RE:  Desperately Seeking Networking

Good morning Geoffrey,

     This can either be a very belated New Year's wishes for the western New Year or an early New Year's wishes for the Chinese New Year although it is considered bad luck to wish anybody happy New Year ahead of the actual New Year's Day for a Chinese New Year!!!
     Reading your most recent article about the trend towards virtual online meetings, a subject that is of course of high interest to everybody, although I would agree that most of the value that is added by such events occurs during the coffee breaks and in the evenings in the bar which of course can never be virtual, I can imagine that conference organizers must be scratching their heads wondering how their business will look in the future.
     But I would suggest that there is an absolute parallel discussion to be had about the move to online training, and here I think ULD CARE is taking an initiative. Online training has been available for many years in some form or other but the difficulty has always been to assess the amount of knowledge the trainee has absorbed, multiple-choice, tick the box tests are very limited in their capability and you might not even be sure that the person doing the test is the person whose name is on the paper.
     And of course the more traditional classroom type training as offered by IATA will almost certainly have to undertake an enormous adjustment given the high costs of moving people around in order to conduct such trainings.
     However, this is where virtual reality training comes in because it is now possible to create a virtual reality of the actual working environment and require the trainee to identify right from wrong in a random but yet controlled manner. ULD CARE, working alongside Airport College has produced just such a product to enable online virtual reality training for the pre-use inspection of containers pallets and nets. Of course virtual reality training has been used in flight simulators for many, many years, but that is enormously expensive; what we now have today is the ability to deliver virtual reality training at very acceptable cost levels on a very widespread basis and I would argue that this is indeed groundbreaking.
     Here are 4 links on this subject:
          https://www.aviationpros.com/21205991
          https://fb.watch/3iwtCBWmjP/
          https://www.uldcare.com/virtual-reality-uld-training-demonstration/
          https://www.uldcare.com/uld-training-meets-virtual-reality/

Bob
Bob Rogers
Vice President and Treasurer
ULD CARE
bob.rogers@uldcare.com, www.uldcare.com