Who Better to Train Your Techs Than Techs? The Case for a Different Approach to Simulator Technician Development

There's a gap in the flight simulator industry that doesn't get talked about enough.

We have well-established frameworks for qualifying simulators. We have regulatory standards for approving pilot training programmes. We have detailed requirements for the pilots who train in these devices, the instructors who facilitate that training, and the organisations that deliver it.

What we don't have, at anything approaching the same level of rigour or structure, is a consistent pathway for developing the people who keep these devices operational.

Simulator technicians, the engineers and maintenance professionals whose work determines whether a training device is ready when a crew needs it, occupy a critical position in the aviation training ecosystem. And yet the industry has never fully resolved the question of how to develop and maintain their capability in a systematic way.

I had the opportunity to represent Simutech Solutions at the most recent Flight Simulator Engineering and Maintenance Conference (FSEMC) in Frankfurt, Germany. The gap that was the conversation that came up more than any other with some of the industry’s most well respected operators was, the people question. Specifically, the training question.

And one observation, made by more than one person across more than one conversation, has stayed with me since.

Who better to train your techs than techs?

What FSEMC Reveals About the Industry

The Flight Simulator Engineering and Maintenance Committee (FSEMC) is, in many ways, a unique institution in the aviation world. It is a global forum addressing simulator engineering and maintenance challenges, with an annual conference attended by over 300 experts from around the world. The conference serves as a platform for simulator users to engage in open discussion on topics related to simulator engineering and maintenance, covering themes including regulatory standards, lower-level devices, innovation in simulation, and rotary wing training.

What makes FSEMC distinctive is not its size, though it is the largest event of its kind globally. It is the nature of the conversations that happen there. This is not a trade show. It is not a vendor showcase. It is a working community of practitioners, people who operate and maintain simulators for a living, gathering to share knowledge, identify common problems, and develop the kind of technical standards and solutions that make the whole industry more effective.

The fact that technician training was a conversation that arose numerous times at this year's event is itself significant. This is a community of people who are deeply embedded in the operational reality of simulator maintenance, and they are telling us, clearly and consistently, that the workforce development problem is real and it is not being adequately addressed.

The Gap Is Structural - Not Incidental

To understand why simulator technician training is as underserved as it is, it helps to understand the structural conditions that created the gap.

Simulator maintenance is, in most jurisdictions, not a licensed discipline in the way aircraft maintenance is. There is no Part 66 equivalent, no type rating system, no prescribed pathway from apprentice to authorised signatory. The regulatory framework governs what simulators must do and how they must be qualified. It is largely silent on the question of who is qualified to maintain them and how that qualification should be established and verified.

This has produced a landscape where technician competency is developed primarily through on-the-job experience, OEM training courses where they are available and accessible, and the informal transfer of knowledge between more experienced and less experienced practitioners. For technicians fortunate enough to work within large training organisations with internal development infrastructure, this produces reasonable outcomes. For those working in smaller operations, at independent training centres, or supporting devices in regional environments, the developmental pathway is often ad hoc at best.

The retirement wave that is moving through the simulator maintenance workforce compounds this problem significantly. The technicians who hold the deepest institutional knowledge of ageing platforms, the ones who know not just what the documentation says but what the device actually does, are approaching the end of their careers. The knowledge transfer that needs to happen to preserve that expertise is, in too many cases, not happening systematically.

What the industry has been left with is a skills pipeline that depends heavily on individual circumstances and informal relationships rather than on structured, replicable development pathways. That is a fragile foundation for a discipline that sits at the heart of aviation training safety.

Why the "Techs Training Techs" Model Matters

The observation that resonated most strongly across FSEMC conversations I was part of was deceptively simple. The best people to develop simulator technicians are simulator technicians.

This is not a revolutionary idea. It reflects something that experienced practitioners in many technical fields have understood for a long time. Contextual expertise, the knowledge that comes from having worked on real devices in real operational environments, produces a fundamentally different kind of teaching than the knowledge that comes from formal qualifications or vendor documentation alone.

A simulator technician who has spent years working on a specific platform knows things that no training course fully captures. They know how the device behaves when it is cold and when it has been running for twelve hours. They know which fault codes reliably indicate what they say they indicate and which ones need to be interpreted in context. They know how a systems update three years ago changed the way a particular subsystem responds under load. They know what the documentation says to do and, equally importantly, they know when the documentation is incomplete or does not quite match what the device is actually doing.

That knowledge is the product of accumulated operational experience. It cannot be fully systematised or replicated in a classroom. But it can be transmitted, deliberately and effectively, by the people who hold it to the people who need it.

The "techs training techs" model recognises this. It starts from the premise that the most valuable simulator maintenance training is designed and delivered by practitioners who are still active in the field, working on real devices, encountering real problems, and bringing that currency directly into the training environment.

This is not to say that formal qualifications, OEM courses, and structured curricula have no value. They do. But they work best when they form the foundation of a development pathway that is built and delivered by people whose expertise is grounded in current operational reality, not just in historical documentation.

The Industry Is Ready for This Conversation

What struck me most about the technician training discussions at FSEMC was not that the problem was being identified. It was the degree of consensus about what the solution needs to look like.

There is broad agreement that the answer is not more vendor-delivered courses, though platform-specific training from OEMs remains valuable for what it covers. There is agreement that the answer is not simply hiring more experienced technicians and hoping the knowledge transfers informally, though mentorship matters enormously. There is agreement that what the industry actually needs is a structured, practitioner-led approach to technician development that is grounded in the realities of simulator maintenance as it is actually practised.

FSEMC's model of bringing together OEMs, training device manufacturers, operators, and regulators in an open forum is itself an expression of this philosophy. The value of the conference comes not from any single presenter or vendor but from the collective intelligence of the practitioners in the room. Extending that model into formal technician development, creating pathways where experienced technicians are the primary authors and deliverers of training for the next generation, is the natural next step.

It is also, frankly, a more honest model for what simulator maintenance actually requires. This is a discipline where intuition, accumulated experience, and the ability to work with incomplete information are as important as formal technical knowledge. Training that is designed and delivered by people who have developed those qualities, and who can model them in a teaching context, is more likely to produce technicians who develop them too.

What This Means for Simulator Technician Operators

For operators and training managers thinking about how to invest in their technical teams, these FSEMC conversations point toward a few clear conclusions.

Structured development pathways matter more than individual courses. A technician who completes a series of isolated training events, however good those events are, is less well-developed than one who progresses through a coherent pathway that builds competency deliberately over time. Investing in the pathway, not just the event, is where the returns compound.

Practitioner-led training is worth seeking out. When evaluating training options for simulator technicians, the question of who is delivering the training and what their current operational experience is deserves as much weight as the curriculum content. The most valuable training is designed by people who are actively working on the problems it addresses.

Retaining experienced technicians has a training value that extends beyond their direct contribution. An experienced technician who is supported and enabled to develop the people around them is delivering value that significantly exceeds their individual output. Operators who treat senior technicians purely as individual contributors and underinvest in their role as knowledge transmitters are leaving that value unrealised.

There is also a dimension of technician training that does not always appear on a business case spreadsheet but matters enormously in practice. Sending a technician to external training is a visible signal. It tells them that the organisation values their development, is willing to invest in their growth, and sees them as a long-term asset rather than a replaceable resource. In a discipline where experienced practitioners are scarce and retention is difficult, that signal carries real weight. Technicians who feel invested in are more engaged, more likely to stay, and more likely to bring what they have learned back into the team in ways that raise the capability of everyone around them. External training is not just a skills transfer mechanism. It is a retention and culture investment.

And the broader industry conversation that FSEMC is hosting, about standards, about development pathways, about the kind of practitioner community that produces excellent simulator technicians, deserves operator engagement. This is not a problem that any single organisation will solve in isolation. It is a community-level challenge that requires community-level engagement.

A Conversation Worth Continuing

The Flight Simulator Engineering and Maintenance Conference (FSEMC) exists because the simulator maintenance community recognised, some years ago, that the problems they were facing were better addressed collectively than individually. The same logic applies to the technician training challenge that is now so clearly on the industry's agenda.

We are not merely observers of this conversation. We are active participants in building the answer to it. Our simulator technician training courses are designed and delivered by simulator technicians with significant experience, people who work on real devices in real operational environments every day, and who bring that current, grounded expertise directly into the training room.

If you are an operator looking to invest in your technical team's development, or a technician ready to take the next step in your own capability, we would welcome the conversation. And if you are attending FSEMC in the future, come and find us. The conversations that happen at that conference are exactly the kind we want to be part of.