The full Eurofighter Typhoon cockpit on the ADAMS stand drew a crowd for two days at DSET in Cheltenham and took the show's Best Exhibit Award. Inside it: a 1:1 replica cockpit from Viper Wing, Metrea's NOR simulation environment, and a Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition.
ADAMS has supported academic training for German Air Force Eurofighter and Tornado aircrew for more than twenty years from its base in Wittmund. Its fifty-odd staff include former Phantom, Tornado and Eurofighter pilots with over 100,000 flight hours between them.
Gero Finke is one of them, and by the time he retired from the Bundeswehr he was among the most experienced pilots in the German Air Force. He spent ten years as a flight and weapons instructor on the F-4F Phantom with the legendary Fighter Wing 71 "Richthofen". From 2003 he was central to bringing the Eurofighter into German service, as a flight and weapons instructor, Squadron Commander, and then Commander of Tactical Air Force Wing 73 "Steinhoff" in Laage, where he built much of the theoretical and practical training the type's first German pilots went through, and the instructional content behind it. As Eurofighter Standardisation Officer at Air Force Forces Command and later at the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Aviation, he developed new standards and owned training and operational quality for the entire Eurofighter domain. From 2015 he commanded the Richthofen Tactical Air Force Group and served as acting Wing Commander at Wittmund. He joined ADAMS in 2018 as a department head and has been Managing Director since 2021. We asked him what fidelity looks like from the seat.
What pressure are air forces and training organizations under right now to get more crews trained, and trained to a high standard?
Gero: The challenge isn't buying more simulators. It's making good training available at the scale air forces now need.
Full Mission Simulators are still the gold standard for mission rehearsal and complex operational training, but they are expensive to buy, maintain and run, and they don't deploy. Air forces have very few of them, which makes FMS time one of the scarcest resources in the pipeline. Fleets are growing and operational commitments are growing with them. Waiting three weeks for a simulator slot is not a good use of a training year.
Not every objective needs a full-mission device. Procedural work, emergency drills, tactical rehearsal and mission preparation can all be done on networked trainers that cost a fraction as much and still feel real. Those systems also travel, so crews can train where they are operating rather than only at home base.
None of this replaces the Full Mission Simulator. It frees it up for the events that genuinely need it. We call that targeted fidelity.
Where does XR fit? What can it do that conventional methods can't?
Gero: VR was already a big step: realistic visual immersion at low cost. Mixed Reality goes further by putting that immersion around a real cockpit, so the pilot gets the visuals and the haptics at the same time. We think that combination is the next generation of pilot training.
We tested the claim rather than assuming it. Together with Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences, where Julia Schorlemmer led the scientific work, we compared Mixed Reality training in a real cockpit against conventional approaches. It produced the best overall training outcomes.
A Mixed Reality trainer costs more than a laptop and a VR headset, and far less than an FMS. Because of that, air forces can field them in numbers, network them, and run several crews through a shared scenario at once, at home, at a deployed location or in a training centre. Realism matters, but a brilliant simulator you can't get into on Tuesday trains nobody.
What is the setup you showed at DSET, and who is it for?
Gero: Our Ultimate Multi-Task Trainer. An exact replica of the Typhoon cockpit inside a Mixed Reality environment: the same layout, displays, controls and switches as the aircraft, with an immersive virtual world around them.
Three things make it work. The Viper Wing cockpit is the physical foundation, a 1:1 replica with authentic controls, and that is what builds procedural memory you can take to the aircraft. Metrea's NOR provides the virtual battlespace. We chose it for its mission generation and networking, and for its secure architecture, because in military training cybersecurity is not optional. The Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition joins the two worlds together.
On the headset, image quality is not a comfort feature. Pilots have to read cockpit labels, pick out distant aircraft, recognise terrain and hold visual situational awareness without fighting the display. Mixed Reality only works if the pilot forgets they are wearing a headset, and that is what the XR-4 Secure Edition does. It also meets security requirements that rule out most commercial hardware.
The system is network-capable, deployable to a forward operating base, and needs no dedicated maintenance team. Qualified instructors run it themselves. It covers everything from first cockpit familiarisation to advanced tactical scenarios for experienced combat pilots, and networked together, several of them let a formation rehearse a complex operation without starting an engine.
Walk me through a session.
Gero: Every mission starts with a structured audiovisual briefing, exactly as it would in an operational squadron: objectives, context, weather, threats, training goals. Then the pilot straps in.
With students, the instructor can freeze the simulation at any point. Those pauses are where a lot of the learning happens, because you can explain a procedure, walk back through a radar picture or answer a question while the moment is still live, instead of saving it all for the debrief. As pilots gain experience the freezes stop and the missions get harder: worse weather, higher threat levels, smarter AI adversaries, decisions that have to be made faster. For advanced training, several networked cockpits put a formation in the same battlespace, communicating and coordinating as they would for real.
Every mission ends in Tacview. Flight paths, sensor employment, aircraft parameters and tactical decisions all replay, so you can see what actually happened rather than what everyone remembers happening. The sortie is only part of the learning. Briefing, execution and debrief together are what make a pilot better by the next one.
The first time you put the headset on, how did it compare to sitting in a real cockpit?
Gero: Surprisingly convincing.
As a military pilot you approach any simulator looking for the detail that gives it away. What struck me was how well everything held together: the cockpit around me, the visuals, the spatial audio, the real controls under my hands. After a few moments I stopped thinking about the headset and started thinking about the mission, which is the only test that matters.
One difference remains. You don't feel G. Visually, procedurally and cognitively, though, it is remarkably close. You are scanning, managing sensors, making tactical calls and flying the aircraft the way a demanding scenario demands.
People with no flying background sometimes get motion sick in it. That sounds like a fault and is really the opposite. The brain has accepted the virtual world as real. Most adapt after a short familiarisation.
As a fast-jet pilot, what do you notice about fidelity that the rest of us would miss?
Gero: People assume fidelity means graphics. Graphics are one part of it.
What matters is whether the whole thing is believable. Are the switches where your hands expect them? Does the cockpit behave the way it should? Can you build situational awareness naturally, and think and react as you would in the jet? Fighter pilots spend years building procedural memory so that flying the aircraft stops taking up attention and tactical decisions can have it instead. Anything that interrupts that flow, a switch in the wrong place, a control that responds oddly, an inconsistent visual cue, you notice at once.
The underrated one is depth perception. Tactical flying is a continuous judgement of distance, closure, attitude and relative movement. Being able to read a display effortlessly and hold an accurate picture of the world outside at the same time changes both the realism and the training value.
Perfect detail isn't the goal. The goal is an environment where the pilot behaves naturally and builds skills that transfer to the aircraft.
Flying is decision-making under pressure, communication, situational awareness. How well does the sim train those?
Gero: Those are the ones it trains best.
Flying a fighter isn't mostly about manipulating controls. That becomes second nature quickly. The job is managing a lot of information, prioritising, communicating and deciding well while the situation keeps changing. A dynamic scenario loads a pilot the same way a real mission does, and because the environment is networked, communication and teamwork are part of every sortie rather than an afterthought.
The other advantage is that instructors can break the plan on purpose. An engine problem, a threat that wasn't in the brief, weather closing in, a new tasking. Missions rarely go to plan, and adapting to that is where the best learning happens.
And mistakes cost nothing. You can push a pilot to their limit, take the decision apart in the debrief, and fly it again an hour later. Repetition like that is the strongest thing immersive simulation has to offer.
What changes for the next generation of crews?
Gero: They will train more often. That sounds simple, and it is the whole shift. For decades the limit on high-end simulation was availability, so practice happened when a slot came free. When trainers are affordable enough to field in numbers, a pilot can rehearse a procedure or a scenario when they need it, and instructors can tune the difficulty to the individual rather than to whatever the syllabus scheduled. Formations will train together across locations in a shared battlespace without being in the same building.
The result is that crews arrive at the Full Mission Simulator, and eventually at the aircraft, already fluent in the procedures, the radio work and the decisions. XR doesn't replace anything in that pipeline. It makes every stage of it work harder.
You flew the Phantom, then helped bring the Eurofighter into German service and set the standards it was trained to. What carried across?
Gero: Both were defining chapters, and they taught me different things.
The Phantom demanded respect every time you climbed in. It wasn't the most forgiving fighter, but if you understood it and worked with it, it gave you outstanding performance. It taught discipline, precision and humility.
The Eurofighter years taught me something else. When a new type enters service, there is no syllabus waiting for you, no instructional material, no agreed standard for what competence in it looks like. We had to build all of that while learning to fly the aircraft ourselves and teaching others to fly it. Later, as Standardisation Officer, my job was to define what good looked like across the entire Eurofighter domain and then hold training and operations to it.
That is the thread. The question then and the question now are the same one: what is the shortest honest path from a pilot who cannot yet do something to a pilot who can? Everything else is implementation. It is also why this work interests me rather than making me nostalgic. Mixed Reality is not a novelty to me. It is the first tool I have had that genuinely changes the answer to that question.
What stayed with me most isn't either aircraft. It's the people. Military aviation is the ultimate team sport. Every successful mission rests on trust between pilots, instructors, weapon systems officers, engineers, controllers and a lot of people you never see. Individual talent is never enough. It comes down to preparation, communication, and knowing that everyone around you is working to the same standard.
That has shaped everything I have done since. At ADAMS we are not only building training devices. We are trying to hand that culture to the next generation of aircrew. The technology is an enabler. The people using it decide whether the mission works.
-Gero
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