Background
Opening and operating an aircraft door is one of the highest-consequence manual tasks a cabin crew member performs, and it is traditionally taught on heavy fixed door mock-ups that occupy a large training hall and can only represent one aircraft type at a time. Dutch leisure carrier Transavia, the low-cost arm of the Air France-KLM group, set out to make that training both more realistic and easier to schedule.
The deployment
In November 2025 Transavia put the Door Trainer into service at Hangar 5 in Schiphol-East, the airline's training base near Amsterdam. The airline and its supplier describe the installation as a world first for airline crew training: it is the first time a virtual reality cabin has been paired with an industrial robot to reproduce the physical behaviour of an aircraft door.
How it works
The trainee wears a VR headset and sees a complete virtual cabin, while a robot arm positioned in the real room holds a door handle exactly where the virtual door appears. The arm is programmed to reproduce the weight, resistance and mechanical travel of a specific door, so the force the trainee feels matches what the virtual door is doing. Door operation is driven by hand tracking rather than hand controllers, so crew use their own hands as they would on the aircraft.
Because the door is defined in software rather than in steel, one station covers every aircraft type Transavia operates, along with different door positions such as galley doors and overwing exits. The system can also introduce failure conditions that a physical mock-up cannot easily stage.
Assessment and scheduling
The trainer records every action a candidate takes, which gives instructors an immediate debrief and gives the airline an auditable record for quality assurance. It also occupies a compact, self-contained room rather than a full-size mock-up hall, which lets Transavia plan sessions more flexibly and lets candidates repeat a drill at their own pace.
Hardware and software
The platform was developed by AirVR, a Danish specialist in aviation VR training, and comprises the robot and its controller, a control PC and hub, a VR headset and a fixed handle stand. Photographs of the installation show the robot is a Universal Robots collaborative arm carrying AirVR branding; the headset model was not named by any source.
Status
Transavia said the Door Trainer would be fully operational across its training programmes by early 2026. The airline frames the purchase as part of a wider strategy of investing in more efficient training and learning processes. The same AirVR system has since been taken up by other carriers, including ITA Airways.
