One of the greatest fears for new pilots, John King observed at a press conference earlier this week, isn't crashing or getting lost or bouncing a landing. It's talking on the radio.

The fear has is understandable. You, after all, are an absolute beginner trying to communicate something — it's actually pretty hard in the heat of training to remember what exactly it is that you're supposed to say — and communicate it in a way that won't make you sound stupid. And let's face it: surrounded by all these experts and all this extraordinary specialized knowledge, you already feel pretty stupid. Who wouldn't feel afraid to open their mouth?

The solution? Well, training, obviously, though given all the other competing concerns, communications is one subject that takes a seat in the far back of the sylla-bus.

Help has arrived! Redbird Flight Simulations, a company about which I've spoken before, has launched a product that very effectively simulates the verbal interaction between a controller and a pilot. The product, called Parrot, will be an optional addition to nearly all of Redbird's flight simulators. (Check out my story about these remarkable sims.) King Schools' John and Martha King announced Parrot at AirVenture on Wednesday.

So anyways, an ATC simulator: If it sounds easy to pull off, then you simply haven't thought about it hard enough.

A real ATC simulator, and not some canned response rote trainer, has to be able to do several different complicated things and then combine those things into a cohesive whole.

It has to, first, be able to recognize what the student is saying. To accomplish this, Redbird relies on a commercial off the shelf voice recognition program that is, I've discovered, actually very good. The student does, of course, have to train the program to recognize his individual vocal patterns, a job that takes just a short while. After it can recognize what words the student is saying, it has to determine just what to do with those words. After all, the program must be able to reply appropriately to a student who answers an ATC request to "Say altitude," with a response of "Affirmative." It also must know where the airplane is in four dimensions, what the weather is, what the frequencies are and what ATC has previously cleared or instructed the pilot to do.

Parrot does all of these things with aplomb.

In a demonstration of the technology at the press conference, Redbird demonstrated just how Parrot works. The student received a clearance, read back the clearance incorrectly, asked for help, got it right the next time, got a takeoff clearance, switched to departure control and all along the way Parrot guided the student through the maze that is ATC communications, allowing the student to screw up and fix it without ever once replying with the slightest hint of annoyance. That's something you won't get with actual ATC.

There are limitations. Parrot's voice is mechanical sounding, the program does insist on correct ATC phraseology (a feature that some would call a strength), and the list of ATC interactions, unlike in real life, are finite.

All these things considered, Parrot is an astounding success. Students can practice their radio work without fear of embarrassment and without the expense of having to be in an actual airplane. And they can do it while they're aviating, a critical component to the success of the product because the flying reinforces the communications — it's all part of one big skill set, something non sim-based comm training programs can't do.

Redbird sells Parrot as an option to its flight sims, but for my money, that's a semantic distinction. What training facility would deny its students — and its instructors — a tool that can help student pilots master one of the toughest skills in aviation and do it for pennies on the training dollar.

For more information on Parrot, visit KingSchools.com or redbirdflightsimulations.com.