Co-writer on this blog is our President and co-founder, Mr. Remi Quimper who brings his prior CAE leadership experience on such products CAE Simfinity which was awarded several prestigious international prizes such as the Frost & Sullivan Technology."

The next time you take your seat on a plane, buckle up and prepare for take-off, consider the real possibility that your pilot may have never flown that type of plane in the air before. Why is everyone so confident the pilot can do the job? Because for several decades the aviation industry has been developing and perfecting simulator-based training methods that are more cost-effective and efficient than traditional "learn-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" methods.

As some of you may know, there's a specific protocol to follow for each flight situation presented in pilot training simulators. Should X happen, then a pilot must do A, B, and C tasks. Should Y or Z occur, the procedure changes. The success of simulator-based pilot training is evident when watching how the US Airway's pilot performed when faced with a dual engine failure shortly after takeoff. Once the pilot calmly went through all the options it was evident the option he had was to land in the Hudson River. Wouldn't we all want the truck drivers alongside us on the highway to be as calm and consistent as this pilot was?

Can these lessons be applied to the trucking industry? I know they can. My confidence is based on more than twenty years experience working as an engineer at CAE, the world's largest manufacturer of flight simulators. Today, CAE SimfinityTM is an integrated training solution being used in aviation training centres around the world, including Airbus and Boeing. As the Director of development for the CAE SimfinityTM product, I learned to leverage superior technology to develop superior training tools and methods.

Based on my experience at CAE, I started looking at what was available in vehicle simulation. Did existing technology properly simulate the look, sound and feel of today's truck? I felt that the fidelity requirements for visuals, motion and driver controls were far higher for truck simulators than flight simulators. I also wanted to investigate if any of them integrated a systematic adult-learning outcome system. I submit that the technology that meets all these criteria will support the broadest needs of professional driver training.

There are clear differences in training requirements between trucks and planes. For starters, there are differences between emergency situations due to systems failures in airplanes and those that occur, seemingly at random, on the road. But there are also some clear similarities that favor the use of simulation for driver training. During emergencies in the air and on the road, correct and timely responses are critical to preventing harmful consequences - practicing these responses on a simulator can save vital seconds and prevent a crash. As most emergency situations are rare, it may be years before a driver encounters one, making it difficult to develop and maintain the necessary skills to properly deal with them. Carefully planned simulator training scenarios have the potential to compress years of experience into hours of training, thus accelerating the experiential learning process and reducing the incidence of violated expectancies.

Besides teaching drivers how to handle the myriad of potential emergency situations, simulator-based driver training can also help drivers grasp the most basic skills, such as shifting and backing up, but the real value of such simulators, of course, is how driver performance affects the bottom-line.