Keeping It Real

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. This article is part of Update or Die, a series from Future Tense about how businesses and other organizations keep up with technological change--and the cost of falling behind. Few passengers realize that in the airline industry, we exclusively train our pilots using simulators. When a new-hire pilot flies the real airplane for the first time, it's with paying customers in the back. To create one of our simulators, we hacksaw off the pointy end of a real airplane, put it on a 6-degree-of-freedom hexapod motion platform, and outfit it with video displays so pilots have something to look at out the front window.