burn rises, an engine fails) and watches how the student responds. Only if you can steer the scenario cleanly can you assess performance fairly. That framing drove every design decision.
During a running simulation, an instructor has no time to dig through menus. The interaction design had to put the critical levers one tap away.
As on my other engagements, I drove the early stage hands-on (concept, structure, the hard interaction decisions), then delegated operational delivery to a designer on my team while holding quality and direction.
Flight simulators are single-student by default. This product broke that: multiple students in the same scenario at once, new for the field. The brief came from the client; the design challenge was ours to solve.
