At the Vertical Aviation International Heli-Expo show in February, helicopter flight simulators that use virtual reality (VR) glasses to replace bulky and expensive visual displays seemed to be all over the place. The two newest devices, Leonardo’s VxR (AW119) and TRU Simulation's Bell 505, were in use every day of the show, as was Loft Dynamics’ H125 VR simulator and a setup in the Rotor Safety Zone with two Precision Flight Controls VR simulators running on Ryan Aerospace motion bases.
I’d flown the Loft H125 at last year’s show, and this year with a fresh commercial rotorcraft add-on rating in hand, I tried out both the VxR and the 505. Each uses Varjo XR-3 mixed-reality glasses, which include hand-tracking that allows the user to interact with controls, avionics, and systems knobs, buttons, and switches in the cockpit and provides a high-resolution view of the outside world. The glasses replace large fixed visual systems, which take up a lot of space and are expensive to build. Both Leonardo and TRU, as well as other VR simulator manufacturers, promote the ability to easily move the simulator from place to place, and all they need is a relatively small space compared with full-flight simulators and even some fixed-base flight training devices.
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