At EAA AirVenture 2021 this week, Redbird Flight Simulations will demo its new Redbird Pro app that’s under development, which will eventually incorporate stories from Flying’s legendary ILAFFT series and instrument-pilot-focused content from Flying’s Chart Wise, along with other aviation safety providers.
The new app is aimed directly at those GA pilots—most of us—who don’t typically spend our hours logged between flight reviews practicing towards our proficiency. The upshot? We’re really not as good at retaining that proficiency as we could be. Just as an app such as Duolingo encourages you to daily practice of a language, Redbird Pro gamifies the proficiency quest and rewards you for frequent engagement.
Using smart artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Redbird Pro guides the pilot through training events, which can include scenario-driven flights in a flight training device, desktop simulator or in the airplane. The pilot also has the option to chair-fly a given scenario by walking through a video or narration with an instructor—or the pilot can improve themselves through reading content targeted towards the areas in which they need to practice or develop further skill. This content will include installments of ILAFFT and Chart Wise from Flying magazine, as well as Real Pilot Stories and accident analysis from the AOPA Air Safety Institute, and other training topics.
As a pilot moves through various scenarios, they acquire points based on their capability, and guidance on what to study next. Redbird’s vice president of sales and marketing, Josh Harnagel, invited folks to come by the Redbird tent at Oshkosh to try it out. “Redbird Pro is going into beta now, and pilots at AirVenture can come to our booth to try it out and enroll in the beta program. We will release the app to the App Store and Google Play later this year.”
Redbird has also updated GIFT (Guided Independent Flight Training)—its maneuvers-based training supplement for its flight training devices—to Private Pilot version two, which increases the customization available to students for each training scenario. According to the press release, “Version two of Private Pilot now offers hundreds of variations and settings options for each of the 33 training tasks, and it can simulate the flight dynamics of any of the 30-plus aircraft configurations we offer for our reconfigurable aviation training devices.”
Redbird has shifted its annual Migration Flight Training Conference to take place on February 8 and 9, 2022, in Lakeland, Florida, at the Aerospace Center for Excellence. Redbird noted the reason for the change: “We will host the event at the beginning of the year moving forward to reduce scheduling conflicts for flight training professionals and offer exclusive opportunities to preview new products and initiatives before we officially announce them.”
