First, a scoping review was conducted to synthesise existing studies.

Two studies are reported, each of which investigated the use of extended reality in flight training. A potential means of improving the efficiency and lowering the cost of flight training is to use extended reality (xR) as an adjunct to traditional flight simulators and aircraft. With current training capability, this may be difficult to achieve. Over the next 20 years, it is predicted that an additional 760,000 new pilots will be needed to meet the growing demands of the global aviation industry.

We conclude that VR is promising for basic flight training tasks and encourage future work to explore this further by investigating neurophysiological indices of workload and engagement and establishing relationships between presence, workload, and flight performance. Additionally, we found a correlation between subjective workload and flight performance in the Desktop condition, but not in VR. However, participants reported higher presence and engagement in the VR training environment. No differences were observed in the flight performance between these conditions. In a within-subject experiment, we compared fight performance and subjective measures of workload, presence, and engagement in two flight training environments (Desktop and VR) on two flight tasks of equal difficulty (changing speed and performing turns).

However, to what extent VR flight simulations offer increased performance compared to less-immersive simulators is not clear, and neither are their underlying cognitive aspects. Virtual reality (VR) offers a training environment that promotes increased learning and performance.

Microsoft flight simulator 2015 vr