Victoria home to a new world-class fire aviation flight simulator

CFA Aviation Commander John Katakouzinos AFSM: So what we have here is a fire aviation flight simulator that has virtual reality and mixed reality goggles meshed in one. It means the goggles have see-through technology so it allows the virtual world and the real world to come together.

It means that if you look at your hand or you look at a map book or you look at the pilot next to you, which is very important to us, for crew resource management, you can 
do that through the one set of goggles. So the in the fire aviation world, this is the first in the world that we've been using that technology. 

CFA and FRV Air Attack Supervisor Kelly Krajnc: Previously, as an Air Observer, to be able to move up to the next qualification, I needed to fly over x amount of fires to show that I could do the skill. But now with this type of simulator we can simulate those fires and I can challenge myself a lot more outside of the expense of actually hiring a real aircraft.

John Katakouzinos AFSM: What the simulator does is it allows us to get a better quality and a better outcome at the end. By training in the simulator, when they arrive on the Air Attack course, during their assessment they're actually getting better results a lot sooner than traditionally using crewed aircraft. 

Kelly Krajnc: At any time we can pause the simulation and we can discuss what's going on and then we can reset it. This program also allows us to record our whole in-training simulation and then do some self-evaluation after the session's complete.

John Katakouzinos AFSM: Very, very excited and relieved that we've got it to this point but the next step for us is repel dispatchers, winching operations, night operations etc.

Kelly Krajnc:This is an amazing tool that is just going to bring us forward into the future and be able to bring on more people and train more people than what we could previously do.

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