Most pilots know that FlightSafety International is a huge and successful training organization, but not all of them are aware that it is also a world-class simulator manufacturer. On Tuesday, the company cut the ribbon on its new manufacturing facility in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The state-of-the-art 375,000-square-foot plant has 19 assembly positions for manufacturing everything from multimillion-dollar level-D flight simulators to stationary flight training devices to be used at training centers throughout the world. ** **
FlightSafety broke ground on the plant last July after winning $6.6 million in incentives from the city, including infrastructure improvements. The city is leasing the site to FlightSafety for $1 a year for 99 years. Once running at full speed, the facility will employ as many as a thousand workers–currently there are around 650 workers there, 250 of them engineers involved in the design and production of the simulators. Over the years FlightSafety has built more than 625 simulators for use in FlightSafety training centers and by governments and airlines around the world.
To read about the latest advances in flight simulator technology, check out Stephen Pope’s July story, Simulating Reality.
